The bond that was forged on Calvary

by Father
Peter de Rosa
IAM settling down to write this short article on "Easter," having just heard by letter of the death of a friend.
Bob was white-headed but he was not old. He had children and grandchildren, too, but even so, 1 say again, he was not old. Only, for the last few years a kind of creeping paralysis was gaining on him. First hr couldn't walk; then he couldn't use his arms, his hands. his fingers. Now he is dead.
My friend was a man of peace. I saw little enough of him because h lived on the Pacific Coast of America, but I, like everyone else, felt I knew hint well. I was the first priest to celebrate Mass with him in his home when he was unable to move.
I imbibed the spirit of the man. He was uncomplaining. A man of peace and joy.
His daughter who wrote to me today tells me that a priest friend visited him. They had a simple yet beau• tiful celebration of the anointing. Bob made his confession, and afterwards he said to his family gathered round him: "I want to thank all of you for sharing this illness with me . .. I think I may get there fIrsT and if I do I will roll out the red carpet for all of you."
When Bob was transferred to hospital, a local bishop came and prayed with him. The bishop said: "Robert, it won't be long now until you are at home with your Father."
Bob, as though to console the bishop, answered simply and humbly: "I'm not worried." He was a man hopefully reconciled to God his Father.
When Bob breathed his last quiet breath, his daughter said she felt unprepared. In reading this I thought, "Unprepared? How could you have been unprepared after such a long illness?" But I realised that death nearly always finds us unprepared, and unwilling to accept its coming. But this was especially ''Bob's death." He was prepared; he accepted it. There was in him no anger or resentment.
His daughter, like countless, fond daughters before her, could not believe her father had breathed his last. There must be some mistake.
She went back to the room where her father lay as if to prove to herself that it was all a terrible error on her part. He couldn't really be dead, net her father. Each time, she saw the familiar, white-haired man of her childhood, adolescence, youth. Always, and even more so now, he was a man of peace.
The funeral was a celebration of real, almost unaccountable joy. Many nonCatholics present said it was the most joyful Christian experience of their life, "so like Bob."
Bob's life and death can be paralleled by the lives of innumerable good people of many beliefs. It just so happened that Bob was a rather fine instance of how a Chris tian can face and conquer the enemy common to all men: death.
Of course, Bob couldn't have died as he did if he hadn't faced up to death a long time before. He had lived a life "full of life," so to speak. His way of life was the Christian way of lie.
The basic Christian task is to spread the good news that God loves us and has proved his love by raising Jesus crucificd from the dead to be the living Lord of our lives. In faith, we give ourselves with joy to the God of the resurrection.
We Christians do not think that Jesus lives on because of our faith. Rather, faith is possible because Jesus lives on as the Christ by the power of God.
Jesus by dying out of love
for us has forged a bond between his Father and us that nothing can shatter. And God by raising his Son from
the dead has proven that
Jesus really was his Son, faithful, obedient, the perfect Image of his Father.
The whole of the gospel story is written from the perspective of faith in the resur rection. We might say the gospel begins where it seems to end, namely, at the resurrection of Jesus. The Evangelists begin by saying, "This is the good news"—and what could this good news be except that God has raised Jesus from the dead to be the Lord and the Christ?
Even the nativity is, in a real sense, an Easter story. It tells of the significance of the birth of that little One destined to be the conqueror of sin, hatred and death.
The passion narrative is, above all, an Easter story. Never are we allowed to think for a moment that this is a disaster. Do we not even call the day that Jesus died "Good Friday"? It must have looked to the apostles at the time, when they saw him hanging on his cross, like Black Friday. But when the Spirit came and they began to preach, it was already Good Friday, because even then they were able to see that seemingly catastrophic day in the light of Easter.
The apostles' witness is of foundational importance for Christianity. I don't mean they can dispense us from the need to give ourselves personally to God in Jesus Christ. What I mean is that without the apostolic preaching there would be nothing to confess our faith in.
Only the apostles had known Jesus from the time of his baptism onwards. Without • them, Christianity would have no content. Only they could tell us what sort of man Jesus was: someone who healed the sick by inspiring them with the gift of faith; someone who responded totally to all God's demands. Here was a man who had no enemies, who was the brother to everyone, the neighbour to any man in need. Here was someone who was poor, meek, forgiving. Here was someone who em bodied in himself the Kingdom of God.
This was the man whom the apostles said they experienced as alive after he had died. They met him. The Christ they encountered on Easter Day was the very same Jesus who was born of Mary and who had been their friend and master. Only the apostles could fuse their memory of Jesus with their faith in him as the Christ who is alive for ever, and call him "Jesus Christ."
But how do we know that the apostles really did meet the risen Lord? What if they were guilty of hoaxing their fellow Jews or perhaps were themselves the first, sad vie. tims of an illusion?
The only answer to this is: taste and see that the Lord is good. We ourselves must, through faith, give ourselves to Jesus as our living Lord. As Paul says, we must die with Christ and rise with him. We, in John's terminology, must experience the "eternal life" in our ordinary day-to-day existence. Having done this, who could doubt the apostles' testimony?
The whole of Christian experience is a share in the threefold quality of the Eucharist. It is the experience flow of the real presence of Christ who died for us and is to cane one day to fulfil the life of the world.
Past and future are, Jibe the ends of a piece of string, gathered into the sliding knot of a present which is always with us. A Christianity which is not based on what Jesus said and did among us has no roots. If it does not point to a future fulfilment, it has in it no hope. If what Jesus did once and is to do at his coming are not brought to bear on every moment of our lives, Christianity has no relevance.
When I heard my friend had died, something died in me. I was Ionging so much to see him and talk with him in the summer. But through the manner of his death something rich came to life in me, as well: theoy that Rib had lived his life to the full. What must have been the quality of his life and his hope when. though he had loved and been so loved, his death brought peace and joy?
Christianity is not about death but about the conquest of death. Wherever and whenever the risen Christ comes into a man's life, there is no death.