Eternal Life

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

As the Church chants her Alleluias and the dead things rise to life, in token of the Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior there is one great thought to be borne in mind, and that is what we call life is only death. The only life is the life of the Risen King.

What do men call life? They call life that temporary endowment of vital forces which animates their body, sees in their eyes, hears in their ears, and thrills in their hearts.

Death is [its] opposite or the cessation of all those processes which made living a joy; it is a muffling of the heartbeats, which like a drum on a funeral march becomes silent at the grave. That is what men call death.

And it was in the light of such a narrow concept that men judged the majestic Person of Christ. They thought His life ended in death.

In the beginning of His public life, in the first flush of apostolic successes the apostles left their nets, boats, and custom tables and flocked to Him as the restorer of the Kingdom of Israel.

Judas saw it as a successful financial venture; James and John saw in it an opportunity to sit at His right hand and at His left in earthly glory; the others, jealous of their brethren, quarreled for the first places at table.

The power to cast out devils, the thrill of daily companionings with such a noble personage, the peace which stole into their hearts as His words took the wings of angels, and the glory of His triumphant entrance on Palm Sunday into Jerusalem—all these made His death seem remote enough to be almost impossible.

Even though at the very beginning they heard Him speak of His Resurrection, saying that He would in three days rebuild the temple of His body which men would destroy (John 2:19); even though they had heard Him say that like another Jonah He would be in “the heart of the earth three days and three nights” (Matt. 12:40), they still adhered to a narrow, human, and worldly outlook on life and death.

That is why Peter was scandalized at the very mention of His death. That too is why when Holy Week came, and death began to raise its menacing hand against His holy Life, they dispersed like sheep when the shepherd is struck. Their Master was about to die! It would be the end of their hopes!

Judas felt that since death was inevitable, he would profit on it as he had profited on His life. So he sold his Master for thirty silver coins (Matt. 26:14-16)—a sign that Divine things are always bartered away out of all relation to their true worth.

Peter, James, and John, who saw their Master when His face shone like the sun and His garments were as snow (Matt. 17:2), now slept in a garden when that face was beaded with crimson drops and His garments were dyed red as wine (Matt. 40-41,43-45).

In the four trials before the Jewish and Roman judges there was not a single apostle to speak a word in His defense. As trials made history by their injustice against Justice, Peter warmed himself by a fire, and with an atavistic throwback to his fisherman days, he cursed and swore that he never knew the man! (John 18:18, Matt. 26:69-75).

At the foot of the Cross only the apostle John was present. James, his own brother, was not there! Neither was Peter! They were not there because they thought all was lost.

As the last drops of redemption spilled out from that broken chalice of Redemption, they were convinced that it was only a matter of minutes until His life would end.

In the unearthly darkness when the sun hid its face at the passing of light, the friends at the foot of the Cross whispered that He was dying! A moment later they sighed that He was dead! All seemed lost! The grave was about to give its sting. Death had won its victory.

As the lengthening shadows of three crosses cast their sinister brooding sadness over the retreating figures, many a man and woman in Jerusalem that day revived sweet memories of Him. It is a regrettable fact that more flowers are scattered at our death than at our living.

They loved Him—there was no doubt [of] that—but it was that kind of love which shrinks from showing itself at the foot of a cross.

The apostles kept the memory of a beautiful Kingdom which like Moses, it seemed, they were to see with their mind’s eye, but never to enter. Now that death had come and life had gone, back to their nets and their boats they would go (John 21:3).

Three years before, that great Master had called them away from fishing to be “fishers of men” (Matt. 4:19). Now that His Flame died away, at the moment they were about to be lighted by it, they would once more become fishers of fish. What more had they hoped for? Had not He whom they hoped would restore the throne of David died on a peg, with only thorns for a crown, nails for a scepter, and His own blood for royal purple?

There was just one word to express their attitude, a human word with a human outlook, and with a horizon no broader than that on which the sun sets: Christ is dead.

[Now let us] contemplate another scene some days afterwards—possibly a week. Many things had transpired in the meantime. The High Priest had returned to his judgment seat, Pilate to his basin of water, and the Fishermen to their nets.

It was now evening; the lake was flecked with white as the stars danced upon it, and the moon sent down its rays like silver grappling hooks to move its tides and all the surges of the seas.

Seven followers of the Lord who never could forget the Unforgettable gathered about the little harbor of Capernaum. Their boats with their slanting sails, worn seats, and high red rudders were to them like another home. It seemed as if fishing might be good, now that they had turned from men to fish, and from earth to sea for things to catch.

