Sometimes when we put everything we have into anticipating a great event—planning, preparing, hoping, dreaming—the event itself can sometimes seem almost anticlimactic, as though it couldn’t live up to the hype. Brides and grooms have said this of their wedding days, when after months and months of planning every perfect detail, they have little recollection of the day itself. Easter can be a little bit like this, especially if we celebrate the great feasts of the Triduum, the three days before Easter. Holy Thursday with its commemoration of the Last Supper, Good Friday’s account of Jesus finest hour, reigning from the cross, and the Easter Vigil, recounting all of salvation history, culminating in Jesus’ great gift.
We know in our minds that we are celebrating the greatest single event in God’s covenant with his people, the triumph over death itself. But somehow we can’t wrap our understanding and emotions around something so intense, so unique, so utterly beyond our human experience. Ironically, this letdown is almost built into the Easter readings. At the heart of the Easter story is the empty tomb. The stories of the appearances will come later, unfolding the mystery of the resurrection. But the first message to the apostles is that the tomb is empty.
Somewhere in the darkness of our Easter Vigil, we must confront the empty tomb individually in fear and trembling. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb in the early hours of the morning. John and Peter go together to the tomb but each enters separately. We must do likewise. But our belief that the Christ has risen will draw us together once again into an experience of community, an experience of Church. Our response to our individual conversion is to gather with those who can share that experience and then together go out to tell our story of the Christ.
Throughout the Gospels, the apostles appear in shifting groups or more often as individuals, following Jesus and relying on his leadership to hold them together and settle their disputes. It is only the fear of the crucifixion and then confrontation of the empty tomb that gathers them together into a single group, relying on each other for protection, reassurance and support. The empty tomb compels them to rely on their faith in the stories Jesus told of the resurrection, stories they may not have heard or understood because of their individual preoccupation with success and advancement. Now they must rediscover his presence by retelling those stories and centering on him rather than on themselves. Alone none of them is able to fully comprehend the experience; together they discover new insights in a shared belief. From Easter to Pentecost, they are most often referred to as the Eleven, a sign that their identity is as a cohesive group rather than a collection of individuals. Any personal experience of the Risen Lord is marked by the command or the impulse to “go and tell the others.” Our vision of church today and into the future can take its form and character from this early community.
Just as a wedding day is followed by years of marriage, the day-to-day life of learning to live and love in a committed relationship, so Easter Sunday stretches first to the Easter Octave, then throughout the fifty days of the Easter season and into each expression of the paschal mystery in our weekly Eucharists and in our lives.
