Easter Vigil: Dom Peter

There is a theological debate going on in certain Catholic circles right now. You might shudder at the prospect of hearing me talk about ‘theology’: it is late after all. However, this particular controversy seems to touch on the possibility of hearing the Good News in our present day and ago. The debate centers on the disturbing teaching of Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss theologian who died three days before he was to receive the red hat of a Cardinal from the hand of Pope John Paul II, an admirer.

Balthasar’s dangerous idea is that the abandonment of Jesus on the Cross by God the Father was total, that Jesus suffered the consequences of sin that real sinners suffer: death accompanied by the loss of hope. The dissenters to this idea hold that Jesus could not have suffered in this total way.

At the center of this debate, as I see it, is the question of whether we worship a credible God. We have just been through a century of suffering, death and cruelty on a scale never before encountered in human history, and this has been accompanied by a new idea in human thought: real, radical atheism, a self-conscious rejection of God. It seems to me that Jesus would have to suffer the desolation of modernity in some sense if He is to ask us, the members of His Body, to do the same. If there is something new in von Balthasar’s theology, perhaps it is because we are faced with a new crisis in anthropology.

The newness of our situation is perhaps simply a willed ignorance of the many trials and travails of humankind in the past. In our constantly changing new-and-improved world, it is easy to forget that in the thousands of years in history that have gone before us, women and men have struggled as we have to live lives worthy of the God whom we are told is All-Holy. We are blessed this evening to have the opportunity to have heard chapters of the long story of God’s history with His chosen people. A modern American would think, if the Jews were simply making up the story about God, that they would have been tempted either to make themselves look a little better or, given the many sufferings that they have endured, to have given up on God at some point.

This is a point to keep in mind when we view our situation in the Church today. Certainly events of the past several years have served to discredit the Church in many ways. We in the Church suffer for this; I take walks in Roman collar, and mothers cross to the other side of the street. Many of us, perhaps most of us, resist this suffering. We distance ourselves from it, blaming bishops, priests, theologians, feminists, atheists, Masons, the Sexual Revolution, the Supreme Court, the internet, and the pope. Someone should do something about this disgraceful state of affairs.

But I ask: this rejection of suffering and the pointing of fingers, is this the gospel?
Let’s take this to a more personal level. We all try to get around suffering if we can. Our society has a taboo against suffering: it is impolite. A suffering life is a life that lacks in quality and perhaps, for the sake of decency, should be ended. Even unhealthy unborn persons, if we anticipate that they might suffer, are spared suffering and put to death instead. People who are in a bad mood don’t get much sympathy, “What’s his problem?” We are supposed to buck up and, importantly, not impose our troubles on anybody else. Precisely where the suffering need human solidarity, our world turns its back. Even people who claim to care about the suffering often prefer to care about those far away, overlooking the suffering of those in front of them, thereby adding to it.

Is this the gospel?

During the forty days of Lent, we made resolutions to try and live more nearly the way God asks us to live. This effort at conversion ought to have opened us up, not to our strengths, but our weakness, our inability to do what God asks, our failures as human beings to love as we want to be loved, to be free and not subject to sordid addictions to food, alcohol, sex, or drugs. Many give up on the whole conversion experience because of the hell it puts us through. Indeed, we experience the hell that we have chosen for ourselves. Again, our culture tells us to flee from that realization that we are choosing hell for ourselves. Those of a certain age had a saying for this strategy: Turn on an tune out!

Hold that thought!

“He suffered, died and was buried.” We profess that Jesus, far from shying away from real suffering, embraced it. Not because He was Clint Eastwood or Indiana Jones, but because He loves us. The creed goes on, or at least did in less polite days, to affirm that “He descended into hell.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that we do not know if anyone in particular goes to hell after death; we can’t even say that Judas is there. However, we do know one Person who has been there and back: Jesus the Christ. Whether He entered hell crashing the gates and throwing down demons with pitchforks, or whether He simply went to this place of torment to be raised up by God the Father, what does not change is the fact that out of love for weak and failing men and women, Jesus went to hell. Hell is a state of being, and I just got done saying that all of us in some way choose it, or perhaps are simply subject to it. When we experience our own versions of hell, do we think about the fact that our Savior has been there and now has the keys and that the gates of hell cannot prevail against Him? Our Lord ‘became man’. He didn’t just imitate being a man: he desired to experience the whole of human existence, including the sense of alienation from God, the product of our weakness, failure and sin. If we experienced this Lent, some of that weakness, failure and sin, well, blessed are we because Christ is waiting there to save us. Christ saves us where we need saving, not where we are self-sufficient.
Here is the Good News according to St. Paul: we were baptized into Christ’s death, and buried with him, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we might not simply wait to be raised, but that we might begin to live ‘in newness of life’. Can we experience this resurrection and a life of blessedness without experiencing death and hell? Surely we are not asking to be spared what Christ undertook for us any more than we should fear, out of a misplaced and unhistorical respect for God, to imagine Jesus be spared any of the sufferings of which we are capable.
This is the Good News: who of you are suffering tonight? Our Risen Lord Jesus is calling to you, and He says, “Fear not! I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and Hades. Believe in me and live!”