There is a Capuchin friar who has the title Preacher to the Papal Household. He is a gentle, perceptive man who used to stay at the Cathedral Clergy House at Westminster when I lived there. Several times a year, he has the responsibility of recalling the Pope and those around him to the central truths of the Gospel. Duirng this Holy Week, the Preacher has talked of a time of purification, which the Church is undergoing at present. In his words, there were obvious undertones of the scandals which are besetting so many local churches for which there must be genuine contrition and a firm purpose of amendment. An evil root has been tolerated and allowed to produce bad fruit, and for that there has to be genuine repentance and deep compassion for its victims. But the purification the Papal Preacher was talking of has another, more profound dimension, for, at its centre, it is concerned not so much with human weakness but with Divine mercy – not so much about where human beings get things wrong, but where God gets them right.
And, of course, God got it so absolutely and definitively right in the Paschal Mystery which we are celebrating in these holy days. “Christ has died: Christ is risen: Christ will come again”. On Good Friday the God who has becomes so accessible in his Incarnation that human pain is now intrinsic to his experience, allows himself to descend into death. In so doing, he traces a path which none of his creatures can avoid – and, in so doing, he transforms that path, taking from it, if we are prepared to accept the consequences of what has been achieved, the fear of annihilation which is endemic to the human condition. When Mary of Magdala, Peter and John witness the empty tomb on Easter morning there is a shift in consciousness which can never be reversed. “O grave where is your victory? O death where is your sting?” The Resurrection is the most powerful statement possible about the value and dignity of the human person, of every human person.
The picture given to us in the creation stories which begin Scripture is of an initial harmony - between God and his creatures, as between creature and creature - but that harmony is fractured. What should have been a continuum of generosity is broken - with devastating consequences to everyone, and everything, concerned. Mistrust, self-regard, fear, enter the frame, and life itself becomes truncated, its purpose a matter of question, its future uncertain. The Christian understanding is that God determined to reverse this damage, to give this world a new beginning, nothing short of a re-creation. This he effects, so we believe, in the life, death and resurrection of his Christ. At the end of a gradual, painstaking process lasting centuries, there stands a cross and an empty tomb. By means of these physical signs, these sacramentals, these moments in history, there is atonement, purification of all that we are.
The significance of the physical resurrection of Jesus – not just a spiritual rebirth, but a mystery involving flesh which is warm to the touch, which is recognisable, tangible – Someone not just something - is that our humanity is set back on course: once more we are offered continuity, communion. Physical death is still a barrier, but God’s own Son shows a way through, which we are to follow. As St Paul writes to the Corinthians: “We shall be changed as well, because our present perishable nature must put on imperishability, and this mortal nature must put on immortality”. Or as T S Eliot expressed it, "to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from”.
The message of the risen Christ this Easter Day – the Gospel – is one of purification from fear, the reclamation of a sense of worth and purpose for our lives which now regain an eternal significance. “The life you have is hidden with Christ in God”. We were created not for death, but for life. But as we come together to share in the Mass as Catholic Christians in this country at this particular time we are conscious of failure and of the message having become opaque through the flaws in its messengers. The months ahead are not going to be comfortable – the papal visit in September is going to stir up all kinds of prejudice of which at the moment we are havong a foretaste. Purification is needed. Jesus says: “Blessed are the poor in spirit” but the Paschal Mystery – if we live it in practice rather than just accept it as theory – means looking to the future with great hope and without fear. The Risen Lord says to us, what he said to his first disciples: “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me so I am sending you”. Out of present difficulty will come many fresh opportunities to show Christ, to live Christ, to speak out of our own heart. The medium may have to be renewed - a greater humility, a listening ear, a new concentration on service - but the message is ever the same: Christ “the power and the wisdom of God … the first fruits of all who have fallen asleep … just as all die in Adam so all will be brought to life in Christ” .
This then is what I pray: “Out of his infinite glory may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth, until knowing the love of Christ which is beyond all knowing, you are filled with the utter fullness of God”.
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