LET THERE BE LIGHT!

A SERMON FOR EASTER SUNDAY

As we awaken to another Easter Sunday morning, the light of the rising sun dispels the black shades of last week’s events.  Like dreams that fade as we awaken, the dark memories of our Lord’s Passion and Death now brighten with the realization that they were the cause of our redemption.

It was not so on that very first Easter morning. 

Let’s cast our mind back through history to that momentous daybreak. It is the end of the Jewish Sabbath and all is quiet in the Holy City of Jerusalem.  The silence is reminiscent of a winter’s night thirty-three years prior—it is the silence that covered the land of Judea the night our Blessed Lord was born, “while all things were in quiet silence, and night was in the midst of her swift course.”

What happened this first Easter night?  It is the third day since the Crucifixion, since that eerie physical darkness had descended on the world at the hour of Christ’s death.  He who, in the beginning, had created light with his divine Word; who, at his Incarnation became himself the Light of the World; who, at his Nativity brought light to the people who walked in darkness; now he was dead, and the lifeless corpse of this divine Son of the Most High is at rest in the quiet darkness of the Holy Sepulcher.  The black twilight that fell over Jerusalem on Good Friday may have dissipated, but a spiritual darkness still pervades the land, mixing with the awful memories of the week’s events to create an uneasy atmosphere of anticipation.

There are no witnesses to the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. The men closest to his tomb, Roman soldiers placed there to guard it, are asleep and they see and remember nothing. There are no scriptural accounts of this most spectacular event since the world’s creation, no revelation from God of what exactly happened.

However, it is not unreasonable to speculate that in the course of that night, something silent but remarkable accompanied the return to human life of God’s only-begotten Son.  For an idea of what that could have been, we have only to look back at the world’s Creation, when the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity each played a role in producing Light out of the darkness.  Is it not reasonable to expect that now, at our Lord’s Resurrection from the dead, this same triune force would express their will with a similar radiance of light?

“Let there be light!”  The divine nature of Christ, which of course, had never ceased to be, again follows the will of his Father in heaven, and the Word of God issues the command for Light to replace the darkness of death.  The Breath of God that is the Holy Ghost once more descends over the darkness of the deep and, overshadowing the lifeless Body of Christ, breathes new life into it again.  In him is life once more, and that life is again the light of men.

The men of science recently discovered that, accompanying the conception of every man in his mother’s womb, at the exact moment the Holy Ghost infuses an eternal soul into a mortal body, there is a physical flash of light.  We can only imagine the intensity of that same celestial light as the Holy Ghost breathes our Lord’s divine nature back into his lifeless human body.  “Let there be Light,” the Light of Creation, the Light of the World, a light so intense that it burned a perpetual and three-dimensional image of our Lord into the Holy Shroud that covered his Body.

With this flash of divine light, the Body of Christ rises from the grave, and is again the “Light that shineth in darkness.”  Life has returned to the Body of Christ.  The Precious Blood again flows through the veins of Christ’s Body, the living Body and never-ending supply of the Blood of the new and everlasting covenant.  Because it is everlasting, because it is divine, this Body can never die.  “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” 

This living Body of Christ is our Bread of Life.  “The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world… and he that eateth of this bread shall live forever.”  Without our Lord’s Resurrection from the dead, there could be no Blessed Sacrament.  Of what use would it be to eat, not the bread of life, but something long since dead?  But our Lord himself warned us: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.”  If we do not receive this Bread of Life in the Blessed Sacrament, our eternal life will not be simply jeopardized, not just compromised, but denied to us forever.

So let us rejoice this Easter morning, let us find the fullness of our joy in our Saviour’s Resurrection.  With that joy that can be realized only by a soul in the state of grace, let us approach the Communion rail today to receive the same living Body that rose from the dead that first Easter Sunday. This living Body of Christ is our eternal salvation, and by uniting that Body with ours in Holy Communion we dare hope to achieve the everlasting life for which he died, and now rises again.