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Sunday, April 16, 2006
Mercado: Revisiting Easters past
By Juan L. Mercado
(For Easter 2006, we dipped into our newspaper archives to revisit articles we had written earlier. A column we wrote years back reflects what the old acclamation says today: "He has risen as he promised---Juan L. Mercado)
MANY are captives of pre-conceived ideas of Easter, the Irish theologian Eamonn Bredin notes. Many assume that Easter is "little than the simple resuscitation of a larger-than-life Jesus." Thus, we lump His raising with that of Lazarus.
Is that the case with us?
"Then, we have no hope," Bredin writes in “Rediscovering Jesus” (Claretian Publications). That's only a brief reprieve, before we slip back into death. " If for this life only we have hoped in Christ," St. Paul writes, " we are, of all men, most to be pitied."
Today, four out of every 10 Filipino teenagers (aged 13-19) do not believe in life beyond death, a survey of 1,300 urban students by Philippine Jesuits found. " Those who believe 'there is no resurrection' are majority of the young around us," Loyola School of Theology's Catalino Arevalo, S.J. points out.
What is the empty Garden tomb, with its folded burial shroud, to them? Or to us?
Churches overflowed this Holy Week. But "this "phenomenon is actually misleading," asserts the survey analysis, published in Windhover magazine. "Contrary to popular belief, we're no longer the nation of believers we are reputed to be."
Few of us think of our deaths---and what lies beyond. And Easter is time to grapple with "the two great mysteries that confront us: God and death."
There are many Easter stories, scholars tell us. But they all express the same message: "God did not allow Him to be held in death" (Acts 2:24). " And Jesus appeared to Simon/ me/ us/ them."
Luke and John come close to a physical description of Jesus after his death by crucifixion. Time and space no longer bind Him. He comes and vanishes, even if doors are shut. Nor do they recognize Him immediately, in the Upper Room or on Lake Galilee's shores.
They encounter the crucified Jesus in a new way. "He had become another," Fr. Arevalo notes. "I think of that quaint expression people sometimes use in Taglish: You are very another na."
"They recognized Him in the breaking of bread"---description of the Eucharist and mass, since Pilate's time, the evangelists add.
Thus, the Eucharist embodies the Easter Jesus revealed to us as "Emmanuel," Fr. Arevalo writes. He is "the God who is with us always, fellow wayfarer, companion on life's journey, friend of all our nights and days...That is why there is such a bond between Easter and the Eucharist."
But only 36 percent of Filipino teenagers believe in the Real Presence, the survey found. A majority of 49 percent thinks the Host is just a symbol, or a reminder. The rest were uncertain.
Without this bond, will these youngsters, like the women on Easter morning, futilely "seek the living among the dead?"
An earlier survey of 1,400 Filipino youngsters (aged between 7 and 21) by Trends MBL, found: 94 out of every 100 were crammed into the impoverished D and E classes. Those in the C class made up five percent; the affluent A/B class one percent.
The disciples, too, were from the D and E basement of society then. And all, without exception, abandoned their master. So, what transformed them after Easter?
They met Jesus after Calvary and arrived at an absolute certitude: this Jesus who died on the cross had entered into a radically transformed life.
They now speak not about some kind of "His cause goes on," Bredin notes. Rather, they assert: Jesus has been brought, through death, into God's future.
That experience "brought Peter the Rock out of Simon the betrayer, or a crucified Paul out of a crucifying Saul, or the church of martyrs out of the scattered disciples."
The disciples' experience has been refracted to us over the centuries. "After the resurrection, the disciples saw the living Christ, who they knew to have died, with the eyes of faith," St. Thomas Aquinas was to write:
The language used by Paul and others in speaking of the Easter appearance is different. They do not say; "We have seen Jesus again" but "we have seen the Lord and worshipped Him." Even those who proclaim the implications of Easter in their lives---Mother Teresa or John Paul II, for example---stammer to articulate its meaning.
What do our youngsters today proclaim? Wowoweee? Only seven percent remember Sen. Benigno Aquino as martyr. A deluded equal fraction thought the dictator Ferdinand Marcos "heroic." Can the flesh and blood language of the disciples' lives transform our kids into the "heroes we never were"?
Easter "is the ultimate threshold between history and mystery." It cannot be adequately expressed in language. Here, the disciples stammer. "Not everything has a name," Alexhandr Solzhenitsyn writes. "Some things lead us into the realm beyond words...For an instant, you glimpse the Inaccessible. And the soul cries out for it."
Easter reveals the true face of God, as He is---and mankind, as it could be. "It nudges us into the newness of God's future." But have we, "oldies," bothered to tell the kids just that?
(juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (April 16, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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