Message From the Prioress
The Gift of the Resurrection
Prioress Pat Mulcahey, OP, preached the following on Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008.
Happy and holy Easter. Thank you to our priests, to our liturgists, to our musicians and choir members, and to each of you for your part in our community experience of Holy Week. We come to this Easter celebration renewed in our gratitude for the gift of Christ’s suffering and death. May our prayer and reflection today deepen our gratitude for the mystery and the gift of Christ’s Resurrection.
Last night’s Gospel gave us reason to rejoice in Christ’s rising from the dead on the first Easter Sunday. Today’s Gospel takes it all back. There is no earthquake, no lightning-like appearance of an angel, no announcement of Christ’s resurrection. Mary, Peter, and John haven’t any idea of what has happened to Christ’s body. In place of the light and whiteness of the angel, there is the darkness of an empty tomb. Are we being played with? Are Matthew and John, the authors of the two Gospels, watching us from afar to see what we will do with such different accounts of the first Easter Sunday morning? No, not at all! Neither of the above!
In last night’s Gospel, Matthew tells the story of Christ’s resurrection. He does so in the context of how clearly sometimes God speaks to us, the times when we know with certainty what God is saying to us. “He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said. He has been raised from the dead, and he is going before you to Galilee.” (Matt. 28)
What a powerful story. What a joyous, literally life-giving end to Christ’s crucifixion and death! Matthew leaves us with an almost blinding image of the angel announcing that Christ is risen from the dead. Matthew wants us to see the power of our God. The image he leaves with us bespeaks our belief in the power of our God who can do all things.
In today’s Gospel, John tells us a story, not about the resurrection but about the empty tomb. He tells us the story in the context of how God speaks to us most of the time, not so clearly but rather through signs. In focusing on the darkness of the empty tomb John reminds us that our God is “inexpressible, incomprehensible, ungraspable.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #42.) In the different responses of Mary, Peter, and John to the mystery of the empty tomb, in their different responses to the mystery of our incomprehensible God, John gives us an opportunity to see ourselves in relation to our God. Let’s reflect on what he could want us to see.
Mary Magdalen’s Response
John does not tell us why Mary Magdalen went early in the morning to visit Jesus’ tomb. We do know that when Mary gets to the tomb and sees the huge stone rolled away, she never thinks for one minute that Christ has risen from the dead. She doesn’t even enter the tomb. She knows that Christ’s body has been stolen and goes to tell Peter and John, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb and we don’t know where they put him.”
What Mary knows, precludes even an inkling of a message from God that Christ has risen from the dead. We see in Mary, as we see so often in ourselves, the primacy of reason, even just plain common sense. But we can also see how inadequate reason or common sense is as we stand face-to-face with the mystery of our God. Mary’s response to the empty tomb reminds us that reason is not sufficient for right relationship with our incomprehensible God. Something else is needed.
What of Peter and John in this story? They ran to the tomb. It is no surprise that John got there first. We know from an earlier Gospel story in which John lost his tunic, that he was a runner.
Peter’s Response
Peter, the last to arrive, upon entering the tomb, sees the burial cloths, the head cloth rolled up in a separate place. We don’t know what Peter thinks. This is amazing in itself. Our experience of Peter throughout the Gospels has been of a person who speaks first and thinks later. Surely he could have been still suffering unbearably from the knowledge that only two nights prior, three times he denied even knowing Jesus. But it seems more likely that Peter was simply awed into silence by the empty burial cloths. Perhaps he was recalling Jesus’ words, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” “I am going away and I will come back to you.”
We see in Peter’s response to the empty tomb the reality of our own deeply felt experiences of the presence of our inexpressible God. Silence is the response. Peter’s response to the empty tomb reminds of the Persian poet Sufi’s “The universe surrenders to a mind that is still.” Reminds us of Meister Eckart’s quote, “There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence. Reminds us of Joan Chittister’s quote, “Silence is that place just before the voice of God.”
John’s Response
What of John . . . John the runner, John the beloved disciple? He entered the tomb, saw, and believed, believed though he did not understand. Face-to-face with the empty tomb, John didn’t need the light of the angel’s announcement. Just as music, wordless and pictureless music, reaches us, touches us at a level deeper than the cognitive, the empty tomb reached John. John’s response reminds us that it is at a deeper level than the cognitive that we relate to our God. John’s response to the empty tomb also reminds us that our ungraspable God calls us to walk by faith.
We see in John a person walking humbly with his God, bowing before the ungraspable mystery of God. What a perfect image for the Feast of the Resurrection.
Thank you for the Word of God, Matthew. Thank you for the Word of God in John. As the weeks of this Easter season go on we can carry with us any of several images that will deepen our consciousness of the meaning of this Easter season, of the gift of Christ’s resurrection.
• We can carry with us an image of the power of our God being announced by an angel and pray in adoration before our incomprehensible, inexpressible, ungraspable God.
• We can carry with us the image of Mary Magdalen and take care to see that in knowing what we know, we leave space for the in-breaking of God’s messages to us.
As the weeks of this Easter season go on,
• We can carry with us the image of Peter, silent before the mystery of our inexpressible God and revere silence for what it means for our relationship with our God.
• We can carry with us the magnificent image of John seeing and believing though not understanding and ask God to deepen our faith.
As the weeks of this Easter season go on, let’s also pray the poem of Walter Brueggemann:
Christ is risen!
We give thanks for the gift of Easter
That runs beyond our explanations,
Beyond our categories of reason,
Even more beyond the sinking sense of our own lives.
We know about the powers of death,
Powers that persist among us,
Powers that drive us from you and
From our neighbors, and
From our best selves.
We know about the powers of fear and greed and anxiety,
And brutality and certitude,
Powers before which we are helpless.
And then you . . . you at dawn, unquenched,
You in the darkness,
You on Saturday,
You who breaks the world to joy.
Yours is the kingdom . . . not the kingdom of death,
Yours is the power . . . not the power of death,
Yours is the glory . . . not the glory of death.
Yours . . . You . . . and we give thanks
For the newness beyond our achieving. Amen.
Walter Brueggemann, Not the Kingdom of Death
And during the coming weeks, let us pray again, often:
And then you . . . you at dawn, unquenched,
You in the darkness,
You on Saturday,
You who breaks the world to joy.
Yours is the kingdom . . . not the kingdom of death,
Yours is the power . . . not the power of death,
Yours is the glory . . . not the glory of death.
Yours . . . You . . . and we give thanks
For the newness beyond our achieving. Amen.