First Sunday of Advent: A New Age - CUA Office of Public Affairs

Easter Sunday: The Christian Passover

By The Rev. Francis T. Gignac, S.J.

April 15, 2001

We have just celebrated our Christian Passover. In the Gospel story, the passion scene of violence and bloody death is swallowed up in the tremendous "yes" to life at Easter. As we die and rise with Christ symbolically in baptism, our feast today calls us to live the new Christian life to the full.

When our Jewish brethren celebrated Passover last week, most commemorated not only the Exodus of their ancestors from Egypt and their settlement in the Promised Land some five millennia ago, but also more recent events in their religious history, including the terrible Holocaust of the Second World War and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 – symbols that correspond to death and resurrection in our own religious tradition.

As the first Christians, who were all Jews, continued to celebrate Passover, they also included recent events of their salvation history. They spoke not only of the liberation of their ancestors from slavery to a hostile nation, but also of their liberation from sin through the blood of the Passover Lamb slain upon the cross. And they celebrated the victory over death and the liberation from all the negative aspects of human existence that their faith experience of the living and risen Lord promised them. Three ways of articulating this faith experience are found in today's readings.

The first reading (Acts 10:34,37-43) reflects a pre-Gospel formulation of Christian preaching. The author of this work attributes to Peter a speech in which he describes in rather schematic but beautiful fashion how God anointed Jesus at his baptism with his Spirit as the agent of salvation and how Jesus went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil because God was with him; and how finally he was killed, hanged upon a tree (a figurative expression for crucifixion), then raised by God to new life.

The second reading (1 Cor 5:6-8) develops the theme of a new Passover. Paul tells the Christian believers in Corinth to get rid of all old yeast, as a Jewish household gets rid of anything containing yeast on the eve of Passover, in order to make a fresh start, because Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed. The time has passed for corruption and wickedness; the time has come for sincerity and truth in our relationship with our living Lord.

The Gospel passage (John 20:1-9) is one of four different accounts in the New Testament of the scene at the tomb on Easter Sunday. It begins with Mary of Magdala going to the tomb "while it was still dark," in contrast to "when the sun had risen" (Mark), "at dawn" (Matthew) and "at daybreak" (Luke). Darkness is a powerful symbol in the fourth Gospel, which introduced the ethical dualism of light versus darkness in the prologue. It pictured Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night as representative of the realm of ignorance and contrasted Jesus as "light of the world" with the darkness of the world without his presence.

In this Gospel, Mary runs from the tomb to Simon Peter and to "the other disciple whom Jesus loved" – a literary figure for the model Christian believer, the same figure who was pictured standing at the foot of the cross with the mother of Jesus. She reports to them, "They have taken the Lord from the tomb and we don't know where they put him." The "we" reflects the earlier tradition of more women going to the tomb, as in the synoptic Gospel stories.

The author then pictures both disciples running to the tomb and includes the note that the other disciple ran faster than Peter but allowed Peter to go into the tomb first. He saw the burial cloths, and the cloth that had covered Jesus' head rolled up in a separate place. Then, as in all these stories, the role of faith in perceiving the resurrection of Jesus is stressed: "Then the other disciple also went in...and he saw and believed." It is the model Christian believer who perceives the risen Lord.

Christ's resurrection proclaims victory over death and over the evil of sin. As Paul says (Rom 6:9-10), "We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has power over him. As to his death, he died to sin once and for all; as to his life, he lives for God." So we, too, followers of Christ, are called this Passover to die more to selfishness and sin, so that we may live more for God and for others.

The Rev. Francis T. Gignac, S.J., is a professor and chairperson of the Department of Biblical Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. A photo is available.

Any questions or comments? cu a-public-affairs@cua.edu

Revised: February 12, 2001