Risen!

 

Christ is risen! The Gospel of Easter Day, according to the Evangelist John, proclaims the experience of the Resurrection. The discovery of the empty tomb leads Mary Magdalen to break the news to Peter and the beloved disciple. The latter, upon entering the tomb, saw and believed. This is the first sprouting of Easter faith. From this first day of the week onwards, the Resurrection of Jesus also becomes a word event, an announcement; indeed, it becomes the word par excellence that the Church is called to announce and bear witness to.

However, if we listen carefully to our text this morning, we see that we do not yet have the full Easter proclamation here; on the contrary, what Mary Magdalen runs to tell the two disciples is: They have taken the Lord away from the tomb and we do not know where they have put him. She still sees her beloved Jesus as dead, and thus subject to the power of human beings. Prey to fear and discouragement, Mary assumes for certain that the body of Jesus has been stolen and her one concern is where the body has been hidden from her grasp. This Gospel episode shows us the development of Easter faith by presenting the first release of the spark that will soon become a conflagration.

The inner journey that will eventually lead to the joyful cry He is risen! must first pass through the painful evidence of death offered by the shroud that wrapped Jesus’ dead body and the tomb in which it was placed. Absence of faith in the Resurrection is already anticipated symbolically by the remark that it was still dark when Mary Magdalen went to the tomb. She herself and her love for Jesus still moved blindly, in the darkness. Her eyes had not yet been enlightened and enabled, by the word of Scripture, to see beyond material things. This is indeed the first day of the week, the day of a startling new creation; but the dawn has not yet broken, and the darkness is most intense just before daybreak.

In this context, the Evangelist presents the reactions of three disciples—Mary, Peter, and John—to the empty tomb. He stresses above all the faith being born in the beloved disciple who, seeing the bindings on the ground and entering the empty tomb, began to believe. This is why the Evangelist comments on this burgeoning faith by saying: They had not yet understood the Scripture that he should rise from the dead. Easter faith is not born from the mere observation of an empty tomb: this could also lead to the hypothesis that the body has been stolen, as we see with Mary Magdalen. The empirical facts must be seen in light of the words of Scripture, to be illuminated by these; only then will observed facts give life to our Easter faith.

The text suggests a serious ignorance on the part of Mary Magdalen (who says, we do not know where they have put him) and of the disciples (of whom the Evangelist says that they had not yet understood [the Scriptures]), and this ignorance is an important element of their journey towards understanding the event of the Resurrection. The Resurrection event is necessarily the Unheard-of, the Unthinkable, the utterly Disconcerting. It is the radically New Thing that God is creating in the world, the event that only God can create.

The disciples’ is not a culpable or rebellious ignorance but something unavoidable at this stage: the Resurrection is not a product of human reason or resourcefulness or wishful thinking but, wholly, the deed of God, originating wholly outside ourselves and all our powers of comprehension and imagination. Like ourselves, the disciples are totally unprepared for the event of the Resurrection and so they must struggle to access such a momentous revelation. At this moment, only the beloved disciple, precisely because of the hidden mystery of love that secretly binds him to Jesus, begins to intuit and make room in his own soul for this unprecedented newness accomplished by God.

In these first witnesses who come to the empty tomb, we see emerge the emotional aspect of the relationship with the Jesus, whom they recognized as their Lord and for whom they had abandoned everything. Mary Magdalen is overwhelmed before the stone rolled back from the tomb, and she runs, as if moved by the fear that something irreversible has happened. Mary fears not being able to see and touch the body of her Lord. She fears having lost every visible point of reference for her beloved, even the terminal one, namely the tombstone, a fixed point embedded in the earth where it is at least possible to recollect memories and affections. But Christ will not allow her love for him to turn into mere nostalgia.

In the present faith of these disciples, there is a radical incompleteness that calls for fullness and has to do with understanding Scripture. Only faith in the Word of the Lord and in his love for us allows us to begin to believe in the Resurrection in the midst of the countless signs of death that abound in our lives and in the world around us. Faith in the fact that we are loved by the Lord is the basis of faith in the Resurrection. We have to be convinced that God’s love for us does not end with our death. For, if that were so, then what would be the good of God’s love? How unconditional would it really be and how omnipotent God himself?

This faith, which interprets the emptiness of the tomb, can also come to our aid at the times when we experience the terror of love’s emptiness in our hearts and the fear of abandonment that causes us to dwell in the shadow of death. In this gospel scene, the beloved disciple represents every disciple of Jesus throughout history who is called to enter into faith in the God who loves him.

Peter and John’s act of entering the tomb has a symbolic value. In the course of our lives, we too must enter many places of death (bereavement, separation, abandonment, end of relationships and friendships, difficulties in communication). We also at times allow death to enter into us, and so we become a place of death for others (racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, selfish closure, arrogance, abuse, violence, manipulation, indifference). Faith in the Resurrection, which is the very heart of our Christian faith, is not the same as a simple general trust in the goodness of life and the predictability of nature’s cycles of renewal. Christians are not happy-go-lucky optimists! Resurrection faith believes that new and unsurpassable life is born out of death through the power of Christ’s love. It allows us to enter into situations of death by looking beyond death and living the Resurrection, that is, by loving, or at least seeking to love, as Christ has loved us and, above all, by believing in his love for us.

I leave you with a wonderful saying of our Cistercian father Guerric of Igny, and I suggest it to you as a possible mantra for this Eastertide. He says: “It is enough for me if Jesus lives.” What depths of faith, trust, and love are contained in this statement, in which Blessed Guerric dares to turn away wholly from his own self in order to rejoice fully and exclusively in his one Beloved! So may it be for us this Easter morning as this same Beloved now hands himself over to us at this altar.

Icon written by Brother Terence. Homily by Father Simeon.