The Sainly Sinner Who Raised God from the Dead

Franciscan friar Fr. Mychal Judge, chaplain for the NYC firefighters, died in the conflagration of 9/11, 2001. Fellow-firefighters carried his body to nearby Episcopal St. Paul Chapel at 209 Broadway. There they laid Judge’s body on an altar.

The Saintly Sinner Who Raised God from the Dead

Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011

Acts 10:34, 37-43 Colossians 3:1-4 John 20:1-9

The first reading from Acts

Peter proceeded to speak: “You know what has happened all over Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached. You know about Jesus of Nazareth, how God poured out on Him the Holy Spirit and power. He went everywhere doing good and healing all who were under the power of the Devil. We are witnesses of all that He did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put Him to death by nailing Him to the cross. But God raised Him from the dead on the third day and caused Him to appear, not to all the people, but only to us who are the witnesses chosen by God in advance. We ate and drank with Him after he rose from the dead. And He commissioned us to preach to the people and testify that He is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead. To Him all the prophets bear witness, that everyone who believes in Him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.”

The word of Lord
Thanks be to God

Alleluia, alleluia.

A reading from the holy Gospel according to John

Glory to you, Lord.

On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.” So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first. He bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in. When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths lying there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place. Then the other disciple, who had arrived at the tomb first, also went in. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand the Scripture which said He must rise from the dead.) Then the disciples went back home.

The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

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Introduction

Nietzsche’s murdered God

German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) is famous for his strange but intriguing declaration that “God is Dead." In his work The Madman, he places the expression in the mouth of a demented man who declares,

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed Him. How shall we (murderers of all murderers) comfort ourselves? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has known has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to cleanse ourselves?

God murdered by Nazis

Nietzsche was right: man has the awesome power to murder God. The Nazis murdered God. On November 9th 1938, they rampaged through Germany and in one night destroyed 7000 Jewish businesses and torched 191 synagogues. That night goes down in history as Krystallnacht (Night of the Shattered Crystal), and it marks the beginning in earnest of the Holocaust. By the time the German Nazis had accomplished their `final solution of the Jewish problem,’ they had murdered six million Jews.

The most prominent fatality of the Holocaust, however, was God Himself! Elie Weisel is the Holocaust’s most well-know Jewish survivor. He is also an activist and author. In a little volume entitled Night he recounts his first evening in the concentration camp of Buchenwald. There he saw the bodies of little children going up in smoke from the crematories. He writes, “That was the night which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into dust. Never shall I forget it, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never! “

God murdered by Islamic extremists

Again, Nietzsche was right: man has the awesome power to murder God. Islamic extremists murdered God. This September 11th 2011 will be the 10th anniversary of that horrific event, which labels time for us Americans as “Before 9/11 and After 9/11.” On that apocalyptic day, Osama bin Laden and his co-conspirators drove two 747s into the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan, a third airliner into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Penn. 2800 innocent human beings were murdered on that unspeakable day. After ten months of grim labor, workers at ground zero together with the families of victims of 9/11 gathered at a Staten Island landfill on July 15, 2002 to mark the end of a grueling and emotional ten-month operation which had hauled away 2,000,000 tons of debris, 1600 identified bodies and 20,000 body parts.
Again, the most prominent fatality of September 11th was God Himself! One New Yorker, a security guard who lost more than thirty friends that day, said of that horrific event:

It was utterly barbaric the way their lives were taken. So I look at God now as a barbarian and I probably always will. My old God was murdered that day, and I don’t know how to bring Him back to life.

God murdered by the tsunami

Nature also has the awesome power to murder God. On March 11th 2011, a 90-magnitude undersea earthquake occurred off the eastern coast of Japan. It caused a tsunami of overwhelming statistics: 27,000 people dead or missing. 318,000 people left homeless, and 306 billion dollars to haul away millions of tons of debris and to rebuild. Ominously topping that heap of horrible statistics are the crippled nuclear reactors in Fukushima Prefecture. The cost in human grief, physical pain, deep despair, irreparable loss and ominous fear of radiation is overwhelming.

That tsunami did, indeed, murder God for Austin Kenny. In an article entitled God, Allah & the Tsunami Disaster he unambiguously declares his atheism, and he momentarily ignites in us a spark of temptation to go down the same path of atheism. He writes:

Where was God when the tsunami hit? He was where he always was, in the
imaginations of those who believe in him. He exists nowhere else. He can neither help nor hinder us. We have nothing to thank him for nor do we have anything to blame him for. We are simply on our own!

A man who raised God from the dead

Man, indeed, has the awesome power to murder God, but man has also the awesome power to raise God from the dead! Fr. Mychal Judge was a priest of the Franciscan Order, and a beloved chaplain of the NYC Fire Department. By his utterly unselfish life and death he raised up a God murdered by man on 9/11. On the apocalyptic day, chaplain Judge rushed to ground zero where he became that infamous day’s first recorded fatality. He had taken off his helmet to give the last rites to a dying fireman when suddenly a mass of debris came crushing down upon him. He died there on the spot, and his body was reverently carried off by his fellow firefighters to nearby Episcopal St. Paul Chapel at 209 Broadway. There it was reverently laid on an altar. That solemn drama of Fr. Judge’s last moments crowned a life of extraordinary unselfishness.

New Yorkers knew much more about Fr. Judge than just about his heroic death on 9/11. They often experienced his jocund character -- his legendary knack for story-telling and for bursting into old Irish standards at the drop of a hat. They experienced his great gift for making people feel as though they were the only ones in the room, and his bartender's gift for bringing strangers together. New Yorkers were always amazed at Judge’s encyclopedic memory for people’s names, birthdays and passions. New Yorkers also knew about his deep compassion for the city’s needy and forgotten; he knew everyone from the homeless to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who declared at his funeral that, “This man was a saint.” And though he was a true New Yorker, born and raised in the City, people saw how he lived on an entirely different plain of priorities than theirs: he was non-acquisitive, unselfish and utterly uncomplaining.

New Yorkers also knew a `darker side’ about Fr. Judge. He was a recovering alcoholic who comforted alcoholics, assuring them they were not evil people. He’d tell them, “Look you’re not a bad person. You have a disease that makes you think you’re bad, and that’s going to `f…’ you up.” (He’d used forceful language when the occasion called for it.) Despite some raised eyebrows, he opened the doors of the well-known Church of St. Francis of Assisi on 31st Street in Upper Manhattan to Dignity, an organization for gay Catholics. And then to top it off, people saw him, clothed in his Franciscan habit, march quietly and dignifiedly in the first gay-inclusive St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City.

No wonder, then, when Cardinal Edward Egan presided at his funeral on September 15, 2001, in St. Francis of Assisi Church, NYC, the Mass was attended by a sea of 3,000 people. In that immense crowd were city officials, former President Bill Clinton and New York Senator Hillary Clinton with daughter Chelsea. The funeral homily was broadcast worldwide over three TV networks. And when a memorial service was later held in the Anglican chapel of the Good Shepherd Chapel on Ninth Ave, cops, firefighters, lawyers, priests, nuns, homeless people, rock-and-rollers, recovering alcoholics, local politicians and middle age couples from the suburbs came flocking from every direction to celebrate a man who in New Yorkers’ very darkest hour had raised a dead God to life for them.

Austin Kenny declares that “We are on our own,” whether it be the 11th of September or the 11th of March. At the other end of the spectrum stands St. Mychal Judge who by his living and dying raised up a dead God for New Yorkers in general, and for alcoholics and gays in particular. By his living and his dying he reassured us that we are not ”on our own.”

Conclusion

One good word for Easter: `Alleluia!’

Words, indeed, fall short on Easter Morn. The words of a homily which pretend `to prove’ that Jesus truly rose from the dead are never brilliantly successful. More successful in engendering Easter faith is the yearly robin rolling away the stone before the tomb of winter, building her nest according to an eternal blueprint, and announcing the arrival of spring. More successful in engendering Easter faith is a vibrant parish rolling away the stone before the tomb of a dead God, and making Him come alive with living Liturgy and living Word. More successful in engendering Easter faith is a `sinful saint’ like Mychal Judge rolling away the huge stone before the tomb of a God murdered by 9/11 (and 3/11), and reassuring New Yorkers and us that God is, indeed, alive.

Words, indeed, fall short on Easter Morn. At the end of the day, there is only one good word for Easter: `Alleluia!’ `Alleluia’ is an unintelligible exclamation; it’s a kind of ecstatic babble which wells up in our hearts because of nesting robins, vibrant parishes and saintly sinners like Mychal Judge.