Resurrection Hope

Propers: The Second Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials.” So writes St Peter to some of our earliest brothers and sisters in the faith.

What is the hope of Christianity? Is it that bad things won’t happen to good people? Not hardly. The very symbol of our faith is the Cross, the Crucifix—the world’s only truly perfect Man, suffering the most depraved punishment the human mind could devise. Jesus does not promise us ease and prosperity in this world here below.

Quite the opposite, really. He warns that those who follow Him must tread the hard and narrow way, bearing the weight and humiliation of the Cross. Thus He warns His followers to take stock before daring to set out upon the path of Christ.

“In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus frankly states. “But take heart—for I have overcome the world.”

In the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Christians are given, by the sheer, unmerited mercy of God, new birth into a living hope; an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, which will come to light, come to fruition, in the fullness and culmination of time, the end of the age.

What does that mean? It means that in Christ’s Resurrection—in the Harrowing of Hell, the crushing defeat of sin, death, and the devil—all the powers which enslaved us have been revealed in truth to be shams. All our emperors have no clothes.

The devil, the world, and the flesh, that unholy trinity of powers within us, around us, and beyond us that would separate us from the life and love of God, have been cast down through fire and water and their ruin smote upon the mountain of Golgotha. They are pretenders. They are usurpers. And they are one and all dead and defeated—even if they don’t quite seem to know it just yet.

In a world beset by suffering, terror, war, disease, inequality, cruelty, alienation, and mercilessness, it can be hard to imagine, let alone believe, that the God in whom we all live and move and have our being, the Creator who is the source and font of this and all possible realities, could in fact be infinite love. It seems to go against all we know of this world.

But that in fact is the tell that gives the game away. The fact that we know this world to be unjust proves that there must be a justice greater than the world against which to measure it and find it so wanting. How could we know a line to be crooked unless we’d seen one straight?

This world is fallen. This world is broken. The way it is, is not the way it ought to be. And we all know it. Every religion, every culture, every faith, even those who would claim to have no faith at all, all of us know that something has gone wrong. And all of us know that we as human beings have a responsibility to set it right—because we alone have the knowledge of good and of evil. We alone choose to sin.

We know it’s not right that the vulnerable get sick. We know it’s not right that the poor now take the brunt of unemployment. We know it’s not right that people who lose their jobs thus lose their health insurance in the middle of a pandemic. There are indeed so many things which we know to be wrong that they threaten to overwhelm us. We feel like we’re drowning in the ocean of this world’s misery, anxiety, and cruelty. Fear and death and pain hold sway. That’s just how it is for us here under the sun.

And so if this really were all that there is—if only in this world could we seek for justice and mercy and love all in vain—then despair would rightly be our refuge, and nihilism the great inheritance of humankind. Who could blame us? For if there were a God, we think, surely He would’ve snapped His almighty fingers by now and forced this world to be good, forced us out of this mess that we’ve made.

But that’s not the way that God works. That’s not the way that love works. For love cannot force. Love cannot coerce. It can only promise and give and forgive, always reaching out with open arms, always offering new life to the dead. For there is a God, my brothers and my sisters. And we all know this because we know that this world has, or darn well ought to have, purpose, direction, and meaning. And this God is not inactive, thank Heaven, not aloft and aloof on His throne.

No, this God gets His hands dirty. He comes down here, into the mud and the blood, into the womb of humankind, to be born of Mary, born of a Virgin, as one of us; born to bring God to earth when we could not climb ourselves back up to Heaven; born to forgive us and heal us and guide us all home; born to die, at our hands and for our sake, not because God is cruel—indeed, God is on the Cross—but because we are cruel. And the love of God, in His infinite wisdom and subtlety, will take that cruelty and twist it, astonishingly, into the very instrument of our salvation.

The Cross turns our world upside-down. The Cross crucifies all our hierarchies of power. The Cross reveals the true face of God to this cosmos: the face of ever-suffering love, the face of ever-present forgiveness, the face of a Lamb who bleeds for the ones He so desperately loves and adores.

And so we have a new birth of hope: a hope that looks at poverty, disease, and war, and sees in them enemies whose defeat is even now at hand. For yes, they shall have their day, their petty little triumphs, but even now their time is cut short. Yes, the world is fallen, but this very day God is hard at work rescuing and resurrecting it through the same means by which it fell—by the ministries of angels and of men.

Our hope is born of the sure revelation that all the things which imprison us, which enslave us, which hold us in thrall to fear and despair, we see now as they truly are, which is to say, ephemeral. They shall vanish like smoke on the breeze.

Disease has no lasting power. It is tragic, it is against the will of God, but it can cause no wound which God will not ultimately heal. Death has no dominion here. The grave cannot claim even one soul whom God shall not raise up at the last.

And injustice and oppression and even damnation cannot defeat us, cannot claim us, cannot in truth lay one finger on the beloved children of God—because they will all be dragged, kicking and screaming, out from the darkness and into the light. And there they will boil away like shadows before the sun.

I know many of us today are scared. We’re tired. We’re plagued by anxiety. Who wouldn’t be, what with all that’s gone on these last few months, last few years? But we as Christians are given a hope, imperishable and undefiled, that Christ is Risen—Alleluia!—and that as surely as He is Risen, we too shall arise.

He is with us even now, in our homes, in our prayers, through the Ministry of Word and of Sacrament; present in our wounds, present in our hopes, present in our fears and in our pain; present to give succor and comfort and healing and peace.

For death is defeated. Sin is defeated. The rebellion of our own hearts is defeated. And we know that at the last all shall be revealed for what it is truly meant to be. Our tears will be dried, our infirmities will be healed, and the separation of death shall be forever overcome. There is nothing this world can take from you which Christ cannot restore.

For the godliness of His power resides not in snapping His fingers and forcing the world to be good, but in taking wrongs which can never be set right, and impossibly remaking them right in the end. It is God’s eucatastrophe—a joyous ending for all of Creation, which at last makes sense of the story as a whole.

In this we rejoice, even if now for a little while we have had to suffer various trials. Indeed, in this world we will have trouble, especially if we take the narrow path, bear the heavy Cross. But take heart. For Christ has already overcome this world. And when everything we’ve feared or suffered or lost lies dead and buried in the tomb, then shall we rise in Christ immortal, to a joy infinitely greater than all we have endured in our time here below. That is the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Some may surely dismiss this as wishful thinking; others as but an opiate to keep us quiescent, promising pie in the sky by and by. It is of course nothing of the sort. Christian hope is a cri de cœur to rally God’s troops as the tide of the battle turns—to rout from the field a perfidious enemy whom Christ Himself has put to flight.

Stand up, Christians, against the tyranny of oppression and despair. Fight hard against the legions of injustice, fear, and hate. Be hope in the midst of anxiety, love in the depths of depression, and calm in the eye of the raging of this storm. In short, be Jesus. Be Christ for all people, in whatever way you can. For Jesus has claimed us, as His own, and for all time. And so nothing and no-one else ever can.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.