Bishop Glen John Provost
Bishop of Lake Charles
March 31, 2013
Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord
“They found the stone rolled away from the tomb.” Luke 24:2
What did the women think who discovered the empty tomb? The Gospel tells us they were puzzled (Luke 24:4). They are so taken aback, so incredulous, that it takes a vision of angels, “two men in dazzling garments” (Luke 24:4), to call them back to reality. “Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised” (Luke 24:5-6). Those words of angelic greeting are worth pondering in this Year of Faith on this Easter Sunday.
We should not look for “the living one among the dead.” The living one has taken death and reversed its fearful verdict. The risen one has taken the most powerful weapon of the evil one and used it against him. With the Christ, there can be no longer any fear on our part. Death is defeated. Life is victorious. This belief prompted St. Paul to cry out, “Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (I Corinthians 15:54-55).
Easter in the Year of Faith challenges us to revisit the central place of faith in our personal lives. It is a good challenge because it offers us an advantageous moment to look deeply into ourselves and our relationship with Jesus Christ. I want to return to the words of the angels to the women, because I think we often look for “the living one among the dead.”
St. Thomas Aquinas identified four dead ends for us in life. Four things, he said, can replace God: power, wealth, pleasure, and honor. They are the four things that masquerade as our true happiness. Their pursuit makes us forget God. And when we forget God, we die. We cannot look for the living one among dead things.
God created us for himself. The living One created us to live with Him forever. When Man fell from grace through sin, he inherited death as a consequence. The only way to save Man from death was for God himself to enter the world and die and then rise victoriously. Jesus spoke of the living God for whom resurrection was a sign of life, when He said, “He is not God of the dead but of the living” (Mark 12:27). It is futile for us to look for life in any other place, certainly not in power, wealth, pleasure or honor that offers only a passing satisfaction. We must find life at its origin and source.
It is this essential point that we sometimes find hard to believe. To discover God is to encounter the source of all life. The dead things of this world—power, wealth, pleasure and honor—are so enticing. They distract, but they do not last. They cannot offer a lasting satisfaction for the deep need in us for God and for life. God gives us a choice in faith. The choice is between life and death.
Faith is a dynamic component of life. The Gospels reveal so much in Easter that is filled with this energy of faith. The women return to the disciples to announce the news of risen life. Peter and John run to the empty tomb. Life draws them in and reveals the burial cloths now empty. They do not yet understand because faith, like a seed, must grow in stages. Faith presents us with a message that seems too good to be true. Then, faith draws us into the tomb and shows us life. Gradually we understand. Life is good. God is God of the living.
If Easter teaches us one thing in this Year of Faith, it is that faith is a precious gift that cannot be found in dead things. Faith, great enough to move mountains, is a faith in God’s victory over death. He lives and He wants us to live, not pursuing the fleeting things of this world but in a hope that makes our lives truly worth living.
God created us to believe. He created us for life. Convinced of this, we see power, wealth, pleasure, and honor for what they really are. They cannot satisfy. They are dead things to be left in the tomb.
If faith returns us to our origin and source, then faith requires abandonment to God. Only when we have looked for the living one and found the tomb empty can we say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28) or with Peter in an earlier profession of faith, “We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:69).
On this Easter may God, the source and end of all life, bring us in the Year of Faith more strongly convinced of the reality of faith and the life it offers in Jesus Christ, the risen Lord.