The Power of the Resurrection in Our Bodies

Fr. Hugh Barbour, O. Praem.

    Brothers and sisters:

    Do you not know that a little yeast leavens all the dough?

    Clear out the old yeast,

    so that you may become a fresh batch of dough,

    inasmuch as you are unleavened.

    For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed.

    Therefore, let us celebrate the feast,

    not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness,

    but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. -1 Cor. 5:6b-8

When we go to the early Fathers of the Church to understand the sense of the great mysteries of faith we are celebrating at Easter, we are apt to be surprised. This is especially true if we go to the Fathers of the Syrian tradition, which represents the most ancient and authoritative approach to Sacred Scripture that we have.

Take, for example, the Scripture lesson given above, which is the classic epistle reading in the Roman Rite. How are we to understand all this talk the leavening yeast being full of the corruption of malice and wickedness and our feast being made of the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth? Especially since it tells us that Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed and therefore we celebrate the feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

I never understood this therefore of St. Paul’s until I read St. Ephrem the Syrian’s commentary on the Gospels.

In speaking of the Last Supper, St. Ephrem counts the three days of Our Lord in the tomb as beginning when he, having been sacrificed in the eucharistic supper by the separation of his body and blood, is “buried” in the earth—that is, in man who is made of the slime of the earth, and in Holy Communion, and in remaining hidden in his members who have received the sacrament as he undergoes his passion and burial; in the following days he rises from the dead through this eucharistic presence and appears again, not under signs, but in his visible, palpable body!...