Sacred Heart Parish

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3RD SUNDAY OF EASTER (C)

Introduction: The Easter Mysteries cry out for reflection on the question of death. Why? Because we are celebrating the great mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, the focal point of human history.

  1. For men and women everywhere, the fact of death is a profound puzzle in the face of which the riddle of human existence grows most acute. We all, of course, experience pain and the advancing deterioration of the mind and the body, and all the endeavors of technology cannot calm the anxieties to which death gives rise within the human spirit. Even the prolongation of biological life would be unable to satisfy the desire for higher life, true life as St. Paul calls it, life that lasts, which we instinctively recognize as part and parcel of the human condition.

  2. Surely, no one here this morning is as indifferent to the question of death as the gentleman among the ancient Romans who had carved on his tombstone the following words:
    “I wasn’t; I was; I am not; I don’t care”.
    I think most of us rightly would follow the intuition of our hearts that abhors and repudiates the very thought of the utter ruin and total disappearance of our very being, a sort of dread of perpetual extinction that wonders how the world can continue to exist without me. The ancient world, from what scholars tell us, was divided, more or less, into those who said that resurrection could not happen, though they might have wanted it to happen, and those who said that they didn’t want it to happen, knowing that it could not happen anyway (N.T. Wright). The world of the early books of the Old Testament is ambiguous about the question of life after death. Job seems quite certain that in his flesh he will see God, but the author of the 49th Psalm says to us with regard to the dead – “Their graves are their homes forever, their dwelling places for all generations. They will go to the company of their ancestors; never again will they see the light.” Many in our day are seeking the medicine of immortality. Many perhaps are convinced that medical science will discover such a remedy. Imagine what the world would look like if each one of us lived for three hundred years. Some, of course, indeed scoff at the thought of life after death as in the satirical ballad called “The Preacher and the Slave” – “You will eat bye and bye in that glorious land above the sky; work and pray, live on hay, you will get pie in the sky when you die.”

  3. Where do we find the truth of things? The new and exciting good news of Easter tells the world that there is a cure for death, that the medicine for immortality has been found. For us who follow the risen Christ, death’s enigma is resolved in Christ. Death means dying with Christ to whom we frequently say at the Eucharist – “Dying you destroyed our death; Rising you restored our life; Lord Jesus, come in glory.” And this Lord of ours, who is with us this very day in word and sacrament and who indeed will come again, is the very Lord who says to us – “I am the resurrection and the life; she who believes in me, even if she dies, shall live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” The medicine of immortality is Baptism.

  4. Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit, the door that gives access to the other sacraments. Through Baptism we are freed from sin, reborn as members of God’s household because we share in the life that is proper to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; we become members of Christ incorporated into his body which is the Church, and we are made sharers in the mission of the Church. This sacrament has many names. To baptize means to plunge or to immerse someone into water. Baptism is often called “the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.” It is often called “enlightenment” because those who are baptized as adults are enlightened in their understanding of the Catechism having received in Baptism the eternal Word of God who became flesh among us, the true life who enlightens all who come into this world. A person baptized into Christ’s life becomes a child of the light and thus becomes light to others.

  5. In the Liturgy of the Easter Vigil, the celebrant blesses the baptismal water with these words: “Father, you give us grace through sacramental signs which tell us of the wonders of your unseen powers. In Baptism we use your gift of water which you have made a rich symbol of the grace you give us in this sacrament. At the very dawn of creation your Spirit breathed on the waters making them the well-spring of all holiness. The waters of the great flood you made a sign of the waters of baptism that make an end of sin and a new beginning of goodness. You freed the children of Abraham from the slavery of Pharaoh, bringing them dry-shod through the waters of the Red Sea to be the image of all peoples set free in Baptism.

  6. At Christmas-time we spoke of the newborn Christ in the words of St. Augustine – “Christ has been born as God of his heavenly Father, as Man of his earthly mother; of his Father without a mother, of his mother without a father; of his Father as the beginning of life, of his mother as the end of death.” When we come to the Easter mysteries, we begin to understand more completely the great truth that Christ the Lord is the beginning of life and the end of death.