Acts 10:34-43
Psalm 118:1-23
Colossians 3:1-4
1 Corinthians 5:6-8
John 20:1-9

"The Love of God, Which
Passes All Understanding"

Throughout the world today and for the past two thousand years, people first seeing each other Easter morning have said, "Christos anesti!" "Christ is risen!" To which one replies, "Alithos anesti!" "Truly, He is risen!" I recall many years ago traveling in Europe with my mentor, a priest of the Anglo-Catholic tradition and at that time a Roman Catholic priest. As we walked through a busy marketplace in the late summer, an older woman approached him and began speaking to him in Greek. When he returned, I asked, "What did she say?" The distinguished old man replied, "Why, she told me that the Lord had risen!" We walked off in silence as I thought about the universal language of our faith. She saw us wearing clericals, and in a sense she drew a fish in the dirt before us: she said the only words that matter in our faith: The Lord is Life. Death is no more. Good order has mastered furious chaos.

In French-speaking Haiti, we heard and said, "Joyeuses Paques," Happy Pascha! And that is what is said in nearly every country on earth: "Joyous Passover!" "Happy Passover!" But in the English-speaking countries, we say, "Happy Easter," and that is a great gift of the English language. Do you recall the geography C.S. Lewis devised for Narnia? The Lands of the Emperor-over-sea and His Son, Aslan, are beyond the furthest points East, across the Eastern Ocean. Our great Feast of the Resurrection is not only East, but further than that, which is to say, Easter. Cast your mind on the East — the horizon that gives birth to the sun, that gives birth to the spring, that gives birth to the new light, which we celebrate at the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is "the true light" (Jn 1:9). In a universe made of chaos, and which tends always toward greater chaos, according to Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics, here is our order: our days-from-night, our springs-from-winter, our round of birth-from-death. Cast your mind on the East, and however far you venture to this .... the birth of all things, you still have yet to arrive; it is always beyond life unto the essence of life, for it is Easter than ourselves ... always Easter.

This is our Easter faith: the chaos of the universe wrested into life-giving order, the Red Sea standing up as a neat colonnade of walls of water, and on this morning, God's most remarkable miracle, which is to master the hideous chaos of death, in which holy, created matter comes apart at the seams and resolves into stink and dust. Mastered! Extinguished! Banished from His marvelous world of life!

During the eleventh century an Italian-cum-French monk sent from Rome became Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselmo d'Aostia. Very much caught up in the intricacies of scholastic philosophy — a highly refined machinery of dialectic and finely wrought formal logic, seeking to ground itself wholly in the synapses of the human brain. Anselm proposed a bold, new understanding of Easter's true meaning. He posited a severe God Who demanded payment for a bond. This bond was attached to the soul of every human by virtue of the sins committed in Eden. Anselm's God would not accept payment from any human because the debt incurred was too great. It was laughable that a human would arrogate to himself this role, to step forward with his checkbook. Yet pressing for full payment — though the God we find in the Hebrew Scriptures demands forgiveness of all debts every fifty years — Anselm explicates the Advent of Christ exclusively in terms of this unpayable debt. Jesus must pay it, for He is now human, but also God. I will have my bond! (saith the Lord). To be sure the Apostles were taught that the Son of Man must die that many might live, but Anselm's invention of a stern and exacting God, obsessed on the payment of a debt, bent upon child sacrifice, even the sacrifice of His own Son, insisting always on this bond, this paper trail to the disobedience of Eve and Adam. Is this the God we know? I find nothing of this in Father God in either the Old or New Testaments. ... so unlike God as to offend the sensibilities of a child.

I almost fear to address this subject. I flinch at the thought of it! For the Protestant establishment, which followed Anselm by five hundred years, fastened upon this theology like bees on new pollen .... and then quickly and diligently cross-pollinated with each other and for the next five hundred years. Lost to them was the Easter faith! Piled on top, the stones of human reason. Please remember that no one believed this invention by Anselm for a thousand years. Had no hint that anything like this could be true. Because for the first thousand years, the Christian faith was the Easter faith.

Now, Protestants point to alleged "corruptions" along the faith's winding road? But surely to fasten upon this, manufactured by a monk through a tortuous process of rarefied medieval philosophy and theological speculation, in no way linked to Christ's three-year ministry of parables, to the Risen Christ's theological teachings, nor even to the ministry of the Apostles. If the quest is always for the fresh, pure springs of Christ's own words, surely we are far afield with Anselm's speculations.

When Jesus speaks of dying for the sins of many (Mt 26:28) or says that the Son of Man must be held up like a bronze serpent to heal humanity (Jn 3:14), then we must always think Easter thoughts.

He is the Lord of Life. The Great Serpent Death, the Lord of Chaos, attempts to swallow Him and is destroyed in the attempt. Death is destroyed, for it seeks to consume not just a life but the invincible power of Life itself. Satan in His Pride miscalculated in his faulty reason. Death, where now is thy sting? (1 Cor 15:55).

He is the Lord of Life, and with His life the Creation is renewed. It is remade. Creation is recapituled, and all things are made new (Rev 1:25).

He is the Lord of Life Who offered Himself as a ransom for many (Mk 10:45). He would stand in a prison which held billions and trillions in order to set them free. But the Evil One had never received such a One as this in his cruel prison and could not hold Him. He has shattered His prison! Indeed, it would be this House of Death, Hell, which would be invaded and harrowed, turning Satan's flimsy logic on its head.

