Easter 2010: Thinking and living outside the box

Most people, myself included, live and think and love in frameworks that help us keep our lives together, boxes we can take for granted and that direct or orient us without our thinking much about it. I would have a hard time, for example, shopping or working in China; I couldn’t read the signs. It’s a different box, a foreign country. We all have skills and a job or position — or at least know what we can do for a living, even in a time of high unemployment. We have our families and our parishes and our towns and neighborhoods. We fit who we are and what we do into these boxes and categories. Life in them can sometimes become a deadening routine but, at their best, they help us develop habits that make a full and rich life possible. They protect our relationships and help us to live and love in conformity with our convictions.

The three people we meet in the Gospel on Easter Sunday — St. Mary Magdalene, St. Peter and St. John — had their ways of thinking and living and loving. They had stable frameworks that helped them to keep their lives together. Their lives had been influenced and changed lately by Jesus of Nazareth; but he was dead now, and they had to go on, back to their families and fishing, back to tax paying and avoiding trouble with the authorities, back to exchanging goods they had made and drawing water at the village well.

On the third day after Jesus’ death, Mary Magdalene, Peter and John experienced something that turned all their previous habits of life and ways of understanding things upside down and inside out. They saw an empty tomb, a tomb where they had placed the crucified, dead body of Jesus of Nazareth three days earlier. But he hadn’t stayed in their box. Later that first day of the week, they met a man whom they thought they had known, a man whose body had undergone death and emerged immortal, freed from all limitations by the power of the Holy Spirit. The risen Jesus is Lord of life and death, of time and eternity; he escapes all our habits, our routine, our ways of thinking and acting.

It took them time to adjust. St. Peter in the Acts of the Apostles confesses that he didn’t realize at first that the risen Lord had to be preached to all the nations, because “God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him …. Jesus Christ is Lord of all.” The risen Lord offers mercy and forgiveness to all, because he offers life on God’s terms, now and for all eternity. St. Paul, who, like us, first met Jesus after he had risen from the dead, tells the Colossians and us that we are to relocate our horizons of thought and action, move into a new neighborhood, think in a different box: “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Often, we domesticate the risen Lord. We shrink him into our world, our ethnic groups, our families, our neighborhoods, our country. Jesus, we can con ourselves into believing, would not do or command anything we don’t want, anything that doesn’t fit into my ideas of compassion or political choices or habits of life. The false stories about Jesus and the church are as widespread today as they were two thousand years ago. In fact, many of them are the same stories, recited now in American English rather than Aramaic, Greek and Latin. They all come down to one story: “I stay in my box and invite Jesus in as decoration, if at all.” But Jesus is Lord; he meets us only when we accept the life he offers, the new life, the risen life that is his forever.

Christ’s is a life where suffering is turned into sacrifice for the salvation of others. The story is told of St. Teresa of Avila, the great Spanish mystic and reformer of religious life in the 16th century, that she once had a vision of someone who claimed to be the risen Christ. She turned from the vision and told Satan to return to hell. Before the devil left her he asked, “How did you know I am not the Christ?” And she replied: “You showed me a body without wounds.” The marks of his passion and suffering remain forever in the now immortal body of the risen Lord. They witness always to his death for us, even in a body filled now with the power of the Holy Spirit. These wounds, along with the glory, mark the lives of all those who call Jesus Lord; they mark as well the body of Christ which is the church, as she waits for her Lord to return in glory.

The only way to meet the risen Lord is to surrender to him, to give him freely all the boxes, all the ways of thinking and acting and living that we have built up over the years and then receive them back from him, transformed. The great vehicle for this transformation is Baptism and the Eucharist, where suffering is turned into sacrifice under sacramental forms. This Easter season can be a time of transformation, of freedom, of new hope for all through conscious surrender to Christ Jesus, our risen Lord.