Lasting Eastertide

EASTER 7C | 1 JUNE 2025 | JOHN 17:20–26

Though Eastertide, like all the other liturgical seasons, recurs annually, lasting fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost, it lasts, in truth, all our life, and beyond: hence Saint Augustine’s description of Christians as an “Easter People”. His description is apt: the resurrection is key to everything, again, in this life and beyond. It is as much a part of our lives now as the death that leads to it. Everything in our human experience speaks of resurrection, and even in the natural world, there is no death or decay without new life and fresh existence. In this sense, our resurrection begins now and is fulfilled in eternity.

In words first fashioned 1,700 years ago at the Council of Nicaea and recited at Mass ever since, we speak of looking forward to “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”. Such faith is rooted, not in a theoretical inference from an abstract idea, but, as attested in the Acts of the Apostles, in the personal experience of those who “ate and drank with [Jesus] after he rose from the dead.”

His rising from the dead was not, however, merely coming back to life, a postponement of death, as was the case with the raising or resuscitation of Lazarus. The brutal reality of the cross was not undone or cancelled by the resurrection: when he died on Good Friday, his human life ended. The resurrection is not a denial of death, nor does it exempt us from dying, as he did. On the contrary, it is deeply embedded in the Christian tradition that we should keep death constantly before us. St Thomas More’s words in the Tower as he awaited his own death by execution are a salutary reminder that if we deny death and our own mortality, our perspective on everything is bound to be distorted:

It will not go well with a man in all his affairs in this world if he hath not this mind in him: to show himself content to die and to depart unto God.

It is not, as many would now think, unhealthily morbid to keep the unavoidability and even the necessity of death before us; rather, it is a source of hope. Writing to his sick father on 22 April 1787, less than three years before his own death, the young Mozart expressed the same sentiment:

…when looked at closely, death is the true goal of our lives, and so for a number of years, I have familiarised myself with this true friend to such an extent that his image is no longer a source of terror to me but is comforting and consoling. And I give thanks to God that he has given me the opportunity of realising that death is the key to our true happiness. I never go to bed without thinking, young as I am [he was 31], that I may no longer be alive the next morning; and yet no one who knows me would say that I am sullen or sad in my dealings with them. For this blessing, I give thanks to my Creator with all my heart…

Shortly before his death, the famous English Dominican, Fr Vincent McNabb (1868–1943), recounted to a confrère how, when he had learned that he was dying of incurable cancer, a friend rang to say how sorry he was to hear the bad news. “What bad news?” asked McNabb, “this is what I have been preparing for all my life.” Anything in our lives that leaves death out of account is a distracting illusion.

Far from being a reversal, much less a denial, of his death, Jesus’ resurrection was the triumphant vindication of the love that was (and is) his life’s meaning and purpose, stated explicitly in today’s gospel: “I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and that I might be in them.”

It’s significant that, after his resurrection, he still bears the wounds of death, which were wounds born of love for us. Utterly good, he entered a world mired (as it still is) in rivalry, injustice and violence: a world dominated by selfish, controlling egotism. In such a world—our world—his cross (and ours) was inevitable. But he was prepared to accept the inevitable so that we might share his life and love. The resurrection triumphs over death because it is the triumph of God’s love over our inhumanity.

Easter was the first day of a new creation, in which death is no longer the end of all that we prize and love. The risen life, which has already begun, is an entirely new life, made possible by grace. So it was that, when Jesus appeared to the disciples at the tomb and in the upper room and on the road to Emmaus, he had to reassure them that it was he, because he was both utterly familiar and yet totally different. And so it will be for us. In a mystery that is as deep as creation itself, our risen life will be entirely new and different; and yet it will be the familiar you and I, body and soul, identifiable and recognisable by those who love us.

As the late Sebastian Moore once said, rather than saying that the resurrection has happened, it is more accurate to say that it has begun. The seeds of our own risen life are sown in all authentic love, but when we receive Holy Communion, we are receiving into ourselves what is already beyond death. We are receiving into ourselves the risen Christ and are united to the end of our journeying, the end of all our longing, that for which we were made, for which the whole of our lives is a preparation. “Surely, I am coming soon. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus” (Today’s second reading, Revelation 22:20).