Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for April 2025

Homily for Easter Sunday

Catholic filmmaker Mel Gibson recently announced that he would begin filming the sequel to his most famous movie, The Passion of the Christ. The new film is set to be released next year, and the current working title is The Resurrection of the Christ, and it apparently will chronicle what happens after Jesus rises from the dead and appears to the women and the apostles.

On the Joe Rogan podcast, Gibson explained, “It’s the story of the Resurrection; It’s a nonlinear story. It took my brother, Randall Wallace, and me about six or seven years to finish the script. We’ve worked with historians. All the apostles died, but nobody dies for a lie; they die for the truth. I wanted to show that. Who rose three days after being killed in public? Certainly not Buddha.”

It is interesting to me that Gibson implies that the Resurrection is unique. And he has historians who are corroborating this conviction that he has. If he were working alongside his fellow filmmakers instead, he might come to a different conclusion. In Hollywood, resurrection seems to happen all the time. In the past thirty years, we’ve been treated to—or subjected to, depending on your cinematic tastes—films entitled Alien Resurrection, Halloween: Resurrection, Mechanic Resurrection (I kid you not), The Mummy: Resurrection, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, and perhaps most surprisingly, four separate releases of movies simply called Resurrection. I could go on and on. From this small sampling, it would seem that people are being resurrected all the time. A cynic might suspect that an effort being made to downplay the uniqueness of the specific Resurrection that we are celebrating today.

It should also be noted that several of these movies are in the horror genre, which is to say that the mechanics, aliens and mummies rising from the dead (and to be honest with you, I’m not sure what it means to have a mummy rise from the dead), that these characters returning to life is something that puts them back into this same world that we thought that they had left for good.

So it appears that the notion of resurrection is commonplace today, and is almost certainly not good news. I presume that these resurrected aliens and mechanics and mummies will head back to the grave at some point. What I’m getting is this: we are so accustomed to the idea of resurrection that we might be in danger of domesticating its revolutionary meaning. It might come as a surprise to discover that the people of Jesus’s own day were rather unfamiliar with the concept. In the year 52 A.D., Saint Paul preached one of his most famous sermons in the city of Athens. In it, he announced that God raised Jesus from the dead. How do the sophisticated, philosophical Greeks respond? They scoff at him. “Sure! Come back another day and tell us more about this crazy idea.” Resurrection certainly was unique at that time. Even unthinkable.

Now, from this perspective, I want to point out something very interesting about the gospel from last night’s vigil and this gospel reading this morning. Here it is: Jesus does not appear at all. It’s amazing that, of all the Sundays and feast days of the Church, the only time Jesus doesn’t appear in the gospel reading is a few times in Advent, when He is not yet born, and then on Easter Sunday. What could this apparent absence mean for us?

First of all, it means this: the Resurrection is emphatically not simply a return of Jesus to the old life He had in this world. It’s not a resuscitation. He has somehow passed into the higher realms, and yet maintains contact with us, as if he were, for example, God. He challenges us to seek Him out, to follow Him. This is, in essence what Saint Paul was saying in today’s second reading—”seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.”

The absence of a visible Jesus in this morning’s gospel is also a sign of just how new and baffling the actual resurrection was and is. There’s another very telling detail in the stories of the resurrection. The Apostles never seem to have questioned that Jesus life is now an eternal life—they do eventually see Him again in the flesh. But he is strangely changed. He is often completely unrecognizable at first. He’s a stranger on the road, a gardener, a man taking a walk on the sea shore at dawn. He is present, but He is present in a new and transfigured form. This is the opposite of the mundane understanding of resurrection trafficked by our contemporary culture. This isn’t more of the same. It is an elevation of human nature into the realm of the divine.

And, my brothers and sisters, we have been made partakers of this resurrection, even though we are still alive in the flesh. In baptism, we were united mysteriously to Christ in His death and Resurrection. This baptism, the promises of which we are going to renew in just a moment, conforms us to Christ, and it is what makes it possible for us to follow Him toward the hidden heavenly realms. Let’s look at the second reading again. Saint Paul says “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is.” Paul is speaking of the Resurrection that we were given when we were baptized, the light of Christ that now dwells mysteriously in our hearts, if we care to search for it.

