Easter Friday

A Sermon for Easter6

by St Aelred of Rievaulx

As our Lord Jesus Christ deigned to be born for us, to be tempted for us, to be beaten for us, and to die for us, so also did he deign to rise for us. Yet his temptation, scourging, death and entombment belong to our redemption; his resurrection strengthens our hope. For by the former he paid for us what we owed, by the latter he showed us what to hope for. Just as by the death of his flesh he freed our soul from death, so by the scourging he took he freed us from the scourging of our soul. For without a doubt, we were in the scourging and we were in the tomb, and whatever he himself suffered in the body is what we have suffered in the soul.

Let us now consider the order of the passion and thereby arrive at the glory of the resurrection. First Judas betrayed him with a kiss… Listen to the kiss: Taste and you will be like gods. This kiss had sweetness and delight on the outside, but poison lay concealed within. After this kiss we were bound. How? Without doubt, by our own inordinate desires. For as Scripture says. The woman, seeing that the tree was beautiful to see and sweet to eat, took and ate from it. At first, therefore, she was as if seduced by a kind of sweet kiss – certainly it tasted sweet to the soul to be like gods. But afterwards she was so bound by her inordinate desires that she could not restrain herself, even if she hoped for no other advantage from it.

Thus bound, humanity was handed over to Caiaphas, that is, to cupidity, whose servants and attendants veiled his face. For who are the servants of cupidity except the vices themselves, which veiled humans’ face so that they could not perceive the true sun, true justice? They were veiled as it were by two bonds, that of ignorance and that of inordinate desire. For these two make a human being totally blind…

After this he was handed over to Pilate, that is, to the devil, prince of this world. In a marvelous way the demons themselves ridiculed the human species in their midst when a man being mocked by one devil was handed over to another for mockery… Mocked by unclean spirits, people have been led to such perversity that they enjoy it when they do evil and exult in the worst things… He was thus crowned with thorns, because <man’s> glory and honor were in his own iniquities. For the more prone <man> was to perverse and crude things, and the more he leaned toward all vices, the more he appeared to glory in himself…

At last he died and was buried. He died because he was separated from God. He was buried because he had reached a point of contempt for God. Even if people are vicious and sinful, inasmuch as they confess and recognize their sin, they are not punished by death. When, however, they advance so far in their evil life that they neither recognize nor confess their sin, then they are dead from deep within. As it is written, confession is as far from death as if it were not. Moreover they go so far as to be oblivious of God and hold him in contempt, even despairing of his mercy, they are buried. About this point Scripture says. The impious man when he came into the depths of evil was contemptuous.

Because we had suffered all these things in the soul, our Lord Jesus Christ wished to suffer all of them in his body and, through the sufferings of his body, to cure the sufferings of our soul. And because Christ suffered all these things for us, so that he then rose from the dead, without a doubt where he rose we too have risen. If therefore you have risen with Christ, seek the things that are above… And who are those who rise with Christ except those who share in all that Christ has suffered