Fr. Sean's Easter Sermon
- Apr 5
- 7 min read
Updated: May 10
The Lord is Risen! Allelluia!
For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.
The Easter Sequence is an ancient poem, written by Wipo of Burgandy, who at that time was the chaplain to the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II. This piece was composed around 1050 and has been a main feature of the Easter Liturgy since! Numerous composers were inspired to write different tunes for the hymn. The dialogue with Mary Magdalene helped inspire and was used in the English Passion Plays of the 14th century. The text is so powerful because it highlights with wonderful word play that is hard to render in English, the paradox of Easter. Christ has come to destroy death by dying, he conquers as king by becoming a humble servant. We can benefit much from contemplating this paradox at the heart of the Gospel message using this ancient Secquence. It starts:
Christians to the Paschal Victim offer your thankful praises.
We are called in the first line to offer our praise--in Latin that word offer is immolare, which means literally to slay or to shed blood ritually. In thanksgiving for Christ's bloody sacrifice, we now must offer our own sacrifice, but ours is offered without blood. Our sacrifice is one of praise. This is why you are here right now. A church service is not just for you to come and receive, it is a service of participation, of doing. And what we are doing here is praising our God who became the Passover Victim for us, for we must respond to such great love and sacrifice which is explained in the next line:
The Lamb the sheep redeemeth: Christ by sin undefiled, reconcileth sinners to the Father.
The poem, following St. Paul in 1 Cor 5, calls upon us to view Christ as the Paschal lamb, the lamb sacrificed on the night of Passover. That notion of bloody sacrifice is strange to us. The ancients viewed the sacrifice, and especially a blood sacrifice, as the offering of a life, not the celebration of death. It was not the victim, the goat, which was truly offered up, but the goat's life on behalf of the participant. Also, sacrifices involved a meal from that sacrifice which means that sacrifices were not individualistic but a shared gathering with the community and the divine.
But now think of the Passover, which is the archetype of Jewish sacrifice--it was centered upon a sacrifice of a lamb and other food and drink which was offered to God. In return, God blessed that sacrifice and as the families ate the meal, He gave them life. God was present wherever the blood of the sacrifice was placed: God's life remained on the houses where the blood remained.
That same promise was continued in the sacrificial system of the Tabernacle and the Temple which God instituted in Exodus. Again, animals and other foods were given to God at the Temple. The people and priests then enjoyed those offerings but also received the invisible gifts of life and forgiveness. God was clear in the Book of Exodus that He would be present with Israel at the sacrifices. God told Moses to sacrifice two lambs everyday, one in the morning and one in the evening and to keep that practice continually. Then he tells Moses: "There I will meet you, to speak there unto thee. 43 And there I will meet with the children of Israel, and shall be sanctified by my glory."
Interestingly, at each offering of the lamb, the priests would also offer flour with oil (unleavened bread) and wine! And even more, according to the Mishnah, these lambs were killed and then skewered. Lambs were killed at the Temple and then skewered by running one strong wooden stick through shoulders and another one from the mouth to the buttocks of the lamb. It was a cruciform sacrifice. And it is through this continual sacrifice that God promised to be with His people! The Jews kept this seriously, and supposedly even during the great siege of Jerusalem, while all the people were starving, they made sure to keep enough lambs in order to offer this sacrifice. They knew, just like at Passover, that it was through the sacrifice and eating of the visible gifts, they would receive the invisible gifts of God: His life and forgiveness. For in the sacrifice, God was present. And now Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, is offered for us, his blood shed upon the cross, the doorposts of creation. And through his blood, our ancient enemy, eternal death is conquered. The poem continues:
Death and life joined together in that conflict stupendous : the King of Life who died deathless reigneth.
Jesus Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity is the author of Life, he is the King of Life, and yet he humbled himself to experience death, and by conquering it, now reigns eternal, deathless. In the past two days we have focused upon Jesus' true death--it was not an image, it was not faked, he did not just appear to die. This is very important because without a true death, Jesus could not have contended with Death itself and Hell.
