Easter Sunday Homily - Fr. Raymond

Cross and Passion - Anne Marie M..

---- Forwarded Message -----
From: Anne Marie ....
Sent: Saturday, 7 April 2012, 10:38
Subject: Cross and passion

Just to show that you can have a spiritual moment with an IPad, but there is no app for that.
Anne Marie
Sent from my iPad

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----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Raymond . . .
Sent: Sunday, 8 April 2012, 12:22
Subject: Easter Sunday Homily

APOSTLES CREED

• One of the riches of the new Easter Liturgy is that it brings back to common Liturgical use the short, simple Apostles Creed.  This Creed is now prescribed for use during Lent and Easter.  For the rest of the year we have the much more elaborate, the much more theologically developed,   Nicene Creed.  The Nicene Creed was formulated many years later than the Apostles’ Creed, and it only took final shape after a great deal of theological controversy.  But one strange thing about this new Creed is that it omits one very significant article of faith, an article that we still find in the Apostles Creed.  This article is explicitly mentioned in the New Testament too by St Peter.  It’s the article that proclaims Christ’s “descent into Hell”.  (We generally understand this word “Hell” here, of course, as referring, not to the hell of “damnation”, but to what might be called a place or state of being in which the souls of the just, who died before Christ were kept waiting till He had opened the gates of  Paradise. )
• Why this article should be omitted in the new Nicene Creed, I couldn’t say, but what is certain is that it is to be found there in the primitive Apostles Creed and it is missing from the later Nicene Creed.  Was it perhaps because it is too  esoteric, too mysterious a concept to put into such a basic proclamation of faith for everybody,  even the newest catechumens?  Or was it because the Bishops of Nicea  weren’t yet too clear on its meaning themselves?  After all, the Church is still to this day seeking an ever deeper understanding of the mysteries of revelation.  The words of Jesus to his Apostles about the church’s need to grow in understanding are, in a way, still relevant to this very day: “I still have much to say to you, but you cannot bear it yet”.  The development of  dogma is an ongoing part of the life of the Church.
• This Easter morning let us try to approach the understanding of Christ’s descent into hell and its implications for his resurrection by considering first the fact that when Christ came to save his brothers and sisters in the flesh, it was most appropriate that he came down to live among them as one of themselves in order to do so.  but, of course, it was not just to those actually living in Palestine at that time that he came, he had, in some way, to came to all of us, to all mankind, past, as well as the present and the future.  To his own contemporaries, the present He came, as a historical reality.  To us, who are the future, he comes through the Scriptures and through the Sacraments.  But how did he come to the past, to those who had died before him; to those who had died before his Ascension, before he had reopened the gates of heaven for us?
• This is where that mysterious gap of three days between the death of Christ and his reappearance begins to have meaning;  that mysterious gap described as the time when “He descended into hell”.  We might be so bold as to call this event the Epiphany to the dead.  At the Bethlehem Epiphany there had been repre-sented the poor and the simple, and the Rich and the wise, but in this event he  is manifested also to the dead.
• By the fact that he not only descended among the dead but also that he spent time there, he stayed three days there, we are surely led to believe that he shared their life with them there, whatever that means, he shared in their darkness and painful exclusion from the full fruits of redemption, that redemption that could only be realised by his own resurrection and  ascension.  The Fathers of the Church, when commenting on these three days, seem to suggest that these three days were the final part of Christ’s sharing in the suffering of his people,  not only of his people who were alive at his coming, but also of the dead, because to him all men are alive.
• Thus, to sum up: The darkness and pain of Christ’s sharing in our sufferings on earth accomplish our deliverance so also his sharing in the darkness and pain of his brethren’s seemingly endless waiting in their Limbo accomplishes  their deliverance.  And both events throw into greater relief the glory and triumph of his Resurrection;  That Christ rose from the tomb is perhaps not quite accurate a statement.  He descended from the tomb.  When he rose three days later, it was not from the tomb, but from the dead, from the mouth of hell.  Christ burst the gates of death then, not from the outside, as he did with Lazarus when he called out “Lazarus come forth”;  but he burst the gates of death from the inside and led out that great multitude of captives with the cry to his heavenly Father: “Behold I and the Brethren thou hast given”