Easter Sunday, Year B:
Acts 10:34a, 37-43; John 20:1-9.
AIM: To show that belief in the resurrection is not
based on “tales artfully spun” (2 Pet. 1:16), but on solid evidence.
“If Christ has not been raised,” Paul
writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “our preaching is void of
content, and your faith is empty too.” (1 Cor. 15:14). Is Christ’s resurrection
really true? Or is it just a nice story? What
evidence do we have that the resurrection is true? There is evidence of
three kinds: first, the empty tomb; second, the appearances of the risen Lord;
and finally, the Church’s continuing experience of Jesus not as a dead hero,
but as its living Lord. Let me speak
about each three.
1. The
empty tomb
The gospel we have just heard tells us
that the empty tomb was discovered by Mary of Magdala, “early in the morning,
while it was still dark.” The other three gospels report that the discovery was
made by several women, after sunrise. Is
this discrepancy a reason to dismiss the whole story? Many people would say yes.
In reality, however, different accounts are just what we should expect. Police,
lawyers, and judges know that eye witnesses seldom agree about all the details
of a particular event. It is perjurers who try to harmonize their stories in
advance, to give them greater credibility.
In one detail, however, all the
accounts agree: that the first people to find Jesus’ tomb empty on Easter
morning were women. That is significant. The legal system of Jesus’ day
considered the testimony of women about as reliable as the testimony of a
three-year-old child today. Had the gospel writers made up the story of the
empty tomb, is it credible that they would have cited as their primary
witnesses people whose testimony had little weight with their contemporaries?
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By itself, however, the empty tomb
does not prove the resurrection. It
could have been empty because the body had been moved. That is what all but one
of Jesus’ friends believed at first. And Matthew
says that Jesus’ enemies put out the story that the body had been moved in
order to discredit the resurrection. If we accept this, however, we must
believe that the entire preaching of the early Church was based upon a
carefully concealed fraud; and that those who perpetrated this fraud were
prepared to die for it. Friends, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
One person alone came to faith in the
resurrection on the evidence of the empty tomb alone. He is called in today’s
gospel, and throughout the gospel which bears his name, “the disciple whom
Jesus loved.” This same bond of love with the Master would permit this
“disciple whom Jesus loved” to recognize the risen Lord before Peter and the
others when, weary from a night of fruitless fishing on the lake, they saw
Jesus standing on the nearby shore at dawn (cf. John 21:7). All the other
disciples came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection not on the basis of the empty
tomb, but only through the second kind of evidence —
2. The appearances of the risen Lord.
The gospels report that Jesus appeared
after his resurrection only to those who had previously known him, loved him,
and believed in him. As we heard Peter say in our first reading: after his
resurrection, Jesus was visible “not to all the people, but to us, the
witnesses chosen by God in advance, who ate and drank with him after he rose
from the dead.” None of the reports of the resurrection appearances contain any
evidence of hallucination or wish-fulfillment. On the contrary, in every case
those to whom Jesus appeared were initially skeptical or fearful, as if they
were seeing a ghost. Only slowly and reluctantly did they come
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to believe
that it was truly the Master they had known and loved, alive again in flesh and
blood.
This slowness of the witnesses to
believe was due not only to the astonishing nature of the occurrence itself
(for in all human experience, the dead do not come back to life). It was due
also to a mysterious alteration in Jesus’ appearance. Jesus did not return to
his old life. He was raised to a new
life, beyond death. His appearance was changed. The mode of his existence was
changed. He could appear and disappear at will.
The empty tomb is the first evidence
for Jesus’ resurrection. In itself, however, the empty tomb proved only that
Jesus’ body was elsewhere. Save for the one disciple who was linked to Jesus by
a special bond of love, none of his friends came to faith in the resurrection
on the basis of the empty tomb alone. They became convinced only when they saw
the risen Lord, talked with him, and ate with him.
Had there been no further evidence for
Jesus’ resurrection, we would expect his friends to become increasingly
skeptical as the memory of their encounters with the risen Lord became ever
more distant. In fact, precisely the opposite happened. In time, Jesus’ friends
became not less but more certain of
the resurrection. This deepening certainty can be explained only by the third
kind of evidence for Jesus’ resurrection —
3. The Church’s continuing experience of Jesus
as her risen Lord.
This evidence is available to us
today. We cannot see the empty tomb. We have not seen the risen Lord. But we
are members of that great family of God called the Catholic Church who
experience Jesus not as a dead hero from the past, but as gloriously alive here
and now. We encounter him in this way especially when we obey Jesus’ command at
the Last Supper to“do this in my memory.”
If Jesus were a dead hero from the
distant past, the celebration of the eucharistic memorial which he left us
would be tinged with sadness. Always and everywhere, however, when Christians
have obeyed Jesus’ command at the Last Supper to “do this in my memory,” they
have been filled with joy. We express this joy today in the Church’s
characteristic Easter greeting: “Alleluia!” This untranslatable word expresses
more fittingly than a word of known meaning something that is, at bottom,
inexpressible: our overwhelming joy at knowing that the One whom we encounter
here in the Eucharist is not a dead
hero from the past, but our ever-present and risen Lord, gloriously alive for
evermore, risen from the tomb holding, as we read in a striking image in the
final book of the Bible, “the keys of death and the nether world” (Rev.
1:18).
This joyful encounter with the risen
Lord is the continuation not merely of the Last Supper, but also of the meals
which Jesus shared with his friends after
the resurrection. Peter referred to
those meals in our first reading, when he spoke of Jesus appearing “to us
...who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”
Because Jesus Christ is alive, we can
live in confidence, in joy, and in hope.
The darkness of this age has been overpowered by the light of Him who is
the world’s light. The power of evil, clearly evident in the morning headlines
and on the evening news on television, is temporary. In raising his Son from
death, God has shown that his power
is stronger than evil. This world,
with all its horrors, is still God’s world. Death, our final enemy, is not the
end. The grave, which was for Jesus a temporary resting-place only on the way
to a new and more glorious life, will be for us too the gateway to this same
eternal life.
Truly we have every reason to join in
the church’s ecstatic Easter hymn:
This is the day the
Lord has made;
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Amen.
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