But since Jesus truly died, hell had to contend with the author of Life. John the Baptist was the forerunner to Jesus on earth, and surely he was in death as well. He already had warned the captive souls of Jesus' coming visitation, and they were ready to be released. As St. John Chrysostom wrote in his Easter sermon: "By descending into Hell, He made Hell captive. He embittered it when it tasted of His flesh. And Isaiah, foretelling this, did cry: Hell, said he, was embittered, when it encountered Thee in the lower regions. It was embittered, for it was abolished. It was embittered, for it was mocked. It was embittered, for it was slain. It was embittered, for it was overthrown. It was embittered, for it was fettered in chains. It took a body, and met God face to face. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen." And so our Lord captured death and turned it from a punishment of sin into the gateway of glory. Now we need not fear even our own death for we have already died with Christ in our baptisms and live in Him now.
The poem now turns to the Gospel account and Mary Magdalen, the first eyewitness of the Resurrection of Our Lord.
Declare to us, Mary, the vision of thy journey. "I saw the Tomb of Christ living: and likewise the glory of the Risen: Bright Angels attesting, the shroud and napkin resting.
As soon as dawn began to break on Sunday, Mary Magdalene rushes to the tomb to find the body of her beloved. She seems frantic, wrecked by grief and sleeplessness, but as she comes into the area of the tomb, she knows something is wrong. She runs and gets John and Peter who investigate but they know the danger they are in by being about an opened tomb. We actually have a law written on a stone tablet from around the 1st century that declared a death penalty for anyone caught disturbing the tomb of a buried body. John waits for Peter who is more bold and he enters the newly hewn grave and the details recorded are remarkable. The linen clothes in which Joseph of Arimethea and Nicodemus had wrapped the body of Jesus were lying there. But the linen napkin that was around Jesus' head, the one used to make sure the mouth of the dead man stayed shut, was folded and put into the corner, neatly.
The Gospel’s account says that they believed. Let us be clear, though, just as John reminds us, they have yet to believe in the Resurrection of their Lord. No, they now believe Mary's testimony is true. The body is gone.
Mary then goes into the tomb herself, where the angels ask why she is weeping. And with a flat affect as if she is not even surprised by the presence of angels, she tells them plainly that she seeks the Lord. Noticing another presence now, she turns, and does not recognize the Gardener until Jesus calls her by name as only He could say her Name. Mary finally sees Her Lord and grasps his feet which she had bathed with her own tears. Now she has found Him, but still she only thinks of Him as He was, not as He is now, as Her Resurrected Lord who will ascend and be with His father.
She then carries the news back to the Apostles to whom Jesus appears later. At first, the community of believers do not know what to do with the sight of their Lord. They do not understand the sacrifice that He has made on their behalf. But as Jesus appears in the breaking of the Bread, and as He teaches them and reveals the meaning of the OT, and as He sends the Holy Spirit to them, their confusion turns into faith. They become the community of the faithful, united together in Christ, united together in His sacrifice. In response, the Apostles no longer run away in fear or fight with futile swords or despair at their Messiah. No, now the Apostles live in a new reality, inspired by the Holy Ghost through the power of Jesus Christ. And so in the poem, Mary concludes:
Yea, Christ my hope is arisen : to Galilee he now goes before you."
And then the poem ends: Christ indeed from death is risen, so we know most surely: O King and Conqueror, grant to us mercy, Amen. Alleluia.
We addressed Christ as victim in the first line, and now in the last we address him as the Conquerer, for we know him as both. What was humble and weak is now our power and strength. What once was a hideous torture device is now the sign of our salvation. Saint Augustine notes in his Confessions, Jesus Christ was “both Victor and Victim, and Victor because Victim,” and He was “both Priest and Sacrifice, and Priest because Sacrifice.” (Confessions, 10, 43, 69)
Now that it is Easter again, you have experienced the paradox of the Gospel as you have walked through Holy Week and now have come to His glorious Resurrection. You have experienced the suffering and death of Our Lord, and now you see the empty tomb and Jesus calls you by name. Do not let the sacrifice of Our Lord pass you by again as an empty symbol but have faith and seek those things which are above--seek Christ Himself. Do not cling to the darkness and your petty sins but offer praise to God for your salvation by offering yourself to His will.
He is here, not rotting in a tomb, and he is waiting for you to join His sacrifice, for you are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God! Christ is risen--rise with Him and offer your life to Him as He gives Himself for you.
