by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
Lilies abound in our churches on Easter morning as the Church throughout the world hears the story of the beloved disciple, the ideal believer, who sees the empty tomb and without hesitation believes Jesus is risen. The lilies are losing their luster a week later. The disciples to whom Jesus appears on Easter evening lack lustre, too. They are more like us, struggling with what to believe.
One wonders if the disciples fear Jesus’ enemies or perhaps Jesus himself. They gather, suspended between the numbing horror of Jesus’ death and Mary Magdalene’s news, “I have seen the Lord.”
Along with the news that she has seen Jesus risen, Mary Magdalen brings his words, “I go to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Their relationship with Jesus will last. He entrusts them to one another as his brothers and sisters.
Yet on this evening of the first Easter, Jesus’ followers make no moves. They stay safe in their own company within their own walls. It’s so much easier than embracing the new.
Most of us know this place, the safe circles where we share values and express bewilderment at those different from us. They may wear veils or cook smelly food or accept same-sex marriage or love tradition and insist on long-held rubrics.
Church scandals and backpeddling have disturbed some of us. Some have to seek God anew.
Perhaps this Sunday is time to pray with the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins a line near the end of his poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” It asks the risen Jesus to “easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.”
The risen Jesus disturbs and reinvigorates a community teetering between old and new, fact and future. Jesus breathes Spirit into them and sends his disciples to carry on his mission from the Father. He forgives them and authorizes them to become a reconciling community. What Jesus does for them he entrusts them to do for others.
- When have you felt suspended between old and new realities?
- What do you want to easter in you?