The Third Sunday After Easter '23
Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter | 2023
By Fr. Hayden A. Butler
I struggle to remember a time in my life when I felt as powerless as I did on the nights when my children were born. I knew in theory that the moment was coming, of course–the evidence had mounted up for months. At the same time, though, much of my world was strikingly unaffected. It was a season long enough to tempt me to wrongly believe that the season would go on forever. But then, the conversation-halting contractions grew more frequent; my handwriting on the notepad, tracking intervals, grew less legible. Slowly, then all at once, it dawned on me, in that manner unique to fathers, whose bodies had not quietly communed with a growing child for nine months, that I was about to meet this long-awaited person–that the unseen was about to manifest like an apocalypse, and that nothing would ever again be as it was. So too, the doubt also dawned on me that perhaps all would not be well–and that instead of welcoming someone I could very well be saying goodbye. I remember wanting to feel like I had the matter in hand, and yet knowing I was in the hand of something beyond me. I remember realizing that to try to exercise some vain sense of control in the midst of this ancient mystery would only make me ridiculous. It was something I could not possess, but in which I must participate with everything I had–something to which I could only assent and offer my whole self. And then, there was a great shout, a frail cry, and my little ones were born.
On the third Sunday in Easter, we are returned to the night that the Lord was betrayed, the last supper before His Passion. On Maundy Thursday, we witnessed the foot washing, the creation of the Eucharist, the command to love as Christ loved us. But then we saw everything go wrong; the altar was stripped, and the next thing we knew we were staring at an empty tabernacle on the altar as we shouted in this very church “Crucify Him!” “A little while and you will not see me,” our Lord said, “and then a little while and you will see me, because I go to the Father.” On that side of Easter, the words spoke of His death and burial and rising again. On this side of Easter, we have to go back to hear them again, having been freed of that impending sense of doom. Now that the Lord has conquered death, we are able to hear in His words a horizon of meaning that we could not before: we are now able to look beyond the finality of death to the life of the world to come.
Halfway through Eastertide, we can now hear His words anew: “A little while and you will not see me, and then, a little while and you shall see me, because I go to the Father.” We can now see how these point to the Ascension, to the exaltation and revelation of Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We can see Pentecost, to the sending to us of the Holy Spirit, who will engraft in us the life of Christ and bring forth from our lives through conversion and transformation the signs of that life within us. The Spirit will grow the likeness of the risen Christ within us and manifest in the world around us. As we approach nearer–day by day–the return of the Lord in His Glorious Appearing. The Spirit will conform us to His glorious appearance. Then, at last, we will be revealed to be like Him in the unique ways that the Spirit has been working within us all along the way–the life within us will be born.
And yet, as it was twenty-one days after the first Easter, the world may not yet reflect that these things are coming to pass. On that first, third Sunday after Easter, Pilate was still in charge of the occupation force. Caiaphas was still the high priest. Herod was still ‘a king,’ still a lecher, still a drunk; and everyone was going back to their day jobs on the first day of the week. In the meantime, the risen Lord was walking among them, regathering His frightened and scattered sheep. There was evidence to suggest that something was happening, of course–the tomb had been found empty; guards had been threatened; an inquisition was being arranged. Slowly, those who had lamented the crucifixion, who should have been defeated, mysteriously were to be found gathered together at those sacred places they had seen the Lord before His Passion: in the upper room, by the seashore of Galilee. There was something new growing in the middle of a world that had returned to its status quo.
We cannot be surprised that much may seem like it has not changed since Easter day. We may be facing some of the same intrusive thoughts, fruitless habits, and compulsive behaviors we knew before we entered Lent. The Resurrection of Christ did not obliterate the world around it, though it surely might have. Instead, the Lord willed that His rising should be a matter seen by eyes that were, pair by pair, gently opened to perceive it in the middle of a passing world and all of its pretension, power-hunger, and endless self-absorption. But with each new person born into the life of that risen Lord, the world, amid its self-assurance, grows increasingly terrified and exhausted. The world, after all, can only run its course to the end and that is all. That is why the world hates new life; a world obsessed with itself can only despise the fact that it must give way to someone else, must assent to a future it can neither dominate nor be the center of. Every birth cry is a death-knell for the world: a judgment on its false sense of immortality. That is why the world hates those who belong to the Lord of Life. We have been freed from the dominion of death at whose altars this world worships. And the older this world gets, the more it will hate the glory of deathless life poured out by the One the world did all it could to slay and those of His who have received that life.
As we cross this halfway point of Eastertide, make the decision not to return to the status quo. Remain with the risen Lord who is going about quietly and lovingly to stir up the faithful, helping them to see. Remain with those He has regathered from the places they were scattered by the world, the flesh, and the devil. Return to the places where He has been known and wait for Him to meet you there as well. There is no life in the way things were. There is only life in the way of things as He is making them newly to be. Do not try to take back possession of your life; the only life we can possess is the life that is passing away. Instead, open your hands to receive the life of the One who will receive you and raise you again to His Easteride this morning. Let Him turn your death into life; let Him turn your sorrow into joy.
And as we open our hands to receive again new life, may the Lord open our eyes to see His life among us and within us even as the Spirit conforms us to the glory of our risen Lord. May the Lord strengthen us to stand firm in the increasing dissonance we are bound to experience with this world and the fury it may show us. And may we, when the pangs of our final trials come upon us, receive the grace to assent to that good labor and at their end welcome that new life, now hidden, but which will be made gloriously manifest when our eyes are opened to the Lord who calls us forth as newborns into the world that He has made new.
As the Lord said to His disciples: “Most assuredly, I say to you that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; and you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy. A woman, when she is in labor, has sorrow because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. Therefore you now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you.”
