Easter 2008
Fr. Mychal Judge O.S.F.[1]
He Rolled the Stone away for Us
(One Nifty Word: Alleluia)
To the churched and
unchurched[2]
gathered in a church not
built by human hands[3]
Acts
First reading
from Acts
Peter proceeded to speak and said: “You know what has happened all
over
Alleluia,
alleluia.
A reading from the holy Gospel according to Mark
Glory to you, Lord.
After
the Sabbath day was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome
brought spices to go and anoint the body
of Jesus. Very early on Sunday morning, at sunrise, they went to the tomb. On
the way, they said to one another, “Who will roll the stone away from the
entrance to the tomb?” (It was a very large stone.) Then they looked up and saw
that the stone had already been rolled back. So they entered the tomb, where
they saw a young man sitting at the right, wearing a white robe, and they were
filled with alarm. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “I know you are looking for
Jesus of Nazareth, who was nailed to the cross. He is not here! He has been
raised! Behold the place where they laid him.” (Mark 16: 1-6)
The
Gospel of the Lord.
Praise
to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
----------------
Introduction
The huge stone rolled away
On
Good Friday, Joseph of Arimathea placed the dead body of Jesus in his own tomb
newly hewn from rock, and then rolled a very huge stone across the entrance and
went away. (Mt 27: 58-61) Very early on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene and Mary
the mother of James and Salome were on their way to the tomb with spices to
anoint the body of Jesus. On their way they asked one another, “Who will roll away
for us the huge stone from the entrance to the tomb?” When they arrived, to
their great surprise they saw that the stone had already been rolled away. (Mk
16: 3-4)
Who rolled it away?
Who
rolled the stone away? Matthew writes there was a great earthquake, and an
angel of the Lord dressed in a robe white as snow came down from heaven, rolled
it away, sat on it and announced to the women, “He is not here; he has been
raised, just as he said.” (Mt 28:6) Mark writes that a young man dressed in a
white robe told the women on entering the tomb that Jesus of Nazareth had been
raised from the dead. (Mk 16: 5-6) Luke writes that two men in dazzling
garments appeared to the women who were surprised to see the stone rolled back.
The two announced to the women, “He is not here. He has been raised.” (Lk 24: 6)
Whoever it was who rolled the stone
back, the message is simple: the stone was so huge it took a mighty angel from
above or at least one or two hefty men from below to roll it away.
God murdered by
an “act of God”& an act of man
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietsche is
famous for his expression “God is dead.“ (Nietzsche -- The Madman, section 125) What or who kills God for us?
Sometimes it is “an act of God” (i.e., an act of nature) -- like the tsunami of
Sometimes it is
an act of man that murders God. Nietzsche, who put his
expression "God is Dead" into the mouth of a madman, writes,
Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. “Is your God lost,” asked one. ”Has he strayed away like a child,” asked another. “Has He hidden Himself? Is He afraid of us? Has he taken a sea voyage? Has he emigrated?”
So did the people mock him. Then the madman jumped into
their midst, transfixed them with his glances and said, "Where is God
gone? I will tell you! We have killed
him, you and I! We are all his murderers! What was holiest and
mightiest of all that the world has yet known has bled to death under our
knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean
ourselves?”
God murdered in the
Holocaust & 9/11
The twentieth
century proved the madman wasn’t so mad after all; man does, indeed, murder God. Elie Weisel (the most famous surivor of the
Holocaust) writes of the Holocaust
-- that horrendous act of man -- in a little
volume entitled Night.
Never
shall I forget that first night in camp [
For many other
Jews God died in the concentration camps of
Marina Fontana, whose husband David was one of the 343 firefighters who died on 9\11, tells how that horrendous act of Usama bin Laden murdered her God:
I cannot bring myself to speak to God anymore because I feel so abandoned. I guess deep down inside I know that He still exists, and that I have to forgive Him and move on. But I am not ready to do that yet.
God murdered in the churches
After
Nietsche’s madman’s episode in the marketplace, he made
his way into different churches on the
same day, and there he intoned a Requiem upon churches as “tombs and sepulchers
of God." Sometimes it is
nature and sometimes it is man who murders God. Sometimes it is the very church
herself who murders God. In the Inquisition she not only murdered heretics like Giordano Bruno[4] but with them she also
murdered very God Himself. The church murders God much less spectacularly but
still quite effectively with her picky pedantries, hohum homilies and lifeless
liturgies in the Sunday assembly.
