In the midst of our beautiful celebration of Easter, we should remember that, in a way, each Mass is also Easter. On the one hand, each Mass celebrates the fullness of our faith. On the other hand, the Church has given us the gift of the Liturgical Year, a cycle of seasons and feasts, which helps us to focus in on different aspects of our faith. At Easter, we celebrate in a special way the resurrection of Christ.
But just as each Mass is Easter, each Mass is also Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Holy Thursday is rooted in the Jewish Passover celebration. When the Israelites were captives in Egypt, Pharaoh persistently refused to let them go. In response, God sent 10 plagues to overcome Pharaoh's resistance. The last plague involved the Angel of Death flying over Egypt and striking down the first born male in every household. The Israelites could escape this punishment by sacrificing and eating a lamb and smearing its blood on the doorframe of their houses. When the Angel of Death saw the blood on the doorframe, he passed over each of those homes, thereby sparing the family inside.
The Passover ritual also involved eating unleavened bread, which symbolized that the Israelites had to eat their meal in haste so as to be ready to escape as soon as Pharaoh relented, and therefore did not have time to wait for the dough to rise. The meal included the drinking of wine as well, which was the staple drink of the time. After their escape from Egypt, the Israelites were to observe the Passover celebration every year. Throughout his life, Jesus also participated in the Passover yearly. At the end of his earthly ministry, during his last Passover meal and through his sacrifice upon the Cross, Jesus reformulated the meaning of the Passover itself. On Good Friday, Jesus allowed himself to be crucified, offering himself up for our salvation. By doing so, he bridged the division between God and humanity that had been brought about by human sin and offered us freedom from the bondage of sin.
As he reformulated the Passover, Jesus made himself the lamb that was sacrificed. Instead of the flesh of the animal lamb, he has given us his Body and Blood to eat and drink in the Eucharist, where the bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ through the words of the priest. Instead of being protected by the blood of the sacrificial lamb upon our doorframes, we are now saved by the Blood of Christ shed for us. The reformulated Passover ritual continues today in the form of the Mass, which is a mystical participation in the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross.
Jesus, who is God Incarnate, made the ultimate sacrifice for us, giving his life upon the Cross so that we could all have life. But his death was by no means the end of the story. On the third day, on Easter Sunday, Christ rose from the dead. The ignominy of the Cross was followed by the glory of the resurrection. When Christ came among us, he knew the suffering that awaited him. In the desert, Satan tried to derail his mission by tempting him to grasp at the glory before its time, before Christ had undergone the necessary anguish of the Cross. But Christ persisted, knowing that he must be crucified before he would claim the glory. Self-sacrificial love precedes the exaltation of Heaven. As we celebrate Easter this Sunday, let us remember that we are also celebrating Holy Thursday and Good Friday. We cannot get to Easter Sunday without the other two days. Just as Jesus had to suffer before the glory of Easter, we also need to experience the Cross in this life before the glory of Heaven. We need to give of ourselves in self-sacrificial love. We need to sacrifice ourselves for one another in small ways and great ones. Then and only then can we expect to receive the glory that awaits us.
But, we might ask, what is that glory? Why should we hope for it? Why should we strive for it? At the heart of our faith about the future as Catholics is the resurrection of the dead. Just as Jesus rose from the dead, we too will rise. When our earthly body dies, our physical being is destroyed, but our soul lives on and our sense of self continues in our spiritual existence. Then, when Christ returns at the end of the world, we will receive our physical bodies back in the resurrection. Our new bodies will be like and unlike our current ones. As we see from the resurrection narratives, the resurrected body of Christ is still physical. He is able to eat with the disciples. He invites Thomas, who is initially doubtful, to touch his wounds. At the same time, his resurrected body also transcends the restrictions of our physical world. He can appear and disappear. He can enter the room despite the locked door.
In the resurrection, our physical body is perfected and is reunited with our soul. For those who have embraced God's love and have chosen to be eternally united with God, the resurrected body will create a sense of completion. The wholeness of our being is restored, which deepens our experience of the joy, peace, and contentment of Heaven. Unlike in our earthly life, our physical body will no longer be a source of suffering. We will no longer grow tired or hungry. We will not age or get ill. We will never die again. But in Heaven, we do not merely just keep living as in the human world, with the suffering removed. In Heaven, we are raised to a whole new order of being, living in God’s infinite love.
Catholic theology starts with the premise that God is one. God has one, indivisible nature. At the same time, we also believe that God has three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are distinct from each other and yet share that one indivisible nature. We do not have three gods, but only one. At the same time, the three persons of the Holy Trinity are not merely modes of expression in God, but are actual persons. So God is both indivisibly one, and yet has three distinct persons. One way to try to conceptualize the mystery of the Holy Trinity is to start with the premise that God is infinite love. Love, by its very nature, requires a love dynamic. In God, there is the Father, who is the One Who Loves. His love is received and reciprocated by the Son, who is the Beloved. The love that exists between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Trinity is an eternal exchange of infinite love, which is not bound by time, but takes place in the eternal timeless now of God’s infinite nature.
Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who has taken on a human nature, becoming one of us, without losing or lessening his divinity. By doing so, Jesus established the closest possible union between the Creator and his creation. What is more, in the Gospel of John, Jesus compares the love he has for us with the love that exists between him and the Father. Jesus loves us with the same eternal, infinite outpouring of love that exists within the Holy Trinity. When we are baptized into Christ, we enter into the closest possible union between us, created beings, and God, our Creator. Jesus then shares with us the infinite, eternal outpouring of divine love that is the Holy Trinity. We are to live and have our being in that divine love. We are to be partakers of God’s infinite, eternal love without end, without limit.
That is what heavenly glory is about. Furthermore, in Heaven, not only do we individually experience God’s love, but that infinite exchange of love will flow through us to all who are in Heaven. The exchange of love within the Holy Trinity will now be a vast web of infinite love shared eternally among all the blessed ones living forever in heavenly glory. The loved ones we have lost, all the holy ones who have gone before us - in Heaven, we will see them again. Our reunion will be an eternal, infinite exchange of perfect love in Christ.
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The readings for the Easter Sunday, Cycle A, can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: The Empty Tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by Zoltan Abraham (c) 2016.