Pinned Post
Albert Baur, 1882
Continuation of the Epistle for Easter Sunday (1 Corinthians 5:7-8)
Brethren, purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new dough, as you really are without leaven. For Christ, our passover, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us keep festival, not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Translation of the Holy Gospel According to Saint Mark (16:1-7)
At that time, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, brought spices that they might go and anoint Jesus. And very early on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb, when the sun had just risen. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll the stone back from the entrance of the tomb for us?” And looking up they saw that the stone had been rolled back, for it was very large. But on entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting at the right side, clothed in a white robe, and they were amazed. He said to them, “Do not be terrified. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen. He is not here. Behold the place where they laid Him. But go and tell His disciples and Peter that He goes before you into Galilee; there you shall see Him as He told you.
The Saving Words of the Gospel
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Transcription of Sermon
In the Collect for Easter Sunday, we say, O God, who on this day through Thine only begotten Son has conquered death and thrown open the gates of everlasting life, give effect by Thine aid to our desires, which Thou dost anticipate and inspire. “Give effect to our desires with Your help” is our prayer. And what ought to be the desires of one who believes in Christ Risen?
What is a desire anyway? It’s a longing for something that one does not wholly possess. There have always been spiritual and philosophical movements that denigrate desire. The Stoics said desires cloud our minds, and our judgement, and trouble the soul. The Buddhists say that of the Four Noble Truths, suffering comes from what one desires, and that the path to Nirvana is through the cessation of all desire. And in fact, even in the Catholic Church, three-hundred fifty, four-hundred years ago, there was the Quietest Movement, which wanted to squelch all desire in order to have a pure love for Christ. And of course, that heresy was condemned and rightfully so.
Amongst the true giants, the spiritual giants of the Catholic Church and of our patrimony, we find a host of saints whose desire exceeded their reason. And it didn’t go against their reason, but it went beyond what they could understand. And as a result of this burning desire for Christ, they experienced joys and sorrows that are not there for those who do not desire Christ. Their joys surpassed every earthly joy, and their agony as a result of their longing for Christ is only comparable to the sufferings of Purgatory. Often, some Catholics will distrust desire, perhaps because of their own sad experience of false desires. And they become doubtful of themselves. We ought to be vigilant. But we don’t squelch our desire.
Christ gave us a heart to know Him, and love Him, and to long for Him. And if we aren’t exercising it in a burning way, in an ardent way for Him, we’ll find a cheap substitute. The Quietest Movement of Fénelon and Molinos, as all of those similar movements, ended in moral chaos, because we were given a heart to love. And Christ wants it all.
This word desire, longing, επιθυμία, (epithumia), appears thirty-seven times in Scripture and as a verb sixteen times, and not always in the best of usages. Yet, this is what’s central to our theme. This was central to Holy Thursday when Christ himself said, With desire I have desired to celebrate this Passover. To a Hebrew mind and ear, this repetition of desire as a noun and a verb together imply intense longing in an abundance of longing, intensity, overflowing of desire, and earlier in that same Gospel we hear Christ saying, How I long to cast fire on the earth, and oh that it were burning right now. Note His anguish that this is not yet the case. Before the Resurrection, as Christ manifested His longings to His Twelve in the Last Supper, as we heard on Thursday, we also have this painful and embarrassing scenario in which the Disciples compare one to another – “I’m greater than you.” It sounds like children on a schoolyard, much more than grown men who have been with Christ for three years. It’s a little embarrassing to read those lines.
And nonetheless, we all have the experience of claiming to know Christ, and to love Christ, and to seek Him where He isn’t. We come to a grave, and we are constantly surprised to find it empty because it doesn’t deliver. And Christ doesn’t shame them for having desire. He doesn’t even chastise them for their disordered desires. But He re-situates them. He re-orients them towards His Kingdom, counselling them to become as children in their positions of authority, to become servants who give of themselves to their entrusted souls. And here is true greatness, and where desire is to be exercised in an ordered way.
