Easter Triduum 2018

Now that we are firmly established in the Easter season, we can profitably look back and savor, once more, two homilies by our Abbot Peter.  We present to you here, Abbot Peter’s Homily for both Holy Thursday and the Easter Vigil Mass.

Holy Thursday Homily 2018 by Abbot Peter McCarthy

Homily by Abbot Peter McCarthy 3-29-2018

Every time I’ve found myself reflecting on these Holy Thursday readings this week, a particular poem kept surfacing in my mind until it apparently wore a hole in my thoughts!  I realized this morning that one line especially kept haunting my reflections.  It is not a contemporary poem, written over 100 years ago now by a very young, and at the time unknown German poet, Rainer Rilke:

 

Only in our doing can we grasp you.  

Only with our hands can we illumine you.  

The minds is but a visitor: it thinks us out of our world.  

 

Each mind fabricates itself.  

We sense one’s life’s limits, for we have made them.  

And just when we when we would flee them, you come 

and make of yourself an offering.  

 

I don’t want to think a place for you.  

Speak to me from everywhere.  

Your Gospel can be comprehended 

without looking for its source.  

When I go toward you 

it is with my whole life.

 

I am challenged and even confronted by the very charged atmosphere of this Holy Thursday evening: The ‘feel’ of it!  The readings are filled with swirling – violent – themes of light – darkness – slavery – liberation – friendship – betrayal … this evening is dense … hard packed tension with layer upon layer of political intrigue and violent, even tortured, men: Judas – Pilot – Caiaphas – Herod.  It is this very night – Paul reminds us in our second reading from 1 Corinthians when the sinless one was betrayed – ‘was handed over’ – wrenched from his beloved disciples, who themselves abandoned him.

And yet … this is the night resonant with ancient, cultic hymns of glorious divine intervention and liberating revelation!  Listen to our first reading from the book of Exodus, Israel’s Passover:

 

This day shall be a memorial Feast for you, 

which all your generations shall celebrate – as a perpetual institution.

 

And in our second reading, we have one of the earliest eucharistic hymns of the ancient Christian community:

 

On the same night that he was betrayed,

the Lord Jesus took some bread

and thanked God for it and broke it, and he said,

‘This is my body, which is for you;

Do this in memory of me.’

 

There is also a gentleness to this dark and violent night – an almost transforming tenderness that one would never expect; like the experience of Divine Mercy!  Like gentle and courageous Jesus allowing himself to be ‘handed over’ this night – bound and lowered into the dark, fearful dungeon of the condemned in the basement of the house of Caiaphas.  A deep and transforming tenderness that radiates from this sinless one!

 

Each mind fabricates itself, writes the poet.  

We sense our life’s limits, for we have made them.  

You come and make of yourself an offering.

 

Tonight’s Gospel from St. John begins right at the end of his Book of Signs.  We should still find echoing in our hearts Jesus’ final words:

 

I, the Light, have come into the world 

so that whoever believes in me need not stay in the dark anymore …

 

I say these words of Jesus should be echoing in our hearts because in our hearts we too carry the darkness, the violence, the fear, and the betrayal of this night!  It is in our world today just as much as it filled the Kidron Valley of Jerusalem on that first Holy Thursday.  It seeps into our hearts as it once polluted and eroded the trust of his earliest disciples.

Jesus asks us in our Gospel tonight: “Do you understand what I have done to you?”  Do we understand what Jesus is doing to us this Holy Week?  And why do we begin tonight in such darkness?  Because John writes:

 

Jesus had always loved those who were his own in the world.  

But now he showed how perfect – how total his love was.

 

My brothers and sisters, God’s glory – God’s love in Jesus – is revealed most fully in our dark places!  Tonight, Jesus lowers himself down into the center of the swirling, violent, fearful darkness that imprisons our world … “And he makes himself and offering.”

 

He removed his outer garment, John writes, and taking a towel wrapped it round his waist:

He then poured water into a basin and began …

to wash away our blind and toxic fear of love that pushes us into self-centered and violent lives – like Caiaphas – like Judas – like Pilot, where we can’t make room for love anymore, even though love itself is standing in front of us!

 

We sense our life’s limits, for we have made them.  

And just when we would flee them, you come 

and make of yourself an offering.

My brothers and sisters let us pray, especially during our liturgy of the washing of the feet that follows now, that He who this night lowered himself into the center of our dark world, wash us in the cleansing power and healing mercy of His love this Holy Week.

