How good it is to be back.
People are back in church, smiles are back on faces, and our tents and treats are back on the front lawn where they belong. It is the resurrection of the Lord, Easter Sunday; and we are back. Alleluia!
How good it was to stand in the familiar places and mark the familiar moments as we moved through Holy Week. How good it was for all of us to be at it again, together, entering into the mystery of our salvation in Christ. We knew where it would take us; we knew where it would end, in victory; and that it would be today, Easter Sunday.
Until recently it would have been normal to say we do this every year, but there was an interruption of that soothing pattern over recent years as lockdowns and prohibitions intervened and changed what people did for a few years there. That was universally unpleasant, so all readily acknowledge the relief and refreshment of the return to the regular, revolving yearly pattern.
Similarly, as I looked out my window this week and saw the small scarlet buds and winged seed pods appearing on the red maple tree I planted there some twelve or fourteen years ago, I was reminded of the beauties of this area in general and this campus in particular. The weeping cherry trees, the daffodils and hyacinths, the flowering plums, tulips, and dogwoods, and all that greening green grass. Such a spot, such a view! Nature in her cyclic way is returning and refreshing life right before our eyes.
Because we do this every year, with every winter bringing Lent, and every spring bringing Easter, it is easy to think that this, too, is cyclic, and a return. But as familiar as the birds and the flowers, as familiar the hymns and the egg hunt, the resurrection is not at all familiar; nor is it cyclic, or a return.
Sin is familiar. Selfishness and strife are familiar. Death is the same-old same-old. We thought that we had made progress, real progress, and moved past war, at least among “civilized,” western nations. But here we are again, appalled by fresh visions more lurid than those of the history books to which we thought we had consigned them.
So, the return of the return is not what we are celebrating. Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb, and back to the life that would again eventually end in death. Jesus Himself, however, does not come back to life; He goes through death to new life. His resurrection from the dead is something completely new, and unrepeatable; it breaks the age-old cycle of sin, and death.
Jesus is risen, not returned; and His resurrection is our rescue from endless return. Christ will never die again, and by our Baptism, Confirmation, and Communion in His death and resurrection, we are remade into something new, and every aspect, every instant of our lives is unrepeatable.
We are united with Him on His one-way walk, going not in cycles or circles, not into and out of recurrent alternating phases of grief and joy. By His suffering, ours is transformed and transforming; through it now is our path toward the glory that we have always desired and even craved, because it is the fulfillment, the perfection for which we were conceived and created.
People are back in church, smiles are back on faces, and our tents and treats are back on the front lawn where they belong. It is the resurrection of the Lord, Easter Sunday; and we are back. Yet, you and I – all of us bound into one in the risen Christ -- we are also never going back, back to the helplessness and hopelessness of nature in general and our nature in particular.
Christ is risen, truly He is risen – Alleluia! How good it is to know we are never going back.
Monsignor Smith
