A Homily for the Mass of Easter Day
Readings: Acts 10:34a, 37-43 Colossians 3:1-4 John 20:1-9
Not so long ago, I was visiting a dying woman. To console and encourage their mother, her daughters, who were also present, said that she would soon be reunited with her husband. She asked me if I thought that to be true.
“Yes,” I said. “If we gain heaven, we will be reunited with those whom we love.”
She was not too weak to challenge me. “But you don’t really know, do you?”
I wanted to insist that I did know, that this is the meaning of the resurrection, its significance for our lives. But one does not debate the dying. Instead, I proffered, “Well, I haven’t died myself.” Lest you think that I abandoned the faith, I went on to speak confidently of the life to come.
Easter is a “this-changes-everything” event. It is certainly not just “This happened, and so here we are.” Easter stands stage center in the Gospel proclamation. It does not merely record, and it never explains. No, its sole concern is connotation. Easter and each verse of the Gospels it birthed exist so that we might know the earth-changing significance of what has happened.
To explore that significance, consider a beautiful poem by Robert Frost. Many of us read it in school. “Birches” is an easy-to-follow narrative about the joy of a young boy swinging in the branches of birch trees. Like many of Frost’s poems, it begins with a straightforward observation of nature. Birch trees are easily bent, and some never return to their former shape.
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
Just as in the Gospels, in Frost’s poem we are supposed to move without effort from what happened to what it means.
We are like those birches. We start life standing straight up, but then storms come to shove, twist and bend us. “Dragged to the withered bracken by the load,” we then live bent down. And once bowed, “so low for long,” we never right ourselves.
Pastoring is jarring work. I can identify with the infirm, even the dying, but then I move from sickbed to playground, and the laughter of children reminds me of how life began, so full of simple joy and contentment.
And that is the second half of Frost’s poem.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
We are born of earth, but we dream of flying, “flung outward, feet first, with a swish.” This sets us apart from other creatures.
If evolution is all there is, then nature has produced something in us that exists nowhere else on earth: yearning. We are the only creatures unsatisfied with who we are. From the moment we gain consciousness, we dream of something more, something like flying. Each of us is meant to be “a swinger of birches.”
All of that was just a dream before Jesus rose from the dead. The afterlife was thought to be no more than a land of shadows, a “pathless wood,” where the living continued some fraction of their earlier existence. Then came Easter!
Jesus does not return from death to confound his skeptics. That would never have worked. Skepticism is spawned in hearts “weary of considerations,” hearts that close themselves to wonder, even the greatest of miracles.
No, Jesus comes back to claim his loved ones. He revives his relationships with them: Mary in the garden, the disciples in the upper room, Peter and John by the shore of the lake.
Resurrection is a biological oddity we cannot pursue, but we must nonetheless speak of its significance. Is it possible, is it true, that death does not, cannot, displace life? That the best of earthly life is carried with Jesus into heaven, there to become something solid and sublime?
Frost ends his poem by insisting that earth, at its best, is heaven enough for him.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Frost had it right: No ethereal realm can replace the joys of earth in our eyes. But he had the Christian faith wrong. This is not a day we celebrate clouds and spirits. This is the day we celebrate earth being wed to heaven in the person of the bridegroom. This is the day when we rejoice that those who have gone before us have entered the wedding feast.
This is the day that earth,
first in the person of her savior and then the rest of us,
learned to fly.
