Alleluia! The Lord has risen indeed!
This is the joyful exaltation that should be on the lips of every man and woman waking up on Easter Sunday morning. I say “every” and not just Christian men and women, because of all things that give us hope in the dark moments of our lives, it is the promise of an eternal life of heaven that gives every man, woman and child the greatest hope that we can ever have.
This hope is more than just the hope than whatever pain or anxiety or hardship that we have in life will be alleviated. It is a hope that even though these forms of strife that we have in life will not be taken away, that disease and illness is not cured and healed, that we will even succumb to them in a most painful and horrible way, that there is the hope of coming out at the other end in a perfect, whole and healed way.
But this hope is something that comes to us with a very high price – a price so high that it was paid in nothing less than the very life of God himself.
And because it was paid by God, and could only be paid by God, it behooves every human person to respond to it in a fitting way that is expressed by a total devotion and worship of this incredibly generous and unconditionally loving God. If God willed himself to love us to the extent of giving his life up for us so that we could have life, the very least response from us would be to want to do the same, which is why Jesus said that the first and most important law is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, spirit and strength.
Wanting the promise of eternal life and having this incredible hope in life will be cheapened if we think that we can live willy-nilly and for ourselves and what we think is best for us, and in the end, still want heaven and all that it stands for.
And this is where I think many cannot see that what they actually want in life is cheap grace – that we can somehow have heaven without any need to, in this life, conform our lives to be lived with a sense of holiness, which includes a life of moral rectitude and righteousness. We want what Christ gives us without living as Christ lived. In short, many may want to have their cake and eat it, which isn’t possible. This idiomatic proverb describes just how one cannot have two incompatible things simultaneously in life.
Hence, to want heaven, and to also want the things that doesn’t conform to God’s being of truth, goodness and beauty is to want a unicorn, to use a current-day phrase. To want heaven’s promise without giving up sin and being contrite and truly sorrowful for our sins is just not possible.
The empty tomb’s promise of our hope to overcome life’s final and biggest bastion, i.e. death, came with such a price that we will do it little justice if we don’t frequently call it to mind. This is where Protestantism and its many off-shoots differ in varying degrees from Catholicism.
This is quite clearly seen in the way that Catholics observe Good Friday as compared to the way our separated brethren do it. While both churches value highly the prize of the resurrection of Easter and the empty tomb, Catholics have it very much ingrained in our liturgy and overall psyche to never leave our eyes off from the Cross and the call to die to the self. And one of the ways we do this is by always having the image of the crucified Lord on the crucifix. Most, if not all Protestant crosses are just crosses with no corpus attached to it, largely because their emphasis of their theology is biased very much on the promise of the post resurrection event and effect on life and all of creation.
The difference appears to lie in the fact that Catholic theology is often one that equally emphasizes the price that was paid, as well as the prize that was gained. But when this is not clearly understood (both by Catholics as well as by those who are not Catholics), it can give the wrong impression that we are just over focused on the cross, without a balanced appreciation, hope and joy of the empty tomb.
Our liturgical observance in the Catholic church actually shows this balanced approach through our having 40 days of serious Lent pre-resurrection, and 50 days of Easter post resurrection, culminating with the celebration of Pentecost. These numbers of 40-pre and 50-post, which lean heavier on the post, should reveal how we do give a high emphasis on the promise and power of the resurrection in our faith, and that it is not true that we are just about dwelling on the hard truth of the Cross in life.
As we enter into the prolonged celebration of the Easter hope of the empty tomb, may we pray for the grace to see how important it is that we truly live with the heartbeat of the resurrected Lord beating in tandem with ours.
A happy and blessed Easter to all!
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