Homily
for Easter Sunday
April
17, 2021
Sequence
St.
Joseph Church, New Rochelle
“Death and
life have contended in that combat stupendous:
the Prince of Life, who died, reigns immortal” (Sequence).
Over and over, we hear that the world is in the power of the Evil One. E.g., one of the temptations that Jesus faced in the desert was Satan’s offer of all the kingdoms of the earth: “I shall give you all this power and their glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish” (Luke 3:6). In his 1st Letter, St. John affirms that “the whole world is under the power of the evil one” (5:19).
It’s this
demonic power that we reject when we pray to Jesus’ Father, “thy kingdom
come.” May God, rather than Satan and
his wicked angels, reign over us!
Over and over,
we see in human experience the vast reach of evil in the world. There’s no other way except as Satanic to
describe the last century’s Third Reich, Stalin’s gulags, the millions murdered
by Mao and his henchmen in China, the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide,
and more. We are seeing that same
demonic malice today in Russia’s unspeakable crimes in Ukraine. We see it in 73,000,000 unborn human beings
murdered every year by desperate mothers, cold-blooded abortionists, and their political
collaborators. So much to please the
Dark Lord of the world.
The Evil One
appeals to the dark side of each of us.
Not one of us is exempt from his allurements, even after we’ve renounced
them in Baptism. That dark side is the
powerful theme of the Star Wars movies, the Harry Potter books, and Lord of the
Rings. It’s the battle, the “combat
stupendous” between life and death, going on within the heart of each of us as
Satan tries to lure us into his bottomless pit of wickedness, cruelty, and
hopelessness.
God hasn’t
stood aside watching the Evil One destroy what was created in original goodness,
watching the Prince of Darkness ruin the divine image in human beings. Into this world ruled by Satan, this world so
apparently dominated by his hatred and horrors, God has sent an invading
force. One commentator has compared the
incarnation of the Son of God, the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh, to the
D-Day invasion of Europe.[1] That event let the world know that Hitler’s
days were numbered, that the victory of freedom and right was coming.
The coming of
Jesus Christ likewise signals that the Evil One’s empire is crumbling. St. Peter says in today’s 1st reading that
Jesus went about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil (Acts 10:38). He signaled God’s goodness in his healings, his
exorcisms, and his mercy, signaled that Satan’s realm was under fatal assault.
The sacrifice
of Jesus on the cross seemed to be Satan’s final triumph. Jesus told the crowd who were arresting him,
“This is your hour, the time for the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53), and
indeed, when he died “darkness came over the whole land” (23:44). Evil seemed to have won. God’s own Son was beaten down by unspeakable
torture, covered in gore, ugly to behold, abandoned by most of his friends and
even, it seemed, by God, and dead—ready for the final darkness of a tomb.
The cross,
however, was but the last phase of the “combat stupendous.” Part of the liturgy of Holy Saturday
proclaimed, “This is the day when our Savior broke thru the gates of
death. He has destroyed the barricades
of hell, overthrown the sovereignty of the devil” (responsory after the
patristic reading). Jesus once told a
short parable about a strong man fully armed guarding his palace and keeping
his possessions safe. That strong one is
the devil. “But when one stronger than
he attacks and overcomes him, he disarms him and distributes the spoils.” That stronger one is Jesus our Lord. (cf.
Luke 11:21-22), and the spoils of his victory is the forgiveness of sins,
eternal joy, our restoration to God’s love.
Like the
Allies storming the beaches of Normandy comes God’s Son to reclaim what belongs
to God. “The Prince of Life” leapt
living out of the dark tomb, dealing instead a death blow to the devil, to sin,
to the mortality that has reigned in the kingdom of the Dark Lord. Jesus Christ the strong one of God is the
“victor king, ever reigning.” He has won
the triumph for God and for God’s creation.
The final outcome of the combat is declared: “Christ my hope is arisen,” and in him even
we sinners shall claim victory over the enemy of God, the enemy of our eternal
happiness.
[1] Oscar Cullmann, cited by Fleming Rutledge,
The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2015), p. 377, n. 75.
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