|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The Church, in her ancient wisdom, does a striking thing on this greatest of feasts. After the dark austerity of Lent, after the long stripping away of liturgical ornaments and consolations, after the silence and stillness and blackness of the tomb, she sets before us on Easter morning an Epistle that glitters with Paschal theology and at the same time cuts like a scalpel. The Roman Station is at Santa Maria Maggiore, the great basilica of the Mother of God, and there, with the joy of the Resurrection ringing in our ears, Holy Church bids us hear Paul say: “Cleanse out the old leaven.”
“Happy Easter! Cleanse the leaven!”
Huh?
We should begin, as always, with context, because context is one way by which the sacred liturgy opens her treasures. The first context is the movement of the whole season. In the Vetus Ordo, Lent was not merely a time of pious self-improvement. Holy Church underwent, before our eyes and ears, a ritual dying. One by one familiar elements were pruned away. The Alleluia had long since been set aside. Music and flowers disappeared. Later the crosses were veiled. In the older use of the Roman Rite certain prayers at the foot of the altar and doxologies fell silent. Then came the great descent into the Triduum, with the stripping of the altar, the removal of the Blessed Sacrament, the severity of Good Friday, the empty silence of Holy Saturday. The Church became still and dark, as if sharing the immobility of Christ in the sepulcher. Out of that severe pedagogy comes Easter. Like the people escaping the old world, we have passed through the dark waters and come to a new shore.
Then there is the Roman Station. After the Vigil at the Lateran, the Resurrection morning brings us to St. Mary Major, the greatest church in Christendom dedicated to the Theotokos. This is fitting in a way that is both tender and profound. There is an ancient and reasonable tradition that the first person visited by the Risen Christ was His Mother. Scripture does not record it. Sacred tradition has long contemplated it. If Mary had her unique role in the Annunciation, when the Word took flesh, and then stood in her matchless fidelity at the foot of the Cross when redemption was accomplished, then there is a beautiful appropriateness in the thought that she (coredemptrix?) also received first the consolation of the Resurrection. St. Vincent Ferrer argues that in appearing first to His Mother, Christ would fulfill the commandment to honor His mother. After all, he formally “gave her away” to John as He was dying on the Cross. Duns Scotus gives us the form of thought that suits the mystery: Potuit, decuit, ergo fecit. He could do it, it was fitting, therefore He did it.
Standing spiritually at Santa Maria Maggiore on Easter morning, we are invited to imagine the Mother who on Calvary saw the Body of her Son scourged, pierced, lifeless, now seeing Him risen, glorious, deathless.
The liturgical context is equally rich. For the Easter Sunday Mass the Church gives us from 1 Corinthians 5 only two verses drawn from a chapter that is anything but serene.
Again context: Paul is addressing a scandal in Corinth, a sin “of a kind that is not found even among pagans.” A man is living with his father’s wife. The sin is public. The Christian community has failed to act. Worse, they are “puffed up … pephusioménoi” inflated with the same pride that prevents clear judgment and sound discipline. Paul says that the report is commonly known (hólos akouétai). The scandal is circulating. Word has gotten out. The community’s failure to address it has become part of the scandal itself.
Happy Easter, right?
Paul’s severe response has a medicinal purpose. He commands that the offender be expelled, handed over “for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.” The point is not vengeance. It is repentance. This is the rationale of ecclesiastical censure, especially excommunication.
The Church’s penalties, when rightly – rightly – imposed, are acts of charity. They aim at conversion. They protect the flock and shock the sinner into sobriety, remorse, and return. Paul claims the authority to direct this even while absent in body, because he is present in spirit and acts with the authority of Christ. Hence the Easter Epistle emerges from a chapter about scandal, discipline, Eucharistic integrity, and the health of the whole body.
The Church then cuts from that chapter these verses and places them on Easter morning:
7 Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
This is a Paschal text in the most exact sense.
“Pascha nostrum immolátus est Christus … καὶ γὰρ τὸ πάσχα ἡμῶν ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν ἐτύθη Χριστός … Christ our Pasch was sacrificed for us.”
That little phrase, ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν… for us” is, curiously, not in the Latin Vulgate, “pro nobis”. However, it anchors the whole Christian mystery in sacrificial reality directed to a purpose. Christ is the true Paschal Lamb. All the lambs of the old dispensation foreshadowed Him. The twice daily tamid of the morning and the evening, the quarter-million lamb victims slain in the Temple for the Passover meals of her pilgrims in Jerusalem; they all pointed toward Calvary.
