Dear Friends,
This Easter I have had some odd memories from my childhood. Not of Easter egg hunts, but of the old-fashioned westerns that were common fare on television when I was young.
In many of the old westerns, the hero comes into a village, does the good that needs to be done and then rides away. For those of you my age, does that seem familiar? The shows seemed to end with the hero’s back to us and to the camera, the hero walks silently away. His work in this particular village is done; he has restored the community to its better self.
“Shane! Come back!” is the famous plea at the end of Shane. It’s much the same as the ending of The Searchers, when the John Wayne character, having rescued the young girl kidnapped by Indians and returned her to her family, walked slowly away from the family, into the wilderness.
Of course, there’s The Lone Ranger TV series. Each episode ends identically: the Lone Ranger has restored justice to the frontier town that had been overtaken by outlaws. As the key “good” characters chat in relief, Tonto and the Lone Ranger slip silently away from the town. The final shot is of them riding off into the distance. “Hi-Yo. Silver. Away!”
The hero is so good in each of these stories that he cannot stay and be with us. They have to leave so we can go back to living our normal lives. “This mask stands for justice,” the Lone Ranger says in nearly every episode. Justice must get our attention, not the human agent. We never really do get to know these “heroes”. These heroic figures have made some sort of personal sacrifice in the course of bringing restoration to the community. As they walk away, solitary, they are aware of what they have chosen to give up in order to effect the good of others.
So, at Easter, the cultural temptation might be to see Jesus as the solitary hero who conquers death for us by dying on the cross and then at Easter he rises and rides away into the sunset. BUT, that is not what happens! We do not tell the Easter story as an event that has happened in the past to our ancestors and is a great story. NO. Easter happens again today. We do not say, “He was risen.” No, we say, “He is risen.”
We tell the story not because it happened but because it is still happening. For God there is no time. Within the infinite being of God, all things are present. In this sense, the Crucifixion is always present before God. Therefore, Good Friday is today, the Resurrection is today, the Last Supper happens today. Jesus did not ride away on a white horse. His historical, physical body has returned to heaven, but he promised that he would remain with us until the end of the world. Our hope is that every Christian has a living relationship with Jesus. He is not just a story from the past. He is real and active in our lives. Each of us experiences the resurrection repeatedly in our own lives; our sin may squash his presence in us, but he rises again through mercy and brings us to more. Jesus is alive! He lives today! He is here among us!
We are not witnessing Jesus walking silently away. Rather he walks directly into our hearts and into our lives. The empty tomb and his resurrection is not the end of the story; it is a new beginning.
This Easter Sunday, as every Sunday, we hear, we taste, we stand in awe; we claim the story of the Holy Week as our own, and we tell it again and again, so that, in time, we will recognize its great fulfillment.
Happy Easter!
Fr. Damian