+ Abbot Peter McCarthy

 

Easter Vigil Homily 2018 by Abbot Peter McCarthy

Homily by Abbot Peter McCarthy 4-1-2018

It was over twenty Easters ago … the first time I preached on this Easter Gospel text from Mark. This was prior to the “new” Lectionary and guess what … the final line of this Gospel had not been amputated! Let me give it to you straight:

 

And the women came out and ran away/scattered/fled from the tomb 

because they were frightened [Tramos] out of their wits. And they said nothing to a soul.

 

Does that final line not change the entire atmosphere of this early Easter Gospel?

You add Mark’s final line and you don’t get a victory celebration … you get the opposite … fear … trauma … shock … soon to spread to the entire community of disciples in Jerusalem who remained behind locked doors.

Why was this?

I am reminded of a reflection from a theologian of our own day…Hans Urs von Balthazar who states: “This Easter event is, as has rightly been said time and again, without analogy. It pierces our whole world of living and dying in a most unique way.”

In a most unique way: Do you remember all the times those first disciples did not recognize Jesus when he appeared to them after Easter morning? All four Gospels (after disagreeing with one another on many points in the story) settle finally on just two identifying characteristics of the Risen Lord. In fact, the angel in the empty tomb this morning spells out both identifying characteristics:

 

“Do not be shocked/afraid … you seek 1. Jesus of Nazareth (physical body person) 2. the crucified (the wounds).”

 

There it is … the earliest Christian Easter Proclamation – The Crucified One is risen.  Notice the priority here … not the righteous one, not the victorious one … however you slice it, if it is authentic Gospel text, the Crucified One is at the center.

 

Just look at tonight’s Easter Gospel … we encounter the image of the Crucified One right at the beginning in that very early morning journey of Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.  Out of love and longing they chose to walk toward that tomb in their lives – that empty and unfulfilled place of total disappointment and failure.  They just kept walking …

 

I am reminded of the rabbinic saying that for anyone walking the path of faith … his or her feet are like two blind scholars attempting to feel their way into life’s meaning … one step at a time.  That describes these three gospel women very well, they just kept walking one step at a time … following their heart’s longing.  When they reflected only a few steps ahead they knew there was a mega stone in their path that they could not possibly roll away … and yet, they kept on walking!

 

The question is … at what point on that first, very early, Easter Sunday morning’s walk to the tomb did they begin to bear the wounds of the Crucified One in their own hearts?  Was it in making the decision to encounter the pain and darkness of their bitter life-disappointment all over again … just to be near him … just to anoint him?  We don’t know … but we know that these three women were Church before the Apostles were Church, because they willingly bore his wounds in their hearts … they could hear the Easter Gospel in all its terrifying power!  As in the words of St. Paul:

 

For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his,

we shall also be united with him in his resurrection.

 

The two Marys and Salome would get it right … The Crucified One is risen!  Risen, his life and wounds are too big for one person … we all must bear them.  So we end up with the cross among the Easter lilies!

 

My Brothers and friends, not one of us comes to authentic Easter faith without walking to that empty tomb at the center of our lives.  We desperately need to stop running away from it … to love enough … to walk right into it, looking for the Crucified One at the center.

 

The eighteenth-century poet, Goethe, got it right:

 

And so long as you haven’t experienced this,

To die and so to grow,

You are only a troubled guest

On this dark earth.

 

I end these reflections with the testament of another evangelist of the Resurrection … the senior American poet, Denise Levertov.  The daughter of an Orthodox Jewish father, her journey to faith was a lonely one.  I share with you one of her last life reflections on that journey, from her poem “On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus”:

2

It is for all literalists of the imagination, 

poets or not, 

that miracle is possible, possible and essential.  

Are some intricate minds nourished on concepts? 

Can they subsist on light, that’s not grounded in dust, grit, heavy carnal clay?  

Do words contain and utter, for them all the reality that they need?  

Resurrection, for them, an internal power, but not a matter of flesh?  

For the others, of whom I am one, 

miracles (ultimate need, bread of life) are miracles just because people 

so tuned to the humdrum laws: gravity, mortality – 

can’t open to symbol’s power 

unless convinced of its ground, its roots in bone and blood.  

We must feel the pulse in the wound 

to believe that with God 

all things are possible.
 

My prayer this Easter morning is that along with the two Mary’s and Salome we too will trust enough to walk to the empty tomb …  Love enough to feel for “the pulse in the wound” at the center of our lives … our real lives that our two feet are standing in … it is here we encounter the Easter Angel … and the Crucified One, who is risen.

+ Abbot Peter McCarthy