Paul’s reference to the lamb and to unleavened bread reflects the early Christian conviction that the Supper with the Apostles was the Passover meal and that the Lord gave to that ancient rite its definitive meaning in Himself.
Allow me to digress about the timing of the Last Supper and Passover. Scholars have picked up on seeming discrepancies between the Gospel accounts. They can be explained.
Some scholars believe that, because of details in the Gospel of John’s account, the Last Supper was not the Passover meal on the evening of the 15th of the Jewish month Nissan, the day the lambs were slain, but rather it was on the evening before, on 14 Nissan. On the other hand, the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are clear: the Last Supper is the Passover meal of 15 Nissan. John’s account of the Last Supper has phrases like “before the feast of Passover” (13:1) for the Supper and “it was the day of Preparation (Greek paraskeué) of the Passover” for the Crucifixion (19:14), thus setting up a seeming contradiction with the Synoptics.
However, the contradiction between John and the Synoptics is resolved by understanding that Passover was observed like we observe Easter and its Octave: the whole week after Passover (15-21 Nissan) was, in effect, Passover.
The Lord was crucified on 15 Nissan, which is the solar day after Passover began at sunset evening before. He died at the ninth hour on the solar day of Passover. The Jews were in haste to get the bodies down off their crosses before sunset because it was the day of “Preparation of the Passover”, meaning – nota bene – preparation for the sabbath that fell within Passover week.
31 Since it was the day of Preparation, in order to prevent the bodies from remaining on the cross on the sabbath (for that sabbath was a high day)
It was a special sabbath, a “high day”, because it fell within the period of observance of Passover.
They were concerned that by leaving the dead bodies on the crosses at that time, in full view and close by the city where so many pilgrims were would render countless Jews ritually unclean and unsuited for the sabbath observance.
Therefore, “before the feast of Passover” of John 13:1 means before the Passover meal of Passover. “Preparation for the Passover” of John 19:14 means preparation for the sabbath that fell during Passover, understood as being the whole week, just as we say that the Monday, Tuesday, etc., after Easter is… Easter. That resolves the seeming contradiction between John and the Synoptics about the chronology of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and, therefore the number of days, three, Christ was in the tomb before His Resurrection.
Now that that is settled, we can return to the Church’s choice to give us, on Easter Sunday of all days, Paul’s image of leaven.
The image of leaven requires careful handling, because in the New Testament leaven can function in more than one way.
The Lord compares the Kingdom to leaven hidden in three measures of flour (Matthew 13:33 and Luke 13:20-21). Parables have twists in them, to get the listeners’ attention. The twists in this parable would have caught the first hearers at once. First, leaven was associated with impurity in the Passover setting. Also, three measures of flour are an enormous quantity.
The image conveys the transforming power of the Kingdom, hidden and pervasive, capable of altering everything from within. This Sunday, in 1 Corinthians 5, however, leaven signifies the opposite. Here, leaven is the ferment of sin, pride, scandal, corruption, factionalism, and doctrinal or moral decay. A little gets into the dough and soon the whole lump is affected.
Paul’s choice of language is exact. The Corinthians are pephusioménoi, puffed up (1 Cor 15:2). Leaven puffs up. Pride puffs up. Sin swells a community with empty air.
Therefore, Paul says, ekkathárate. “Cleanse out! Ya’ll purge!” It is an aorist imperative, crisp and urgent. Jews had to remove every speck of leaven from the house before Passover. Christians, gathered around the true Pasch, must remove the leaven from the soul and from the community. This means personal sin. This also means manifest public scandal. This means the moral corruption that spreads by toleration. This means factional vanity, the self-congratulatory tribalism that glories in camps and slogans while neglecting holiness.
The old leaven includes “malice and evil.” The unleavened bread that must replace it is “sincerity and truth.”
That is why this Epistle, though severe, belongs exactly on Easter Sunday. Easter is the feast of victory, and victory requires an enemy. Christ rose by conquering death. He did this for us, not just for me, not just for you, for us. We are in this together, thus the Church addressed the entire community on this Sunday to remind us of how we are connected in Christ.
The sin of one, hurts everybody. Personal sins tear at the whole Church, at the whole world.
Think about the Church and society at large today. Is this not true?
In the Collect the Church says that God, through His Only-begotten, “Death having been conquered, He opened for us the gateway of eternity.”
Deus, qui hodierna die, per Unigenitum tuum,
aeternitatis nobis aditum, devicta morte, reserasti:
vota nostra, quae praeveniendo aspiras,
etiam adiuvando prosequere.
