A Homily for the Resurrection of the Lord: The Mass of Easter Day
Readings: Acts 10:34a, 37-43 Colossians 3:1-4 John 20:1-9
Love and loss. Some might say that sums up life. Hopefully, we begin life being loved. Either way, we are soon in search of it, and once we have found it, we do all we can to make it last.
But if nothing else should cause us to lose at love, death does. Small wonder, then, that so much has been composed on the theme of love and loss. Who can count all the books, the movies, the songs and the poems?
The English poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, lost the first great love of his life while he was still a young man. Arthur Hallam, his best friend from college, died quite unexpectedly by stroke at age 22. He had been engaged to marry Tennyson’s sister, Emilia. She married another man nine years later, but Alfred would write poetry lamenting Arthur’s death for decades to come.
Love and loss share this much. They both lift us away from everyone else. The experience of love is sensationally singular, and only the one who has loved knows the unique pain of its loss. Others can only empathize.
Here is a scrap of poetry that Tennyson wrote just after Hallam’s death. Others cannot understand his pain, and the poet chides even the stars for failing to see his suffering. They shine up there as though nothing has happened.
I seek the voice I loved—ah where
Is that dear hand that I should press,
Those honoured brows that I would kiss?
Lo! The broad Heavens cold and bare,
The stars that know not my distress.
The law of our humanity binds love and loss. If one comes, the other will follow, though plenty a poet has imagined it otherwise, that love might somehow conquer death.
Tennyson went there as well. He staged his scene of love being stronger than death in a garden.
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.
Did the poet realize that his imagination had wandered into Gospel territory? For of course, Mary Magdalene encounters her Christ in a garden, early in the morning following the Sabbath.
Tennyson gives a confident voice to the lover who has died, who is already becoming dust in dirt.
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
Christ could have spoken the same on that morning, determined as he was to be reunited with Mary, with all his beloved disciples.
Love and loss. Loss always follows love, but at Easter the church tells us that love can supplant loss, that in Christ love “is strong as death” (Song of Songs, 8:6).
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
Mary Magdalene goes to the garden to grieve, “desiring to find some consolation from the place” (St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John, 85.4). She will never see him again, never hear him speak, but she can at least anoint and bedew his corpse. Mary knows that loss always follows love. She is about to learn that love can be stronger than loss.
Love itself died on the cross. For that is who he was, Jesus of Nazareth, God’s own pure love come in the flesh. But this love cannot be conquered by loss. That is half the Gospel truth of this day. Love passes through loss back into love.
The other half is that, despite appearances, love is never truly singular. All true loves share this much: their source. They come from God, who alone is love. Whatever their precious particulars might be, each true human love is a real experience of God.
Love is something we carefully protect, but in the end, we will see that love was there all along, protecting us. Easter tells us that love has the last word. Loss always follows love, but in Christ, loss yields to love. What Tennyson wrote, what Jesus could have said of Mary Magdalene, is what he says to each of us.
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
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