Fr Henry Charles

Mary Magdalene hurried to the tomb on Easter morning, and discovered that Jesus was no longer there, that he had risen.

The miracle of resurrection had taken place in the dark, the time and place of all development and growth.  When morning dawned, the miracle had already occurred.

Easter speaks to us in several ways, but one important way that it does is in teaching us that darkness is not something totally negative. Darkness is also the place where things gestate, the time when new things come to birth.

This has always been part of Catholic spirituality. God always plunges the soul into darkness as a way of bringing it to greater enlightenment, and preparing it for closer union with himself.

Darkness is thus not something to be feared, even though it is a time of difficulty, even of anguish.

The experience of the women on Easter morning tells us something else. When Mary suddenly recognises that the gardener is her beloved Lord, she rushes to hold him, and is told “do not cling to me.”  It seems a strange way for Jesus to respond to Mary’s love after her enormous experience of loss.

The point, however, is that the Jesus Mary thinks she’s holding on to is the Jesus she remembers. But this Jesus is different. Mary is told that if she keeps holding on to the old Jesus - and until and unless she lets that Jesus go - she cannot receive the resurrected one.

Once again, there are deep lessons for us here. Very often the way that we experience new life is by letting older forms of life go. We cannot cling to them, as we are often tempted to do, either from habit or fear. 

New life comes if we relinquish our hold on the old.  This is a form of dying, and it is the way we ordinarily live the Paschal Mystery.

The Paschal Mystery refers not only to the “life-through-death” passage in the life of Jesus, but the life-though-death possibilities we confront again and again in the course of our own lives.

Jesus spoke of daily dying, which means that we can expect the paschal process to be a recurring feature of life. A basic temptation, however, is to choose not to die, because what we need to let go is too much part of who we are, too familiar to do without.

Thus, in middle age we often hold on to youth as though youth were the only life worth having. Only the sheer passage of time forces us to relinquish our hold on the impossible. Couples also hold on to the honeymoon vision of marriage, long after the honeymoon is over.

One can sometimes see another illustration of this dynamic in factions within the Church. People who are conservative by temperament or conviction often lament the passing of the “old” Church.

They view the changes as useless, if not destructive, and live in a state of nostalgia, yearning for the good old days. Those who are liberal, are quite happy that the “old” Church is gone, but they cling to it nonetheless, through their hatred of the past, their constant refrain of how terrible things were, how desperately change was needed, and so on.

Each faction thus remains like Mary, clinging to a remembered body, yet to receive new life and a new spirit.

There may be still other things we need to relinquish, a view of the Bible, for instance, a childhood view of God or Jesus. Faith develops and we must develop with it.

Our internal faith structures must grow as we grow. Unless I let go of the Jesus of my boyhood, for instance, I will be blind to forms of his presence in my life as an adult.

The implications of not letting go are poignantly captured in the gospel of Luke, on the occasion of Jesus’ walk with the disciples to Emmaus. The disciples cannot recognise the resurrected Jesus because they are still focused on the Jesus of their memory, their former understanding and former way of seeing him. They are so preoccupied with the past, they cannot see him walking alongside them now. He is the “stranger.”

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain, but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.” This saying of Jesus (and the various sayings of gain through loss) characterised the paschal mystery before Jesus concretely validated it in his own life. 

We respond to this mystery not only through thanksgiving – it is all “for us”, as the Creed puts it - but though appropriating it in our own lives. In this way, its meaning comes home to us, not as something learnt but as something intimately known.

Easter then ceases to be just a piece of doctrine and becomes a very personalised mystery.