SOME THINGS NEVER DIE.
A HOMILY ABOUT THE GOSPEL READING JOHN 20:1-9 BY FR FRANCIS
DEATH COULD NOT CRUSH CHRIST’S LOVE FOR US
A man of 60 had gone back to visit his home town. One of the places he looked forward to seeing was the primary school he attended more than 50 years ago. While driving to the site, he planned his stroll down memory lane. He would start by finding his first classroom, where at age five he had begun school, and then work his way through the other classes.
But this sentimental journey never took place. He discovered that his old school building was no longer there. It had been demolished and a new one had been built in its place. It made him think about the transient nature of life – how nothing ever stays the same. Communities change. Buildings are here today and gone tomorrow. People live and die. Even nations rise and fall.
Then he remembered how in that school house he had learned the multiplication tables. 2 x 2 = 4; 3 x 3 = 9; 4 x 4 = 16 and all of the rest. He had learned those when he was only a boy. But 50 years later, they were still true. Five-thousand years into the future, they would still be true. So the old school building was gone, but at least part of what he had learned there remained. Time cannot erode them and death cannot erase them. This means that in some ways we live in an eternal world right now. Generations will come and go but in every one of them, 2 x 2 will always equal 4. That simple little formula, which we all learned as children, belongs to a realm where death has no authority.
In a sense, that is the essence of our Easter faith. We are saying that Jesus lived the kind of life that transcended the power of death. His adversaries could kill him, which indeed they did, but they could not stop him. As Peter said in his sermon at the house of Cornelius: “They killed him, hanging him on a tree, only to have God raise him up on the third day.” Our Gospel reading says, “Jesus had to rise from the dead.” It was imperative and inevitable. He belonged to that eternal realm where death has no authority. Some things never die.
To think of death this way provides the only reasonable starting point for believing in immortality at all. If nothing in this world lasted, why should we think that anything in the next world will? But that is not a true picture of life here and now. Many of us have said a final earthly farewell to our fathers and mothers but the love they gave to us did not die with them. It is still a vital part of our lives. The love that we felt for them is not in the grave. We love them just as much today as we did when they were alive.
Love has an eternal quality. That is what we mean by our Easter celebration. We are not saying that death makes transient lives immortal. We are saying that what is eternal IS ETERNAL and for that, there is no death. This building, in which we are worshipping today, will someday be gone and completely forgotten. Not one trace of it will remain, but the One whom we worship here will always be the same. The quality that He gives to our lives will abide forever. It is a kind of living with which death has nothing to do.
Some things never die – and the truths of our faith is one of them.
– This article was published in “The Universe” Catholic newspaper on 31.3.2013. Their website is http://www.thecatholicuniverse.com (external link). Fr Francis’ homilies can be ordered (books, CDs and DVDs) by requesting a mail order form. Address: 15 Cuppin St., Chester CH1 2BN; email: brfrancis@btconnect.com
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