Easter Sunday C April 20, 2025
Isaiah 65:17-25 Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:19-26 Luke 24:1-12
If time could be given the name of a virtue, an emotion, and a feeling, that name would be Hope. If we believe in continuous creating sustaining force propelling life in some omni-invisible way within everything at the sub-microscopic level which is always already resulting in the changing surface of things through what we call aging, then we might call Hope, the omnipresent everlastingness of life itself.
To live is to live with the poignant contradiction of hope as the sense of latent everlastingness with what we call aging and changing in time. On the surface level of the apparent, things change and those changes get categorized with value statements.
And there are profound emotions tied to our value statements about the apparent changes in time. We get sick, we get older, we lose family and friends to their apparent disappearance in death, and we know that we too will sometime disappear from the world of living with others.
If Hope is the inherent everlastingness of life, we need to know how to bring hopeful values to our lives which begin in birth and which have an apparent visible end in death.
The lesson that we need to learn from hope as the engine of time and change is how to balance a linear notion of time and the cyclical notion of time. Time is linear in the sense that now is different from yesterday, and tomorrow will be different from today. Time is cyclical in that there is always a recurring sameness which happens even when things become different.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the good news that came to people who experienced the continuity of the life of Jesus after he had died. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is about the continuing afterlife of Jesus as he became known as the Risen Christ present to those who came to interpret Christ as the personal embodiment of the latent always already Hope within themselves.
The encounter with the Risen Christ provided the assurance that Hope cannot and does not die in the death of individual people or changing entities in life; rather Hope propels on and on, in everything and everyone forever.
When Hope is given the name of the Risen Christ, who is all and in All, it is understood as the energy of life with at least the superlatives of human personality, and the Christ who is all and in all makes us in Christ, and in Christ we have the revelation of a post-death continuity with ourselves. So that while our scientific minds perceive all changing matter and energy being dissolved and reintegrated within matter and energy in future states in cyclical ways, what we know to be essential personhood formed by all the language events of our lives will continue to have everlasting continuity as a unified being which had a human history between birth and death.
One can see within the salvation history of the Bible, the play between linear concepts of time and cyclical notions of time. The cruel suffering of people in time gave rise to the ending of time as a sort of death to our current pain with some apocalyptic end, and perhaps the birth of a perfect messianic age. But the notion of a final static state of being was a freeze frame notion that cannot be real to either linear or cyclical time.
Would the pleroma, day of the Lord, coming of the Son of Man in the clouds, initiate the end of time into the state of changelessness? Or as history continued with no ending, did the people of faith come to accept the immanence of Christ as all and in all?
Did they tell the story of the resurrection as John Gospel did when Jesus told his disciples, "I am leaving, and I am going, but I will come to you again. I will make you an abode, a dwelling place of my Father's house?"
Can we appreciate the Day of the Resurrection as exemplifying the mode of the many comings of the Risen Christ, to people one at a time, and then become known continuous in the presence of the resurrection life of knowing one's most inner being as the presence of God's Spirit?
Let us embrace the Easter Story as the revelation about the rising of latent Hope as the winsome reality of life itself. And let us accept that this Hope is revealed to us as the Risen Christ whose continuity with Jesus of Nazareth gives us the promise of our future continuity with ourselves and with the others who have passed from this visible world.
Let this Easter hope today give us strength to bear up under the seeming contradiction that hope has with the changes in life, some of which are glaringly painful, evil, and downright cruel.
Let us know today that Easter Hope means that Everlastingness remains after us and that Everlastingness will retain us profoundly in the memory of God.
Easter is our hopeful story in the midst of change and so we shout, "Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed. Alleluia!"
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