We Lie in Shallow Graves
Easter Sunday of the Resurrection
Church buildings like the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen were not constructed arbitrarily. Features that at times might seem like practical impracticalities are more often than not profoundly meaningful. You may have noticed, whether a longtime parishioner or a visitor with us this morning, that the Cathedral is not the most accessible space for those who use walkers or wheelchairs. And while much could have been done to make the Cathedral more practical in that regard, there is one, small but crucially important detail that perhaps could not have been otherwise.
In the rear of the church (the end closest to Charles Street), you will find a short hallway that leads to an octagonal room called the baptistry. This is the place, as the name suggests, where baptisms are typically celebrated. The space is a marvel to behold; however, going through the passage into the baptistry, you come across what seems to be a rather unnecessary three steps down into the room. Most people don’t notice them, and perhaps you’ve walked right over them yourselves unaware, but these steps are crucially important to understanding what happens in the room to which they lead.
The three steps down into the baptistry represent the three pourings of water on a person’s head—or the three times they are dunked into the water—as they are baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Yet the three steps also signify the three days Jesus spent in the tomb—and connecting A and B—the steps remind of us our own death with Christ and burial in his tomb at the moment of our baptism. Saint Paul calls this mystery to our attention: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:3-4).
What I’d like to reflect upon this Easter morning is that, as the steps down into the tomb that is the Cathedral baptistry are only three—not three hundred or three million—so too is the grave in which we lie in this present life only a shallow one. For as the tomb could only hold Christ for three days in the ground before he broke it open and rose triumphantly to live forever, then for us who have died, been buried, and have risen with him, the ‘grave’ that we experience in this life does not—in truth, it cannot—last forever. I mean to speak about the grave more broadly than the particular plot of land to which our earthly remains will be committed after our bodies die. I speak rather about the grave at an existential level: our sense of meaninglessness and loss of purpose, our frustration with our inadequacies and inabilities, our feeling of loneliness and isolation, our wandering through the desert of this life searching for water to quench our thirst and shelter under which to rest safe and secure. What I want to say is that, while our experiences of the grave are real, and their pain is undeniable, and their length is incalculable, and the good within them is obscure, these graves can only, in the last analysis, seen in the light of Christ to be shallow—shallow for they cannot exceed the depth of the tomb Jesus Christ has broken open, for we have been buried with him, and our grave, in whatever form it takes, is nothing other than his.
What happens at our baptism—when we are carried as infants or as adults walk down those three steps—is that the gift of faith is sown into our hearts as a seed, and that seed is meant to grow, blossom, and flourish within us until it reaches full maturity in eternal life. The experiences of the grave that I described are common to every person, and no one is spared of them in this life; yet for Christians, what makes the difference is the faith, hope, and love within us that knows that the grave is not the end—for we carry within ourselves the seed of eternal life. And for this reason, the Christian should live differently, for our being in the world—which, as a human, is often marked by experiences of the grave—has been made new by the one who has conquered the grave once and for all. Whereas for the rest of the world, the grave is final and ultimate, and its inevitability produces fear, and its effects are foul and rancid, the grave for Christians is a sign of hope and of new life.
But faith takes work. The seed within us must be cultivated, watered, and supported in order to grow and be a principle of life in the face of death. For the risk of our faith is that it, too, is susceptible to the grave—of being buried over through neglect and forgetting. A dead faith is no faith at all. If the ideas in which we profess to believe do not take root within us, then they are nothing more than ideas. We cannot simply expect that saying that we believe in Christ will be enough to save us from the feeling of falling endlessly into nothingness. No, belief in Christ must go all the way down in us, so that we know where the true bottom of the grave lies—not infinitely beneath us, but only a few feet.
The Easter mystery is one that we must celebrate often if it is to mean anything to us. Every Sunday, the Church celebrates the Resurrection of Christ from the dead to remind us of where we are to find our meaning and purpose, of how we are to grapple with our inadequacies and inabilities, of the fact that we are never really alone, of how we are to navigate through life, and of where we are to find water and shelter in this life’s desert of trials and pain. This is what the Church gathers to discover anew each Sunday, listening to God’s Word, praying the prayers of the liturgy, and entering into the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ again—the mystery by which we are saved and delivered from the grave. And it is here, within a parish community, that we find the encouragement of our brothers and sisters who, lying in their graves as lying within Christ, show us that ours can also be overcome in him.
For my part, which is just one among many in this Cathedral community, I cannot imagine my life without the faith I have in Christ and his empty grave. All I can know for sure is that, without Christ, I would not have purpose, comfort, or direction, and the graves with which I deal on a daily basis would seem infinite. It is my prayer—and my invitation—that the joy of this day, the day on which we celebrate the defeat of every grave, would bring you back next Sunday, and every Sunday after, so that you will live fully and beautifully in the life Christ has won for you.
On this Easter Day, may the living Christ grant to us and to all his Church an increase in faith and draw us ever closer to him, so that when the course of our life is over and the earth claims our mortal bodies, we will live eternally with him, with Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.
Homily preached March 31, 2024 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen