Dear
brothers and sisters, today the Church celebrates the defining moment of our
entire faith, and the crowning achievement of God’s remarkable plan for our
salvation: Today we joyfully commemorate Jesus’ Resurrection from the dead and
we give thanks for the share He has given us in His Divine and everlasting
life.
Over
the past week – through the Scriptures and through the Liturgy of the Church – we
have journeyed with Jesus from His triumphant entry into Jerusalem; to the
Upper Room where He broke the bread and washed the feet of His Apostles; to the
Garden of His agonized waiting; to His betrayal by Judas, and denial by Peter,
and abandonment by the disciples; to His trial, torture and, execution; and
finally to the stone-cold tomb.
And
if we have truly entered into the mysteries of this Holy Week, we should have been
able to recognize in these events of Passiontide a narration, not only of
events that happened two thousands years ago to Jesus, but of our own numerous experiences
of suffering and loss at different moments of our own lives.
We
have, of course, known many blessings and triumphs and have felt the love and
admiration of family and friends as Jesus did as He entered Jerusalem.
But
we have also often agonized as we awaited a medical diagnosis, or awaited the
return of an absent loved one, or as we prepared for a crucial decision – just
as Jesus agonized that night in the Garden of Gethsemani.
We
too have felt the sting of betrayal and the desperation of loneliness, just as
He felt when He was abandoned by His friends and unjustly imprisoned on Holy
Thursday night. In different ways we,
too, have experienced pain that is physical and emotional, psychological and
spiritual, just as He did throughout the tortures of Good Friday.
And
finally, in so many of these moments of loneliness and doubt, suffering and pain,
we have felt the seeming finality of the stone being rolled across the
tomb. We have felt as if there was
no way out, no end in sight, nothing at all that was real or true other than the
pain and loss we were experiencing in that moment.
What the passage does not yet include is
an appearance by the Risen Lord!
We will have forty days of Easter to hear the accounts of Jesus’ many appearances
to His disciples, and His meals with them, in the days between Easter and the
Ascension. For now, however, the
Church is suggesting that even on this most glorious and joyous of days, we
dwell just for a little while, not on Jesus’ Resurrected body, but on the empty
tomb.
Saint John records at the end of our
Gospel passage this morning that when he went into the tomb behind Peter “he
saw and believed – for they did not yet understand.” He saw and believed, but they did not yet understand.
Brothers and sisters, I think we have all
been here before as well!
In the face of their sinfulness and
weakness in having abandoned Jesus; amidst the shock of seeing the man they
thought to be the Messiah arrested and killed; and in the confusion of finding
the tomb empty, the disciples see, and believe, but they can’t yet understand. They have encountered the most beautiful
but confounding mystery of all human history: the Paschal Mystery!
No one had ever risen from the dead
before – it wasn’t possible, it wasn’t conceivable! Mary Magdalene understandably thinks that Jesus’ body must
have been stolen. But Peter and
John see that the shroud has been left behind, and the cloth that covered
Christ’s face had been neatly rolled and put aside. What thief would leave
behind such valuable cloth and be so careful and neat?
No, something else had happened. And without yet knowing completely what
that something was – without understanding how it could possibly be, the
disciples begin in that moment to believe that the unthinkable was in fact
possible.
John can say that they believed because
the empty tomb restored even just a glimmer of the hope that they thought had
been lost forever: their hope that Jesus was the Messiah, that He would save
His people from their sins, that He would reign forever as King. However improbable it may still have
seemed, the empty tomb gave them a reason to hope again.
As I say, I think you and I have experienced
this as well. In moments of our
lives that had been completely dark, desperate, and hopeless, we too – through
grace – have seen some glimmer of light, some deeply felt conviction that there
was still a sliver of hope to cling to.
If we had been pressed to explain it,
to prove it empirically, to help someone else understand why we felt as we did,
we would have been completely at a loss for words. We couldn’t yet understand it ourselves, and yet – through
grace – we believed.
Friends, in those moments of our lives we
have been – spiritually speaking – standing outside the empty tomb of our Lord,
just as surely as in moments of loss and suffering we have endured the Passion
with Him.
Whether we knew or understood it in the
moment, or not, it was the light of the Lord’s Resurrection that shone through
as a glimmer of hope – it was His newness of life that gave us reason to
believe!
But as the rest of the readings during
the coming Easter season will show, even that is not the end of the story. Such experiences – both of suffering
and of impossible hope – are never meant merely for ourselves alone. Precisely amidst such grace-filled
moments we are always being sent on mission, to be witnesses of what we have
seen, and of the hope we have experienced.
Though
they struggled to understand and to make sense of their amazing discovery at
the empty tomb, the disciples ultimately came to believe so firmly in Christ’s
Resurrection from the dead, that they were willing to die rather than to deny
its truth.
They
went to the ends of the earth, and suffered cruel martyrdom, so convinced were
they that they had been “commissioned to preach to the people” the forgiveness
of sins through Jesus, risen from the dead.
In
the end, the much greater proof of the Resurrection is not the empty tomb – or
even Jesus’ appearances to His Apostles, as real as they were. It was the way the experience of the
Resurrection changed the Apostles!
Brothers
and sisters, in Baptism we died with Christ so as to rise with Him to newness
of life. Throughout our lives we
have lived the Paschal Mystery by bearing the Cross with Christ, and by sharing in His Resurrection. As St. Paul said in our second reading:
“we have died, and our life is now hidden with Christ in God!”
So
now, like His Apostles, we too must go forth from the empty tomb boldly
confessing with all our words and deeds, with every fiber of our being, that
Jesus Christ who once was dead now lives to die no more!
Jesus
is Risen – He is truly Risen!
Alleluia!
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