Simon, who was named Peter the Rock by the Master, called down the shores to Thomas, Nathanael, James, John, and two others and said, “I am going fishing.” And they answered back, and the hills echoed it again: “We will go with you, too” (John 21:3).

They went into the boat, shoved off, labored all the night, and caught nothing. At early morn, as the sun began to crimson the Galilean mountain, they began to row to shore.

And as they came near, they saw a Man standing on the bank who seemed to be waiting for them, but they knew not who it was.

His voice rang out like a silver trumpet as He called to them, “Have you caught any fish?” And they answered, “No!”

“Then he said to them, Cast the net to the right of the boat and you will find some.’ So they cast their net and now they were unable to draw it in because of the great number of fish” (John 21:5-6).

And they all began to tremble as the memory of other days awoke within them. “It is the Lord,” whispered John to Peter, and instantly the warm-hearted enthusiast, tightening his fisher’s tunic round his loins (for he was stripped), leapt into the sea, swam across the hundred yards which separated him from Our Lord, and cast his dripping self at the feet of the Master, as the others following in the boat dropped the strained but unbroken net with its burden of one hundred and fifty-three fish.

A wooden fire was burning on the strand, lighted by the Light of the World. Near it was some bread, and on its glowing embers some broiling fish—a meal prepared by the Creator of the Universe in the midst of His creation.

Jesus said to them: “Come and eat.” And none of them who were at the meal dared [to] ask Him: “Who are you?”—knowing that it was the Lord (cf. John 21:12).

After they had eaten this simple repast, the Lord of heaven and earth turned to Simon Peter and said: “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than they do?” Peter answered Him, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” He said to him: “Feed my lambs.”

Again He said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to Him, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” He said to him: “Tend my sheep.”

He said to him a third time: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was distressed because He said to him a third time: “Do you love me?” He said to Him, “Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15-17).

The ordeal was over. For Peter’s triple denial on the night of the trial, Our Lord drew forth a triple promise of love.

But that was not all.

He would remind Peter that love is the key to the meaning of death and life by foretelling the kind of death he would undergo: “Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were young you fastened your belt and went where you wanted, but when you’re old, you’ll stretch out your hands and another will fasten you and bring you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:18).

Briefly, Our Lord was telling Peter: “Love is not a love of earthly life, but a love of death; because I love you they killed me; because of your love of me, they will kill you. The reward of your labors will be two crossbeams and four nails as I had, but also life eternal.”

Many years would pass before Peter would be so girded, and before he would recognize himself as so unworthy of his Master that he would ask to be crucified upside down; but from now on Peter understood something. Mary Magdalene, Mary His Mother, the other apostles understood it too.

It was the tremendous lesson of the Resurrection that every follower of Christ would understand until the end of the world, the lesson that meant unlearning all the wisdom the world ever taught and will ever teach, that lesson which still thrills our hearts today: It was not Christ who died; it was Death.

The Resurrection was a fact. He said He would rise again. And He did rise again! Resurrexit sicut dixit! Think not that Peter and the apostles were the victims of a delusion; think not that they had a hallucination and mistook their subjective ideas for the manifestation of the Conqueror of Death.

All those who saw the One whom they thought dead walk in the newness of life had to be convinced. They were not even expecting the Resurrection. The absence of the apostles at the crucifixion and the other facts [we’ve] mentioned prove that they thought that Death ended all.

On Easter morning the women went to the sepulcher not to meet the Risen Christ, but to embalm the body. Their greatest worry was who would roll away the stone from the door of the sepulcher; even when they found it rolled away, they did not suppose a Resurrection but only a shameful theft of the body. The message of the angel inspires them not with faith, but with fear and horror.

The apostles had the same state of mind—the one thing they were afraid of was a hallucination. Hence when the women announced the Resurrection, instead of being impressed, they regarded the words of the women as “idle tales and did not believe them” (Luke 24:10-11).

Peter and John verified the empty tomb but still knew not the Scriptures concerning the Resurrection (John 20:4-10). They were so far away from the idea of seeing Him upset the…concept of Death, that when they first saw Him, they thought they had seen a ghost (Luke 24:36-40).

Mary Magdalene thought He was the gardener (John 20:14-16), and the disciples on the way to Emmaus did not recognize Him until the breaking of bread (Luke 24:35). And when they told the other disciples, they were not believed (Luke 24:41).

When He appeared in Galilee, Matthew tells us that some doubted (Matt. 28:16-17). The very evening of the Resurrection some of His apostles would not even believe their own eyes until they saw Him eating (Luke 24:41-43).

Thomas even then doubted, and would not be convinced until he put his finger unto His hand, and his hand into the Divine Side to be cured of his doubt (John 20:24-29) and made the Hope and Healer of Agnostics until the end of time.

If His followers were expecting Him, they would have believed [Him] at once. If they did finally believe, it was only because the sheer weight of external evidence was too strong to resist. They had to be convinced, and they were convinced. They had to admit their views on death were wrong—Christ was not dead.

Life then does not mean what men call life. Hence the world and its ideas had to be remade—for [here] was a force greater than Nature!

Nature had not finished her accounting with Him for Nature received the only serious blow it ever received—the mortal wound of an empty tomb; enemies had not finished their accounting with Him, for they who slew the foe found they had lost their day.

Humanity has not finished its accounting, for He came from a grave to show the breast where a Roman spear had forever made visible the Heart which loved men enough to die for them, and then live on in order to love forever.

The human mind has not finished its last accounting, for it now has to learn that what men call life is only death, that bodily life is not true life, that he who gives up his soul ruins also the flesh which houses it—in a word, it was not Christ who died; it was Death.

Think for a moment on the conduct of the apostles before the Resurrection, and the way they acted when the Spirit gave them the fullness of belief in the Risen Savior. What new force so transformed the souls of the apostles so as to make the abject, the venerated; the ignorant, masters; the egotists, the devoted; and the despairing, [into] saints?

What power was it that laid hold of Peter who once said he knew not the man, and now before a learned audience of Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and of Mesopotamians, Phrygians and Egyptians and Romans, arises to startle their hearts and thrill their souls with the message, “You killed the Author of Life, whom God then raised from the dead. … So repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins…” (cf. Acts 3:15, 2:38).

What hand was it that laid hold of Saul, the bitter enemy of Christians, converted him into a Paul and the preacher who counted all things as naught save the glory of the Risen Christ? (Phil. 3:8).

What new spirit entered into that crude, fish-smelling group of Galilean fishermen which compelled them to go to the capital of the world, which brushed them aside with disdain, and there preach the seemingly grotesque creed that He who was executed as a common criminal by a Roman Procurator was the Resurrection and the Life?

That idea was more absurd to the Romans than the idea of a Perfect Supreme God is today to H. G. Wells, or the ideal of purity to Bertrand Russell! Some new dynamics, some new colossal power had to enter into such simple souls to disrupt a Jewish world and impress itself in twenty years on the entire shore of the Mediterranean from Caesarea to Troas.

There is only one force in the world which explains how habitual doubters like Thomas, sensitive tax-gatherers like Matthew, dull men like Philip, impetuous characters like Peter, gentle dreamers like John, and a few seafaring men reeling under the shock of a crucifixion could be transformed into men of fire, ready to suffer, dare, and if need be to die—and that is the force of love which showed itself in the Christ whom the builders rejected and who now [was] made the head of the corner (Matt. 21:42; Ps. 118:22).

Everywhere, they gave the secret of their success: they were witnesses of a Resurrection; He who was dead, lives. And eleven of them went out to have their throats cut in testimony of that belief—and men generally do not have their throats cut for a hallucination.

There was only one conclusion their blood will let us draw and that is the lesson of Easter Sunday which they preached—It was not Christ who died; it was Death.

The cycles of the years whirl away into history, but it was ever the same antiphon that went up from the hearts of men. Each age repeated its own way so that no generation of men was without the tidings of victory.

See how that lesson is verified as the followers of the Risen Christ taught Rome the real reason why it was eternal. Hardly grown to their full stature, Nero published his famous edict: “Let there be no Christians!”

And his successors, with no fear of God to restrain their cruelty, and a great army to administer it, set to work to destroy the Gospel of the Risen Savior.

The swords of the executioners, blunted with slaughter, no longer fitted their sheaths; the wild beasts satiated with Christian blood shrank from it as if more conscious of its dignity than those who ordered it spilt; the river of the Tiber ran red as if already one of the angels of the Apocalypse had poured into it the vial which turns water into blood.

A thousand times from a thousand throats there came the cry: “The Christians must die,” as a thousand times a thousand thumbs turned down in a signal of death. A day finally came when Rome thought it had cut off the last hand that would make the Sign of the Cross and silenced the last tongue that would breathe the name of the risen Christ—and yet what is the verdict of history?

The verdict of history is the verdict of the empty tomb. It was the same antiphon struck on a different key. It was not the Christians who died. It was the Roman Empire. It was not Christ who died; it was Death.

Come closer to our own times and see Easter once more proclaiming its lesson when men would dare forget even the name. The end of the nineteenth century marked the great upward climb of man divorced from God. Every one of the sacred truths taught by the Church since the first Easter Sunday was presumed to have been dissolved by the acids of modernity.

God was reduced to a mental symbol and then explained away psychologically; man was reduced to an animal and then explained away biologically; life was reduced to chemicals and then explained [away] mechanically.

The supernatural was made synonymous with the superstitious; the mystical identified with the mystified; Christ was a mere social reformer like Buddha or Confucius; the Church was a sect, and man was on the way to being a god.

But just at that moment when the world boasted of its superior organization, its faith in the material and its doubt in the spiritual; just at that very second when it was said the death of the Church marked the beginning of the modern world, the crust of the earth seemed to crack as hell came to the surface in a World War.

Science, which was supposed to be an ally of man, became his enemy; man, who was taught he was only a beast, acted like one; souls that were counted as straw were now blown like chaff across the battlefields of blood; God who was denied was now left man to godlessness whose other name is death.

And finally when the smoke of battle cleared away, and the long-range guns were beaten into plowshares and the living made an inventory of the dead, it was discovered that men had failed, that governments had failed, and that institutions had failed. There was only one thing that did not fail; it was the Church and its unwavering loyalty to the Divinity of Christ.

The antiphon of Easter was ringing again, only it was struck in a different key. It was not the Church which died; it was the Modern World. It was not Christ who died; it was Death.

Now enter into your own personal lives. You have heard the voice of the Eternal Galilean calling to your own heart, as the abyss of goodness cries unto an abyss of need, beckoning you on to His Way, His Truth, and His Life. In a moment of silence perhaps—He whispered to you that truth is in His Church; in an uneasy conscience perhaps He beckoned [you] to His confessional; in a passing prayer He called to you to greater prayerfulness.

But you felt it would seem to be the end of your reason if you accepted the Word of Christ in its fullness, that it would be a lowering of your self-respect if you knelt for forgiveness, and that it would be torture to give up the world for deeper and longer prayers.

Then finally you took the great step and made the great adventure. You accepted the Truth, you confessed your sins, you perfected your spiritual life, and lo and behold, in those moments when you thought you were losing everything, you found everything; when you thought you were going into your grave, you were walking in the newness of life; and when you thought you were in the dark, you were ablaze with the Light of God.

The whole experience of conversion, Confession, sanctification, seemed in the beginning as if you were dead, but it was only a new verse to an old theme. It was the antiphon of the empty tomb struck on the chords of your heart by the fingers of God. It was not you who died; it was sin. It was not Christ who died; it was Death.

Christ lives! The Eternal Galilean abides. Why then do we not recognize Him? Why do we delay in embracing the inevitable which is God?

There is nothing new to be tried. There is no need of setting up new laboratories to test new faiths. We have tried them all and found them to be old errors with new labels.

We tried all the experiments of the ancients who believed in the supremacy of man and found that if we did not believe in God we could not be human; we tried human fierceness, and it turned our poppy fields into Haceldamas of blood; we tried indifference, and it ended in our identification of the spirit of truth with the specter of evil; we tried science, and it fed our minds and starved our hearts; we weighed the earth, measured the turning of Arcturus, and took a census of the stars, set our thermometers in the very heart of the sun, and in the end we had new measures, greater numbers, and fancy names, but we still had our ignorance and our heartaches, and our “dismal universal hiss of sin.”

We tried the experiment of [law], and we did not obey the law, but changed the law to suit our moods and called it progress; we tried the economic, leaned on its staff and found it pierced our hands; we tried the experiment of Beauty, and found it vanished as we touched it and grew old as we embraced it; we tried the experiment of doubt, and found that if we doubted our doubt, we were in “confusion worse confounded”; we tried the experiment of Wealth and found ourselves poorer; the experiment of Power and found ourselves weaker; the experiment of Pride and found ourselves humbled.

We found no welcoming shade by quiet waters, where our bodies could repose and our minds could be at rest; we are always seeking but never finding; always knocking and never being admitted; always learning and never coming to a knowledge of truth.

There is only one experiment that modern man has not definitely, really tried, and that is the love, not of Jesus the Teacher, Jesus the social reformer, Jesus the humanitarian, but of Him who is true God and true man, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Somewhere on earth His unerring absolute Truth still abides; somewhere on earth His Divine Life flows out into hearts like fresh springs from an Eternal Fountain; somewhere on earth His Calvary is prolonged through space and time as other mothers raise up other Johns to stand beneath a cross to swing it in benediction in the direction of Eden’s fourfold river; somewhere Christ lives, loves, and teaches.

And where that beautiful somewhere is, three hundred million souls on this earth know; but where the other sheep know not through no fault of their own: That beautiful somewhere is the Church or the Mystical Body of Christ.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW

From The Eternal Galilean, Chapter XV, Fulton J. Sheen (1934).