Easter Shock! Horror!

What I love about the resurrection stories in this octave of Easter is the human shock and horror at what has happened. See Peter and John running from the tomb in terror and total bewilderment. Time and again we read that the disciples were shocked, horrified, terrified--overwhelmed. They thought they were seeing a ghost. This is the physically revolting terror of the living dead. Here was a corpse walking about. Here was someone they knew had died, but he was back again.

There is no mistaking what has happened. Those urbane theologians who reduce the resurrection to some sort of intellectual fairy tale have never grasped the gut wrenching, nightmare quality of the shocking events. The resurrection could not possibly be a case of 'the beautiful teachings of the noble rabbi continuing to be believed by his followers even after his tragic death' What a load of hogwash!

The sheer impossibility of the attested miracle is enough to validate the truth of the resurrection. Why would anyone make up anything so prepsosterous? If people wanted to make up a new religion would they not have devised something more believable, more acceptable, more reasonable? Instead they say a man has risen from the dead, that he contined to be alive and is alive today.

This is why I am so excited by Easter--because the resurrection stands the whole world on its head. We thought religion was about being good, or being wise, or being nice or believing the right things or doing the right things or performing certain rituals or learning how to meditate or transcend the physical realm or any other long list of do's and dont's and suddenly we find that all that religous fol-de-rol was just a pointer to something greater. It was a hint of what was to come.

And what was to come was not a religon but a relationship. The risen Christ come to meet us and demands a response--and taking refuge in a religion is a cop out, for the religions we create for ourselves (and they are many) are all too often an escape from the encounter rather than an experience of the encounter. As Catholics, the religion for-- all its objectivity and sacraments of grace-- must still be the way to that encounter which overturns the tables in the temple, calls dead men from the grave--the encounter from which we come with our hearts burning within us as he speaks the Word and makes himself known in the breaking of the bread.