Paul continues, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” So not only is Christ invisible to us in the gospels this morning, but our own new life is a hidden one, one that we must seek out to experience it. How do we seek it out: through prayer, through attentive participation at the liturgy, through the efforts we make to see Christ in our neighbor, in the poor, in the sick and imprisoned. What we discover then, is that all of Jesus Christ’s teachings were not about making this a better world, but a map, an instruction manual on how to find God, to seek what is above while still in the flesh below. At the center of this is His presence in the Holy Eucharist, where He is visible only to the eyes of faith.

In today’s first reading, Saint Peter says that Jesus was not visible to everyone after the Resurrection. He appeared only to those who ate and drank with Him. Saint Peter is referring to us. We are the ones who now eat and drink with the Lord, and this means that we seek the things that are above not merely for ourselves, but to be able to report back to a world that labors, in so many ways, under the shadow of death: “Christ is risen indeed! He shall wipe away every tear from your eyes, and death shall be no more!”

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 2)

My second paradox is closely related to the first.

When the Son of Man is lifted up, he draws all to Himself [John 12: 32]. In John’s Gospel especially, it is the moment of Christ’s death on the Cross, His “lifting up,” that is the moment of Jesus’s glorification. Herein lies the paradox: how can glory emanate from the face that is hardly recognizable as human because of His wounds, His exhaustion, and the utterly shameful nature of death by Crucifixion?

While this paradox has been commented upon by many theologians, I first remember encountering a form of it in an essay by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, in a book entitled On the Way to Jesus Christ. He observes, in the Liturgy of the Hours, two antiphons attached to the same Psalm 45 (44 in the Latin numbering) at Evening Prayer on Monday of Week Two. The Church has always taken this Psalm to refer to the marriage of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church His Bride. During the Second Week of Lent, the Church attaches to this Psalm the antiphon, “You are the fairest of the children of men and graciousness is poured upon your lips.” Jesus’s beauty is therefore emphasized, but especially the “inner beauty of his words,” as Cardinal Ratzinger puts it. He is the perfect man.

But this changes during Holy Week, when the antiphon is now a text taken from the prophet Isaiah: “He had neither beauty nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes [Isaiah 53: 2].”

To make sense of this contrast, Ratzinger points out that it cannot be a contradiction, since both antiphons derive from the same Holy Spirit, who has spoken through the prophets. Invoking the English poet John Keats, he points out that the aphorism, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty” forces us to a critical evaluation of what we consider beautiful. We must accept that true beauty must somehow involve “wounds, pain, and even the obscure mystery of death and that this can only be found in accepting pain, not in ignoring it.”

Thus in the suffering Christ we see the beauty of our God accepting our pain in love, transforming it into life. We see a man, driven by a fervent love, freely willing to endure all manner of human violence and hatred in loving obedience to the Father. He loves His own to the very end and goes to any length to rescue us and to show us how lovable we are, even in our frequent unloveliness. That this is a kind of beauty can be inferred by its effects on us: it causes a kind of “compunction,” a breaking open of our hearts, often connected with tears, partly of joy, partly of pain.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s essay is primarily a reflection on Christian aesthetics, a topic to which he often returned in his occasional essays. He recognizes certain premonitions in Plato’s aesthetics (especially in the Phaedrus and Symposium), in the pagan philosopher’s belief that beauty wounds the beholder (which is to say, it causes a kind of compunction) and thus awakens in us a thirst for a deeper truth, something beyond superficial notions of beauty.

I would add that a similar premonition in the Greek pagan world can be found in the poets. As the great Alasdair MacIntyre observed, Homer’s Iliad demonstrates, subtly, how one can win a war by losing it. By this he means that the reader, in the end, tends to sympathize more with the vanquished Hector, even when his “appearance was so marred beyond human semblance [Isaiah 52: 14],” by the disgraceful treatment of his body by Achilles. There seems to be greater glory in the moral goodness and inner nobility of Hector than in the acknowledged excellence of Achilles. Why is this? We could speculate at length, but we see Hector dying for love of his city, versus Achilles fighting as a kind of hireling, a soldier of fortune. In the end, what redeems the character of Achilles, as is the case in all Greek tragedy, is our knowledge of his doomed mortality, not his perfections as a manly warrior.