And as He does this, He confers upon them not only the Sacrament of Orders, He gives them the Eucharist, and He gives them seats of judgement in His Kingdom; these same men with disordered desires and bickering, because Christ does not reduce them to that one embarrassing moment. He has a broad horizon when He sees each one of us and what we can be if we cooperate with His grace, but that requires exercise of our hearts in longing for Him more than anything else. He reorients their hearts, and He knows what they will become after Easter Sunday and, in particular, after Pentecost.
The Prodigal Son followed his carnal desires for little things and saw his inheritance as a way of obtaining them. His older brother buried his desires and, on the surface, was trying to look like something else. The man who lives in an un-resurrected way, exercising his heart’s desire for things that are not Christ, will find himself betrayed by those very things. Lesser things will make a claim on our heart because God gave us a heart to love and be loved. The man who believes in the Resurrection, who is risen with Christ and lives the life of grace and truly longs for Him, seeks Him, works to build up His Kingdom, and allows himself to be absorbed by this longing to even become longing itself, so that it define us. This man can desire infinitely.
Infinitely because the object of our love is infinite, and infinite because the One who allows us to love and gives us the means to is infinite. St. Augustine speaks about this in one of his homilies, in which he says that we take our finite love, and we place it in the infinite love of Christ, who then elevates our love to something infinite. To long for passing things, things that won’t be here after the Second Coming, is to have a very small heart and to waste space in it that belongs to Christ.
Desire implies imperfection, a state of unfulfillment, and an already but not yet situation. And that’s where we grow precisely in this imperfection, precisely in this longing for something that we do not completely possess, because the more we long for it, the more our disordered desires are ordered towards Him.
Think of what was going on in Our Lady’s heart in those days, leading up to the Passion and then during the Passion on Holy Saturday, when she knew what Our Lord was going to undergo, and, nonetheless, she experienced it in a way more profound than any of us could imagine. The teaching that the Church is indefectible means that at no time will all lose the faith at the same time. Perhaps the Church was distilled down to the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Holy Saturday when she knew that Christ’s promise to rise again would be fulfilled. And she endured that in ways that His followers could not understand. St. Ignatius of Loyola says that on Easter morning, in his spiritual exercises, the first visit Our Lord made was to His blessed mother. Was she awakened by him, or was she waiting in expectation? That’s something we hope to find out in Heaven.
This already but not yet aspect of our longing has a purifying effect on us. And this is accomplished especially in our times of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, our times of mental prayer, but also our elevating of our hearts and our minds to Him throughout the day. Offering it all up, our work, our recreation, our sleep. Offering it all up, back to the one who gave it to us. And this desire for Christ can, should we want, be our Purgatory on earth.
Back to what St. Augustine said of joining one’s own finite love to the infinite love of Christ; God the Father says something similar to St. Catherine of Siena in her book Dialogues of Divine Providence: He says, Your fasting and your penance please Me, finitely. Your longing for Me pleases Me infinitely. The more we desire Him, the more He reorders our hearts. If we are truly resurrected with Christ, we don’t share our hearts so easily, but allow Him to consume it, to absorb it.
The Kingdom of Christ is already but not yet. Perfect, but still incomplete. A Dominican sacristan went to the chapel early in the morning, and there he saw St. Thomas Aquinas levitating in prayer, in longing for Christ, and he heard the voice of Christ from the crucifix say, Thomas, you’ve written well of Me, what would you like? He said, Domine, non aliam mercedem recipiam, nisi Te ipsum. I want no other reward unless it comes with You. We’ve been made for the infinite.
In Ecclesiastes, 3:11 says God has put eternity in the mind of man that he cannot find out what God has done for him from the beginning to the end. Notice that God has placed this capacity to long for Him without our ability to grasp it with our minds, and that’s all right. Here too, we see this tension of already and not yet, a supernatural longing which increases, grows, which becomes painful, and at the same time brings joy and, nonetheless, is incomplete. And through His Resurrection, He’s joined us to Himself in His Resurrection.
Do the things that I longed for are they of Him? Do they lead to Him? Or am I looking in an empty grave? To participate in His longing, this longing that He exercised in the Last Supper, then is our way out of this empty grave. If we’re generous, this longing will mature and be purified in the waiting as we receive and as we are received more abundantly into the Mystical Body of Christ that is already real but not yet come to full stature.
A blessed Easter to you. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
~ Fr. Ermatinger