No One Can Fall Without Falling Into Him
Easter Sunday of the Resurrection
Our lives are filled with stories and are, in fact, stories themselves. As we tell stories, there are parts we leave out for one reason or another. Some we don’t understand. Others make us uncomfortable. And, thus, we gloss over them. Sometimes, however, with more mature reflection, we come to see that the difficult parts of those stories — the parts which we ignored or tried to forget — were quite important and, in fact, indispensable. We could not understand them at the time; but with a fuller perspective, we can now see how they tie the whole story together and give it its true meaning.
The Easter story is one of those stories; and the day that we call Holy Saturday is the part we are likely to leave out of our telling: the day on which the Son of God was dead. We move from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, from the two great acts of the crucifixion to the resurrection, without much more than a passing thought on the deeply unsettling reality in between, which appears as only a kind of intermission in the great Easter drama.
Today is, of course, Easter Sunday, not Holy Saturday. But just as there can be no Easter Sunday without Good Friday — no resurrection without first the cross — neither can there be an Easter Sunday that truly celebrates the resurrection without passing through — not over — the mystery that is the Saturday in between. So, let us take a step back and revisit yesterday: the day on which Christ was dead.
Yes, we must sit with the uncomfortable reality that Christ was truly dead. His body, first laid in his mother’s arms at the foot of the cross, was laid, wrapped and anointed, in the tomb, sealed by a stone and watched by guards. He was not asleep. He did not feign any appearance of death. He embraced it to the full. Yet while his body reposed in the tomb, the person of Christ was still alive. His human soul and his divine nature — both unable to die — continued to live and, most importantly, continued to work.
In the Apostles’ Creed, we profess that Christ descended into hell and the First Letter of Saint Peter says that Christ, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit… went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey… that they might live in the spirit like God (3:19, 4:6). An early Christian homily imagines this event as Christ, the Good Shepherd, going after our first parents, Adam and Eve, as going after the lost sheep who had fallen into the pit of death. This unknown author describes Christ’s encounter with Adam in a striking way: Look, Christ says to Adam, at the spittle on my face, which I received because of you, in order to restore you to that first divine inbreathing at creation. See the blows on my cheeks, which I accepted in order to refashion your distorted form to my own image.[1]
By becoming a true human, by suffering a real death, and by descending into hell to lead those who yearned for salvation into paradise, Christ has assured us that all who seek him will find him, for he, the Good Shepherd, has gone everywhere we can be to find us. Only the heart that is truly hardened, that has defiantly turned its back on Christ and obstinately rejected his offer of grace, will not be brought home rejoicing on the Son’s shoulders to the Father’s house. Holy Saturday is integral to the Easter story for we must know and not forget that Christ has loved us to the end and has gone to the furthest extremes to find those he loves. And if he has gone even to hell then we have no reason at all to believe that he cannot still find us.
My brothers and sisters, what more do our hearts want than Christ himself? There is an insatiable desire within us for goodness, truth, beauty, and love that nothing on earth can fill. There is a longing for justice and peace in our world and in our homes that no power of ours, however great, can bring about. There is a dream within us to be other than we are — better than we are — that our weak humanity cannot make real. There is guilt in us for that which we’ve done and that which we haven’t that no earthly judge — least of which ourselves — is able to remit. There is a wound in us that no medicine can mend, a sickness in us that no treatment can heal. There is nothing within the story of our lives that can correct the narrative, to save us from what we’ve made it. All of this — our heart’s greatest desires — can only be filled by Christ and with Christ himself. Only Jesus Christ, who suffered death for us, can redeem our story by folding ours within his, that our life would be, as Saint Paul told us this morning, hidden with Christ in God.
Easter Day brings us together for many different reasons. For some, this may be your first time in church for a while. For others, it seems that we never go anywhere else. Yet, in the end, the reason we are here this morning is one and the same for us all. Christ has brought us here, through the various circumstances of our lives, to celebrate his Resurrection that his victory over the grave would be victorious in us — for his Easter story to become our story. Christ stands in our midst this morning, proclaiming to us, his lost sheep, that he has vanquished the grave, has gone to hell and back, and won for us the life we all desire. He invites us — no, he urges us — to let him pick us up, to restore in us his image in which we were created, and to carry us home to the Father’s house as the angels and saints rejoice that we have been found.
If we leave today’s Easter Mass encouraged to draw closer to Christ, thanks be to God, for we are already in the Good Shepherd’s care. With his help, may we persevere and stay with him every step of the way. But when those feelings fade, despair returns, and we feel that we have fallen again off his shoulders, then may Holy Saturday remind us, as one theologian once beautifully put it: When Christ came into our midst to redeem us… he descended so low that after that no one would be able to fall without falling into him.[2]
Homily preached April 9, 2023 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
[1] Office of Readings, Second Reading for Holy Saturday.
[2] Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, paraphrasing Hans Urs von Balthasar, in Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, vol. 4, 43. (cf. Balthasar, Heart of the World, 43).
This is so good, for real.