[I note in passing that in this analysis, I part ways with important aspects of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Greek culture.]

What the pagans were not fully able to grasp (and indeed was anyone able to do it, except in prophecy by the Holy Spirit?) was that this inverted glory would be fully vindicated by God in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of God’s Son. The final beauty, for which the Christian hopes in the Iliad, is the vision of Hector and Achilles, like Saint Stephen and Saint Paul, reconciled by the death of Christ, and now, as friends, adoring the one, true God of us all. Until this final vision, all earthly beauty is provisional, existing in a tension between the intimation of God’s glory and the realism of human cruelty and suffering.

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 1)

Owing to my interest in sacred music and liturgy in general, I’ve been asked to join a few groups on Facebook. Recently, in one of these, I was quite amused by a long debate that had broken out. On one side was a Catholic liturgist, a very learned man whose writings I greatly esteem. In the opposing corner was an Orthodox believer, about whom I know little. The dispute was about the relative amount of rejoicing and lamenting to be found in the Lenten liturgies of the East and West. The Orthodox writer insisted that Western liturgies focused more on sin and penance, whereas the Byzantine liturgies were brighter, focusing on the joy of God’s salvation, and so on.

There are indeed many joyful texts in the Byzantine liturgies for Lent. But there are also long passages in which the faithful accuse themselves of every imaginable sin, of being the worst of all sinners, hard of heart. There are claims for continually weeping over sin. In this, I tended to side with my acquaintance, the Latin liturgist, who made just this argument.

What amused me, though, was the very idea that penance and the joy of Lent could be separated at all. This apparent paradox is easily understood if we attend to the theology of the liturgy. “While we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son. [Romans 5: 10]” We do not weep for our sins hoping that God will save us if we attain the minimum required amount of contrition. Rather, we are already saved, despite the fact that we couldn’t possibly merit salvation. And it is this realization of God’s patience, His loving pursuit of us in our unloveliness, that gives rise to true penthos, or compunction. It is the response of the faithful on Pentecost. When they realized that they had conspired to put to death God’s Son, “they were cut to the heart [Acts 2: 37].” But did they therefore despair? No! They repented and were baptized, becoming followers of the Apostles.

It is well attested of many saints that, as they grew in holiness and nearness to God, they felt less worthy of friendship with God. The brighter the light in which we find ourselves, the more we see our imperfections. Yet it is God’s very nearness and purity, an experience, at root, of awe and bliss, that gives rise to this insight about ourselves. The closer we come to God in the liturgy and in prayer and in asceticism, the more we see how our sins keep us from fully experiencing the joy of life in Christ. And so we weep for our sins precisely because we are drawing near to God’s selfless, regenerating love. It is what theologian Khaled Anatolios calls “doxological contrition,” and which he holds to be the central meaning of salvation.

As I never tire of mentioning, Saint Benedict, who was extremely realistic about human failings and vices, mentions joy twice in his short chapter on the observance of Lent.

What is being described is the theological virtue of hope. Hope is the great forgotten theological virtue, and so perhaps it is no surprise that this Facebook disagreement went unresolved. For hope to be hope, we must hold in tension the fact that we remain sinners in need of salvation, and that somehow salvation has already been accomplished. In fact, until the eschaton, we are necessarily saved, not with final assurance, but “in hope [Romans 8:24]”: in such a way that we must continually work out our salvation in “fear and trembling [Philippians 2: 12].”

Temptation, Transfiguration, and the goal of Lenten discipline

The first two Sundays of Lent each year give us two significant events in the life of Jesus. Why these two? Can we say something about the relationship between the temptation of Christ in the desert and the Transfiguration of Christ on the mountain? And what might these tell us about the holy season of Lent?