God murdered for Jung
For example, Karl Jung, the
father of modern psychology, describes the day of his First Holy Communion. He
waited for it with eager anticipation. It finally came. Behind the altar stood his father, the
minister, in his familiar robes. He read off the prayers from a book. He ate a
piece of the bread and sipped the wine, then passed the cup on to the others,
who looked stiff, solemn, and it seemed to him, uninterested. He waited in
suspense for something out of the ordinary to happen but it did not
happen. He saw no sadness and no joy on
anyone’s face. When his turn came, he ate the bread which tasted flat, and
sipped the wine which tasted sour. After the final prayer all pealed out of the
church, neither depressed nor illumined with joy, but with faces that said,
"Well, that's that." In the course of the following days, it dawned
on Jung that the church had killed God for him on the very day of his first
Holy Communion. He found himself saying, "That is not religion. That is
the absence of God. I must never go back
there again.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
On
the lofty mount where Jesus was transfigured before his apostles, Peter
exclaimed to Jesus, “Oh, how good it is for us to be here! Let’s build three shelters
here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” (Mt 17:4) The church,
too, which assembles us weekly on the lofty heights of
A robin before the tomb
Sometimes it is an act of nature like a tsunami that kills God, lays Him
in a tomb and rolls a huge stone at its entrance. On the other hand, sometimes
it is an act of nature which rolls the stone away for us and brings God back to
life.
When winter in northern climes has turned into a tomb for us
(as it, indeed, did this past winter of 2007-08) we find ourselves crying out
in early March, “Who shall
roll the huge stone away for us?” Then suddenly one day a solitary robin
appears and hoists her tiny wings against the heavy stone before the tomb of
winter holding spring captive. She does
not know (or pretends not to know) there is one more blizzard waiting in the
wings. At the end of the day, however, the lengthening light, the mystical smell of
spring in the air, the biological clock within us and the reappearance of the
robin assure our human spirit that the
back of winter has been broken.
The robin is finally triumphant; her tiny hoisted wings roll the heavy stone
away, and spring springs forth in all its glory. Heaven and earth are flooded with
hints, hunches and hopes that God, indeed, will roll away the stone before our
tombs.
An angel robed in
brown before the tomb
Sometimes it is man who kills God, lays
Him in a tomb and rolls a huge stone at the entrance. On the other hand, sometimes
it is man who rolls the stone away from
the tomb of God and brings Him back to life. By the power of his magnanimous living
and magnificent dying Fr. Mychal Judge,
a Franciscan priest, rolled away a huge stone before the tomb of God in
On the apocalyptic morning of
New Yorkers knew the Franciscan friar. They knew he was a recovering alcoholic who comforted alcoholics, assuring them they were not evil people. They heard him tell alcoholics, “Look you’re not a bad person. You have a disease that makes you think you’re bad, and that’s going to `f…’ you up.” (At times he had no compunction in using forceful language when the occasion called for it.)
New Yorkers knew also he was a gay man by orientation. He opened
the doors of the well-known
But New Yorkers knew (if his church at times did not know) much more than that about Fr. Mychal. They knew he had an encyclopedic memory for people’s names, birthdays and passions. They knew he was a friend of everyone from the homeless to Mayor Giuliani who at his funeral declared that Mychal was a saint. They knew that he was a true New Yorker, born and raised in the city, but they knew also that he lived on an entirely different plane of priorities from most New Yorkers. He was non-acquisitive. He was completely unselfish and utterly uncomplaining.
Behold
how Fr. Mychal -- a hefty angel dressed
in a brown robe -- rolled away a humongous
stone of doubt, unbelief, anger and
lackluster religion for a whole sea of scorched
and prostrated New Yorkers! On the day of his funeral,
The words of the homily that day preached by Fr. Michael Duffy (also O.S.F.)
went forth to the whole world by three TV networks. And when a memorial service
was held one month later for the fallen angel, an endless flow of priests,
nuns, lawyers, cops, firefighters, homeless people, rock-and-rollers, alcoholics
and recovering alcoholics, gays and straights, local politicians and middle age
couples from the suburbs streamed into Good Shepherd Chapel on Ninth Ave, an Anglican church, to do a memorial service
for a Roman Catholic priest.
Yes, indeed, though it was a man (Usama bin Laden) who murdered God for us, it is
also a man (Mychal Judge) who brought God back to life! Yes, indeed, though it is
the church that sometimes murders God for us, sometimes it is also a man representing
the very best of that church who brings God back to life.
Conclusion
One nifty word: Alleluia!
There
are no nifty words for Easter. There are only nifty robins which roll away the
stone and call forth spring from the tomb of winter. And there are only nifty
churches which roll away the stone before the sepulcher of God and bring Him
back to life with life-giving Liturgy and life-giving Word. And there are only
nifty people like Father Mychal who represent the very best of their church;
they roll away the stone for us weary wayfarers and assure us that Jesus is
alive even in the midst of the human condition.
At the end of the day, however, there is one nifty word for Easter; it is Alleluia. Alleluia is not an
intelligible exclamation but rather a kind of ecstatic babble which wells up in
our hearts because of robins in the springtime and life-giving churches and
people like Fr. Mychal Judge.