“Enough! the Resurrection”

A Homily for Easter Sunday 2025

The fundamental message of Easter is this: You have to run into the dark if you wish to run into the light. You have to confront your own limitations if you want to come to know the Limitless; face your own brokenness to discover healing; pass through death to realize the Resurrection.

In a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, he writes about how quick our mark on mind is gone; how all is drowned in an enormous dark and how the human star is so easily blacked out by death. And all the while vastness blurs and time beats level. But then, finally, he cries: “Enough! the Resurrection.”

Let us this Easter join the poet and also cry: “Enough!”

The Resurrection is not other than or foreign to our daily, ordinary struggles with the tragic nature of life, but rather it is only found amid the tragic nature of life. There we discover a beacon, an eternal beam shining across our own floundering deck! A beam which both back lights the crosses of our lives as it reveals their transient nature. As the evangelist, John, writes at the very start of his gospel: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it!”

So, if we find ourselves wallowing in tragic darkness it’s time to cry: “Enough!”

I’ve always loved how in the Christian Orthodox tradition, on Holy Saturday and Easter, there is no icon that attempts to depict the Resurrection of Christ, but the icon that is displayed is the one that depicts Christ’s descent into hell to liberate our ancestors. In the Harrowing of Hell, Jesus goes to the furthest possible reaches of human darkness to indicate the kind of journey we all must walk.

So, if we fear the journey that lies before us it’s time to cry: “Enough!”

If we are held in the promise of forever, and Easter annually reminds us we most definitely are, then there is no harrowing we need fear, no darkness that we cannot abide, no descent that will not, in Christ, be transformed. Theologically speaking, Jesus had to go to the darkest reaches of human experience or the Incarnation would be incomplete. So it is in our own free descent that we meet Christ already there before us, waiting for us, waiting to show us that all is healed, all is saved, and that “all the way to heaven is heaven.”

So, if we find ourselves doubting whether or not we are held in the promise of forever it’s time to cry: “Enough!”

As Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the Beloved Disciple remind us this Easter morning: We have to be willing to run into the dark in order to run into the light! They witness for us, standing before the gaping mouth of the tomb, what it means to have realized in each of us the truth that: the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overcome it.

So, if we find ourselves hovering about the tombs of despair it’s time to cry: “Enough!”

During this past Holy Week, I preached about God’s Trajectory in Christ which is always a descent into human experience, into its deepest reaches, so all of it is healed, all of it is transformed. But for us to know Resurrection as a daily event, and it is a daily event, we need to be willing to descend into the heart of our own humanity and discover there the heart of Divinity; descend into our experiences of Unwantedness to recover our eternal Wantedness. We must be harrowed and thereby liberated by Christ!

So, if we are resisting God’s call for us to join him in his Trajectory in Christ it’s time to cry: “Enough!”

The Harrowing of Hell paradoxically is the sign of a life lived well, because by the harrowing we come to realize we have always been His. But we don’t dare do this alone. We can sometimes be too uncritical about how vastly we are each infected by our culture’s rampant individualism. So, we can come to the false notion that I must face this harrowing alone! Nothing could be further from the truth.

So, if you think you are alone in this… look around you! It’s time to cry: “Enough!”

Yes, all the way to heaven is heaven, but no one ever gets there alone. Together we are harrowed, together we are freed and so together, this Easter Sunday, we once again can proclaim the Gospel message: “Enough! the Resurrection.”