Our theology is Easter theology. During a period of forty days, the Lord of Easter, the Risen Christ, taught His Apostles plainly, no longer speaking in riddles or parables. It is a fact that none of these plainly revealed teachings are recorded in the New Testament. We are able to know them only through the beliefs of the Early Church, through the ministry of the Apostles, and what they handed down to their successors. These are the Easter fruits of the Resurrected Lord's own teachings. For His Apostles, the very ones whom He taught, were the Church .... and continue to be the Church: the faith once delivered to the Saints.

If I may make a brief detour, it is the preservation of this pure and unchanging faith that is of first importance to Eastern Orthodox and Anglo-Catholic Christians. Anselm ascended to the throne of Canterbury on the eve of the Great Schism, when the Undivided Church would be torn in half. (He ascended in 1033; the Great Schism would occur in 1054.) Scholasticism was one of countless ways that the Western Church seemed bent on reinventing the historic Catholic faith. You know it would be Henri Cardinal De Lubac (so revered by Pope St. John Paul II) who would realize that Scholasticism has been a catastrophe for the Western Church and began putting out books that would acquaint Western Catholics with the Greek Fathers. Scholasticism sought to reinvent the historic Catholic faith.

Striving to "prove" the existence of God through "human reason"?! This is ... alien ... bizarre ... even repugnant to the mind of the Christian .... at least to the Christian who's faith is the once and future Church, the ancient Church of Jesus and the first centuries. The soul is the divine "organ" which places Heaven in the human consciousness, not the over-busy, always-inventing brain. By the early twentieth century, the Roman Church would call theology "the queen of sciences." And this helps to explain why the Protestant reformers could not get enough of Anselm, for Protestantism itself is a creature of the Scientific Revolution — the insistence on empiricism and the dominance of human reason.

But Easter dawns on the soul with a radiance that defies the calculations of the brain. It is higher and deeper and beyond human reason. It is a horizon which reason can never reach, nor science ever hope to weigh or measure. This morning, we are asked to be present, to attend to the very first moments of what we call "the Easter Faith," the Resurrection Faith. The stone of reason has been dislodged, rolled back! Something new has been revealed, which the Sadducees and the reasoning minds of Jerusalem had scoffed at and rejected. Mary Magdalene saw it and in an instant knew in the depths of her soul. Had not her brother Lazarus risen from the dead emerging from such a tomb as this and under the hand of this very Man? She had sat at this Man's knee while her sister Martha busied herself in service, ever consulting the imperatives of the brain and its chronic insistence on justice. But Mary Magdalene had come to a very different way of thinking and feeling .... from Jesus. And now in the new garden of the world, on this morning of all mornings, on the Eight Day of Creation, we might say, her heart quaked and vibrated on a heavenly wavelength. She durst not say what her soul knew, for she is a woman. But be sure of this: she felt it. Running to John and Peter, she was full-to-overflowing with silent conviction. John, lightly leaping to the place, "saw and believed" (Jn 20:8). Peter made his own way up the path and

In our Epistle lesson this morning, reporting things that happened years later, Peter provides a hierarchy of what we might call, "the things one might obtain from the faith": First, there is "the baptism which John preached" (Acts 10:37). Next, "how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how He went about ... healing all that were oppressed by the devil" (Acts 10:38). Finally, "that every one who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name" (Acts 10:43). What we really have here is a hierarchy of sin-forgiveness. First, there is John's baptism; then Jesus' power to heal those who are afflicted by evil, which is sin; finally, there is belief in His name, which procures forgiveness of sins. Very logical.

In the garden, John does not report that Peter believed. He does report that he, John, loved the Lord and that the Lord loved Him. In the Book of Acts, Luke reports that Peter had come to believe, but not that he loved the Lord, which is the true and only requirement for salvation and the forgiveness of sins. Certainly, by the time the Book of Acts had been written, Peter does believe. After all, he was among those who were schooled day-after-day by the Risen Christ for forty days! Talk about total immersion! But when, as John reports, the same Christ asks Peter explicitly if he loves Him (αγαπε / agape), which is to say with all his heart, soul, and mind, Peter refuses to commit to this kind of love. Yes, he will be dutiful, even devoted to his vocation, (φιλια / philia), but not the lay-down-your-life love which Jesus requires (Jn 21:15ff). And here we see human reason and its instinct to bargain, to procure the best deal. Here is where heart and brain collide. And Jesus' response to the ever dithering Peter is unforgettable: So, you will devote yourself to your job, Peter? Then do your job: "Feed my sheep!" Yet, as we learn later, Peter will abandon his flock in Rome, fleeing for his life .... until He meets with Jesus on his way out of the city. "Quo vadis, Domine?" "Where are you going, Lord?" "I am going to be crucified a second time," He replies .... for the sake of your deserted flock.

Jesus challenges him to love. But Peter's calculating brain will not cross that line, will not throw all cares to the wind, and will clutch the years remaining in his life like a miser. And seeing this, Jesus warns Him: "Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go" (Jn 21:18). In effect, Jesus says, "Peter, we will all grow old, become feeble, and die. Dying is not so great a thing. It is common, for we all do it."

By stark contrast, what John saw instantly in his soul on the first Easter morning and what Mary Magdalene knew in the convictions of her heart was something that scheming reason can never understand, which is life beyond the horizon, eternal life and Heaven, which finally is the only solid reality. Death? What is death? Do you not see that He has overcome death? And the horizon from here is East and East and Easter than that. Rejoice, good Christian, for the Lord is risen, and all Creation is called to rise with Him. His only question to us is, Will you love Him? Will you cast all cares to the wind? Will you burn your selfish life down to the ground? Will you give Him your life, your whole life? "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." And His commandment to us is One: to Love.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.