Richard Bollman, S.J.

EASTER VIGIL HOMILY, 2009

Mark 16: 1-9 "The Community after the Resurrection"

This story is told in all four Gospel traditions.

Other versions point out that the men of Jesus’ group were frightened

and they stayed behind locked doors. The women felt safer going about.

Only the women go willingly to the tomb.

They had been at the execution of Jesus.

They needed to be together, to bring some kind of closure to that terror.

All the versions of the story agree on what happens next:

they discover the stone has been moved, the tomb opened, and empty.

And then a direct encounter with an Angel, a young man in white,

which is to say, an explicit message from God about Jesus.

This is what we know: he is risen up, he is not in the grave,

and he has gone on ahead to meet the disciples.

This sends the women running away,

because they are both amazed and frightened.

Great power has been released now, hard to fathom, or account for.

Mark’s resurrection story, his whole Gospel,

ends right there with this running away.

As if to say, what happened to Jesus is an event

we are still assimilating: the heart of it.

He is not in the grave, not in our shrines and books,

but is risen up and gone before us. An event still going on.

I think this is essential to our following of Jesus.

He is not to be pinned down, but goes before us.

How will life be different? An amazing and frightening question.

The amazement gradually leads these men and women

to a new kind of community strength in the memory of this the risen Jesus.

The recalling of his words, his encouragement,

draws people around the table.

And he has a way of joining them there.

That was the whole point of their church households,

coming together in memory of Jesus, a memory that becomes a presence.

Jesus at the center, in the breaking of the bread,

in their love for each other especially the broken ones,

and in their witness, more and more fearless, in the world.

That witness, that willingness to act in the name of Jesus

seemed to come from nowhere. Like the Spirit of God has always come.

The other astonishing thing, after the empty tomb, Jesus going on ahead,

is that the world itself looks different.

They gradually see that they are no longer

defined by old social boundaries, neither male nor female, slave or free,

no longer just Jews together,

but are now recognizing how God’s power and compassion reaches out,

penetrating different national groups, even pagans,

all capable of experiencing this new Christ who is at large in the world.

This is how Jesus claimed them, in communion with one another:

and as human beings of the world community.

They saw that, felt it, acted on it,

and actually seem to have heard it from his own mouth.

"Remember me always." Very Personal.

"Touch me every day at the table and in the common love you have.

Meet me every day in reconciliation, which is the work of God on earth.

And from this rootedness in me you will know how to proceed.

You can go out to all the world."

So what we inherit here is not a private religion or personal spirituality.

I’m glad it’s this way, because it heightens the value of spiritual friendship,

companioniship, which has meant a lot to me through the years:

I mean friendship in the Spirit, in the movements,

where you can expect someone

to listen and appreciate how you search, what you feel and hear from God,

and to place that side by side with their own story

and not to rush to judgment or advice, but to wait and want to learn more

as you grow together, listening to the Bible, praying.

This is to ‘remember him always,’ to look for the words that tell it.

That kind of companionship opened up for these six men and women

coming here tonight for baptism. Meeting each other; meeting you.

And getting a feel for Jesus here and now, affecting lives.

This would happen on Thursday nights, the community of initiation.

And Sundays when they left this room to explore the scripture.

But it’s that way with all of us more and more.

I hear people say to me, and to one another,

what a gift it is to just listen to what is happening to folks,

what they go through. What they believe about it.

It think this is what keeps people alive and present in this chapel

week after week. The awesome, fearful possibility

that we need one another for the sake of knowing our own soul.

And we’re pushed by these relationships, challenged,

how they open doors to the broader community of believers

and the wide world of the human story.

I just think back through this one short time of Lent.

I felt so fed by the mind and heart of our brother Paul Knitter

gathering a deeper sense of Christ through the Buddha;

and Jennifer Beste helping me feel the heart of Christ

in a world where the exploitation of the poor is so subtle and unrelenting.

I feel as if Jesus keeps reminding me: I am not here, I’ve gone before you.

Just through a teen-ager’s project to help build a school for African children

we start to empty our pockets of change and try to learn

what this might mean half a world away. Amazing.

And there was that weekend when some thirty of you

risked going closer up to the tensions of racial difference in our culture:

to learn a little bit what we might need to unlearn

about color and history and opportunity.

I think this is the ferment of church as it should be:

the tomb being empty, power breaking out,

Jesus farther from our grasp than we’d like,

and ourselves left often enough baffled

how to tell the tale, what to do next. This is exciting religion

at all levels: eating and drinking in the presence of the Christ,

bringing ourselves to the waters of change and the tasks of justice.

And the word from the angel is this: you have nothing now to fear.

It’s possible to fear, of course.

Or to get sidetracked because of our own resistance, our addictions,

the rigid ways of this vast Catholic institution,

but there is nothing, finally, that we need to fear.

The Buddhists have a great take on this business of fear.

Our real spiritual goal cannot be just to shake off our own suffering,

but rather to start to see with undefended heart

the needs and hopelessness around us, because that’s why we’re here.

No need to be afraid of it. We are called to move "toward the turbulence,"*

the anguish, the hunger and thirst.

We do this because a searching openness of this kind

is also happening among other souls everywhere in the world.

We’re not alone, you and I, this little local church.

So there it is, something three women realized 2000 years ago.

Something new is awake now in the human condition.

Something greater than ourselves, greater than political movements

or military strategy, or scientific analysis or western medicine.

God, in the human condition, on our own planet, awakened and powerful,

looking upon us with the affection of our brother Jesus.

Encounters in the body, eating and drinking at the table,

touching the wounds, being sent with power.

How wonderful to be called to live it.

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* from Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty, (Shambala Press, 2003)