The prayer is magnificent. Aditus is approach, access, the way by which one enters. Reserasti is from resero, to unlock, to unbar, to throw open. God has unbarred the gate of eternal life. Yet the same Collect reminds us that He must also continue in us the work He has begun. He anticipates, inspires, breathes into us the very desires we bring before Him, and then He follows through by helping. Grace comes before. Grace accompanies. Grace perfects.
LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who today, death having been conquered,
unbarred for us the gateway of eternity through Your Only-begotten,
follow up upon our prayers which You instill in us by anticipating them.
Here we touch the doctrine of gratia praeveniens, prevenient grace, so clearly taught in the Church’s tradition.
God gives the actual grace that comes before our movement toward Him. When a sinner is trapped in vice and weakened by habit, God grants the grace just to begin repentance. He anticipates us. He breathes holy desire into us leaving or will free. Then He supports and advances that work. Easter is the triumph of Christ over death. Easter also manifests God’s method in the soul. He raises the dead. He stirs those who lie inert in sin. He opens what we cannot unbar from within.
The Resurrection is therefore not only an historical event remembered. It is a power operative now.
This helps us understand why Holy Church chose a morally serious reading for this day of joy. The new Passover is not a yearly sentimental recollection. Christ was not the Paschal Lamb on day only. He remains forever the Lamb who was slain and who lives. Hence the Christian task of becoming azymoi, unleavened, is continuous.
The Christian community must remain watchful over its Eucharistic life. Easter is a feast of delight, but it is also a summons to integrity. Paul’s concern in 1 Corinthians 5 extends into chapter 11, where he warns that to eat and drink unworthily is to incur judgment. The Church’s ancient understanding crystallized in later canonical form, grew from pastoral realism about both sides of the mystery. To remain for very long away from confession and Communion is spiritually perilous, therefore we have the Commandment of the Church about “Easter Duty”. However, to approach Communion in grave sin is deadly. Holy Church, like a prudent mother, legislates for salvation. That’s why we have in the Latin Church’s Code of Canon Law, canons 915 (which binds the minister’s conscience about Communion for those in manifest sin) and 916 (binds the communicants conscience about reception in the state of mortal sin), two of the most violated canons of the entire Code.
The pastoral edge of the text is impossible to ignore in any age, and present circumstances make it all the more urgent. When public and manifest grave sinners present themselves within the Eucharistic assembly, and when shepherds refuse to address the scandal, the damage extends beyond the individual. Scandal instructs. It de-catechizes by example. It tells others that what is plainly contrary to the Gospel and the law of God may safely coexist with sacramental communion. Paul will have none of it. “Drive out the wicked person from among you.” He is speaking of those inside the Church. The community has duties toward its own members. This is not contrary to charity. It is one of charity’s hard forms. It serves the sinner’s good and protects the Church from contagion.
Sin hurts everyone.
There is an application here, too, for the various factions among those who care deeply about tradition and truth. Beware. It is tempting to denounce scandal in one place while excusing the leaven of vanity, rivalry, and trench warfare in another. Such postures can become their own species of fermentation. Paul’s rebuke of Corinth extends to any Christian group that becomes more animated by factions than by sanctity. Leaven is leaven and it does leavening things, it works through the whole lump. The old leaven is not confined to one category of sin. It includes the swollen ego, the combative spirit, the love of party over the love of Christ and His Church.
There is a spiritual lesson in baking image: when dough puffs up, it must be punched down.
Consequently, our Easter liturgy does two things at once. It fills us with joy in the triumph of Christ, and it compels us to examine whether we are living as men and women of the Resurrection. He breathes desire into us beforehand and then helps us onward, no sinner need despair.
Make Easter real. Easter becomes real in the soul when we let the Risen Lord do in us what He did in the tomb and after. He enters where doors are shut. He dispels darkness. He restores what sin has deformed. He raises. There is no sin so deeply rooted that His Blood cannot cleanse it. There is no habit so old that prevenient grace cannot break its first chain. There is no shame so settled that confession cannot dissolve it in mercy. The Church gives us this stern and beautiful Easter Epistle so that our joy may be genuine, our Communion pure, our communities healthier, our consciences more awake, and our hope more concrete.
Spiritually gathered on Easter at St. Mary Major, in the company of the Mother who surely knew – first of all – the consolation of the Resurrection, we can ask for this grace. May the One who honored His Mother by appearing to her in glory honor us too by coming into the locked rooms of our hearts. May He purge out the old leaven. May He make us a new lump. May He give us the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. May the Paschal Lamb, sacrificed and risen, lead us through the opened gate into the life that has no evening.