This year, we are reading Luke’s versions of these events, and it is noteworthy that for Luke, they both look forward. To what do they look forward? Let’s look at each one. On the First Sunday of Lent, the temptation of Christ ended with an ominous note: “When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him…for a time.” What is Luke getting at here? The temptations aren’t over, is what he is saying. When we aren’t experiencing temptations, that doesn’t mean that they are over and done. The Tempter has just departed for a time. Temptations will return, and our job is to be vigilant.

But I think that Luke also had something more specific in mind. How about this: the great war between Jesus and the Devil, between the Son of Man and the ruler of this world, isn’t over when Jesus wins this opening battle. The war won’t be decided until the Crucifixion. At that time, Jesus’s human nature will again be tempted to use His divine power in opposition to the will of His Father. The Father’s mysterious will is to send His Son into the world as a man, to save us by sharing in our mortality, our weakness and suffering. When we arrive at Holy Week, and we recall all of Jesus’s suffering—the betrayals, the mockery, the scourgings, and finally Crucifixion—this is the Devil throwing every he has at the Son of God, Who conquers Him by a quiet obedience and faith.

The Resurrection marks the definitive destruction of the power of hell. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. We need to see how the Transfiguration also looks forward to Holy Week and Easter. In this case, it is quite direct. When Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus, what are they discussing with each other? Here is what Luke says: “Moses and Elijah…appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.” Jesus is going to accomplish an “exodus.” Isn’t this interesting? So much could be said about what this means, since the Exodus is, in some ways, the theme of the entire Torah. Let’s focus on one important aspect of the Exodus, to see a deeper connection with Moses and Elijah.

What do these two have in common? Both of them spoke to God on Mount Sinai. When God first spoke to Moses on Sinai, He commissioned him to go to Egypt to bring the Israelites out, right? But when Moses went to Pharaoh and demanded that he let the people go, it was not his immediate aim to lead them to the Promised Land. Rather, his goal was to worship God on Mount Sinai. It was to make a new covenant with God—in a certain sense, a renewal of the covenant between God and Abraham. On Mount Sinai, the terms of the covenant are sharpened: God will adopt Israel as His beloved people, and the people, for their part, will obey God’s law.

But why did Elijah go to Mount Sinai, or Horeb, as it was called in his time? As a matter of fact, God asks Elijah that very question, “Elijah, why are you here?” And what does he respond? “Because your people have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars…” and so on. Note that God does not renew the covenant at this time; He simply sends Elijah back with reassurance that a remnant of the people had remained faithful. From that point on the prophets will have the job of reminding the people of the covenant and calling them back to it.

Alright, back to the Transfiguration. Jesus, we said, was going to accomplish His Exodus. Where is He leaving and where is He going? He is leaving this world, the fallen world, and going to the new creation, what we might call heaven, the right hand of the Father. Along the way, just like Moses at Mount Sinai, He is going to ratify a new covenant, in His own Blood. He will give us the new law—this is why the Father says, “Listen to Him!”

Now I’ve downplayed something crucial here: for Jesus to leave this world and pass over into the new world, He must die. And with that observation, we are brought back, finally, to Lent. Lent is a time to battle temptations after the model of Jesus, and it is also a time to practice mortification. For us, this mortification of fasting, almsgiving and prayer, involves a frank acknowledgement of our sin. The goal isn’t to make us feel guilty and therefore punish ourselves the more, even if contrition and reparation are part of the process. What is the goal? In the gospel, the Apostles see it before their eyes: glory. The glory of God and, dare we say, the deification of humankind in Jesus Christ. Every time we accept mortification, we are stepping tentatively out of this world and into the next, with the hope of glory. When we see the brilliant light of the Transfiguration, shining through the body of Jesus, we are seeing a foreshadowing of our own transfiguration. Saint Paul says that Jesus “will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body.”

So the goal of our Lenten discipline and the goal of Christ’s Exodus is the regeneration of creation and the reinstitution of all of the children of Adam and Eve as His beloved sons and daughters. Lent is not, therefore, a time in which we try to “make ourselves” better by increments. It is a time to participate in the death of Jesus so that we may also share in His bodily Resurrection from the dead.

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