Easter Sunday 2022
April 17, 2022
Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
Introduction
In the Gospel just proclaimed, we meet the disciples of Jesus, confronting for the first time the reality of his Resurrection. They are confused and amazed. Mary Magdalene visits the tomb early in the morning only to discover that the body of Jesus has gone missing. She assumes that it is the work of grave robbers. Peter and John run to the tomb to find out what was going on. John defers to Peter – for Jesus had made Peter the leader of the Apostles. But when John peers into the empty tomb and sees the carefully arranged wrappings – the Gospel that bears his name says of him – “He saw and he believed.” Even so, the same Gospel passage goes on to say that the disciples did not yet understand that “Jesus had to rise from the dead”.
On this Easter Sunday morning, when we profess anew our belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, we do well to take seriously the experience of Jesus’ original disciples – not only their budding Easter faith but also their confusion and amazement . . . For we who live in an era of science and technology are often no less confused and amazed than they were. What does mean to say that Jesus rose from the dead? Or that Jesus had to rise from the dead? What does belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ mean for us today?
Love and Immortality
Let us begin, not with empty tomb, but with our experience, the experience of love. Jewelry stores sell diamonds to the love-struck on the basis that love is eternal. It’s true: real love not only sees beyond the present moment or the immediate future, it also yearns for an experience of never-ending friendship and intimacy. Who of us wants to part with a spouse who has loved us “for better or for worse”? Who of us wants to part with a parent who has loved us tenderly our whole life long? Our capacity to love tells us that we are finite beings made for immortality. Love cries out for immortality, yet we cannot prolong our lives indefinitely. All we can hope for, or so we think, is that our loved ones and colleagues will remember us fondly, even lovingly, after we have departed from this life.
Aware of our mortality, we are also aware of how fragile human love can be. Broken relationships and failed friendships may litter our personal histories. Even so, we relentlessly seek “love as strong as death”, a love that will not fail, and until we find it, our lives make no sense; we remain an enigma to ourselves. This yearning for love is, in fact, an opening to the divine, an opening to a love that is not only durable but eternal, a love wherein our love might live on. Acknowledging our need for unending love is not yet faith, but it prepares the ground of our hearts for faith – for faith in the One whose life and love are infinite, immortal, and everlasting. Only God’s love lasts forever. Only by sharing in his love does our love last forever.
The Disciples Did Not Understand
Yet, the very thought that God sent his Son into the world to become one of us, that this Son of his went about preaching, curing the sick, and raising the dead, until he was condemned, died on the Cross, and rose from the grave – doesn’t all that strike many contemporary ears as pre- or anti-scientific, even mythical?
Here, we find ourselves once again in the company of those first disciples who truly did not know what to make of Jesus’ Resurrection. The event of the Resurrection itself was so indescribable that none of the Gospels offer us a direct account of it – only the empty tomb and the appearances of the Risen Lord. However, the disciples did in fact know that the Risen Lord was more than a resuscitated corpse. For when the Risen Lord appeared to them they could see, at least most of the time, that he was the same Lord yet he was very different. He was at once real and ethereal, touchable and untouchable, familiar and unfamiliar. His appearances caused them fear and confusion, rejoicing and wonderment … Perhaps those first disciples were no less baffled than are we by the Resurrection! Baffled, that is, until we recognize, as they finally did on the day of Pentecost, that the mission of Jesus was to reveal to them and to us the glory of divine love, and to bring our wounded humanity, body and soul, into the heart of Trinitarian love— that love for which we were made and that love for which we yearn. Today, as the Risen Lord embraces us, let us stretch out our hand to him and allow him to set us free from the bondage of sin, to enlighten us with the glory of his love, and to awaken our dormant faith!
None of this contradicts what legitimate science has to say of our humanity. Rather, it indicates that there is a dimension to our humanity that lies beyond the realm of the earthly and the observable, unless, of course, one pays attention to the yearnings of the heart. The heart gives the mind more than a few clues that can open us up to faith, but faith, at the end of the day, is a gift given to us by the Holy Spirit at Baptism. Aided by God’s grace, our part is to accept the gift of faith and to let it shape us.
Faith, Worship, Proclamation
If today we should allow the Holy Spirit truly to rekindle our faith in the Risen Lord, what difference would it make in our busy, distracted lives? How would it change us? Faith does not cancel our powers of reason but opens our mind and heart to a love that lies beyond this world, yet in Jesus is found in the very heart of it. When we allow the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with a living faith, we will encounter the Risen Lord as someone completely real, as the One who loves us like no other, the One who wishes to rescue us from sin, and to fill our troubled hearts with fresh hope for life and love eternal. Encountering the Risen Lord in this way spurs us on to worship, implants in us a burning desire to praise and adore him, in the company of other believers, and indeed to unite ourselves to him by receiving him into our hearts. A faith that is alive will not be content with vague ideas about Christ or with mere symbols of his presence, or with an on-again, off-again relationship. No, we will want to receive him – Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity – in the Eucharist – and we will do so without fail on the day of the Resurrection, the first day of the week.
Once love overtakes our hearts, we will not be able to keep it to ourselves. We may not preach it to crowds like Peter in the first reading, but with hearts set on what is above, where Christ seated at the Father’s right hand, we will proclaim the Risen Lord by our love for others, by living as men and women of hope, and by sharing our gifts with those in need. And our witness will be convincing, even now, even in the world as it is today! May the Risen Lord bless us and keep us always in his love!