Easter 2008, March 23.  Our Lady of Grace Vigil, 9:30, 11:30.  Romans 6:3-11. Colossian 3: 1-4.  Matthew 28: 1-10.

One of my favorite Easter things as a child was coloring Easter Eggs.  It was fun to come up with eggs of every color – some brilliant and some quite ugly, others surprising mixtures of fancy colors on the same egg.  In the weeks before Easter we went to the store to look for new kinds of Easter egg coloring.  Coloring Easter Eggs was always a good family fun project.  The bad part was that my mother always made us eat our Easter Eggs in the weeks after Easter.  For many centuries Easter Eggs have been an important part of Easter but no one told me what Easter Eggs had to do with Jesus and Easter.

A chick begins the process of life as a tiny speck within an egg.  The yoke and the egg white surround the baby chick.  They are the part of the egg with which we are familiar.  They provide food and protection to the minute chick as the tiny creature struggles to grow within the safety of the shell, warmed by the body of the mother hen.   The baby chick is so small that we do not even notice the chick’s existence when we eat an egg.  The story of the egg is the heroic story of a tiny creature that from the first moment of conception struggles and works to become the chicken that God meant him to be. After 21 days of growth within the shell the fully developed chick literally breaks out of the shell in a process of escape that takes from four to twelve hours.  The chick emerging from the prison of the shell is an image of the risen Christ breaking forth from the tomb.

A chick doesn’t just rest peacefully in the shell for 21 days waiting for the day of hatching. The chick in the shell is hard at work growing and changing.  In the same way Jesus doesn’t just rest in the stone shell of the tomb for three days to come forth alive, but exactly like he was before.  The crucified and dead body of Jesus placed in the tomb on Good Friday afternoon is like a small seed planted in a stone prison. The body of Jesus will be completely transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit as Jesus comes forth from the tomb as the Risen Christ and Lord and King of the Universe.  In the miracle of the Resurrection the humanity of Christ is completely transformed by his divinity so that the humanity of Christ becomes a radiant image of the Divine Nature    Jesus does not simply come back to life in the Resurrection.  He is not resuscitated by some divine mouth to mouth resuscitation.  The humanity of Jesus is born into new risen life as he comes forth victorious from the tomb.  As testimony to the change, people had difficulty recognizing the Risen Christ, he walked through locked doors, he moved about in an instant. What began at the moment of his conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary came to perfection through the hard work and struggle of his life, death and resurrection.   The small seed planted in Mary’s womb became the glorious person of the Risen Christ.

On the day of our baptism the small seed of God’s life was planted within us.  The seed of divine life was hidden within the infant or adult that we were at the moment we were baptized.  From that moment we were a new creation.  The potential to be the image of the Risen Christ has been struggling to break forth from us as we work at transformation - at the challenge to become the image of Risen Christ that God has called us to be.  Our bodies are an earthy shell and a holy temple containing divine life.  Even in this life God wants us to break out of our shell of merely human appearance. God wants us to break out of the shell of our old way of life and our sins.  God wants to make us a new creation and a sign, sacrament and manifestation of the Risen Christ in our time and in our place.  This great mystery of divine transformation in us will not be complete until the day of our resurrection from the dead when our bodies will shine with divinity just as the body of the Risen Christ did on the first Easter Day.

Easter is not only about the resurrection and transformation of Jesus. It is about our transformation and resurrection.  It is about the renewal of the Church and the salvation of the world.  As Pope John Paul prepared us for the beginning of the 21^st century, he challenged us to “Open wide the doors to Christ.”  He said:

It is the Risen Christ to whom the Church now looks. And she does so in the footsteps of Peter, who wept for his denial and started out again by confessing, with understandable trepidation, his love of Christ: [Peter said, Lord] "You know that I love you" (Jn 21:15-17)… Two thousand years after these events, the Church relives them as if they had happened today. Gazing on the face of Christ …, the Church today sets out once more on her journey, in order to proclaim Christ to the world at the dawn of the Third Millennium: [Jesus] "is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8). … since Baptism is a true entry into the holiness of God through incorporation into Christ and the indwelling of his Spirit, it would be a contradiction to settle for a life of mediocrity, marked by a minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity. To ask [catechumens] "Do you wish to receive Baptism?" means at the same time to ask [them:] "Do you wish to become holy?" It means to set before [before all] the radical nature of the Sermon on the Mount: "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:48).

A chick that doesn’t struggle to grow until it breaks free from the prison of its shell will never really be a chicken at all.  If Jesus had not lived his life to the full even when it meant death on the Cross – he would not have come forth from the tomb as the Risen Savior of the world.  A Christian who doesn’t live the call to holiness until he or she is completely transformed in the image of the Risen Christ has not yet discovered the meaning of this Easter Celebration.  Christ calls us out of our shells and out of our tombs to be his new creation.

For the power of the Risen Christ working in us we give God thanks and praise.