April 9, 2023 (Easter Sunday)
/“Jesus Is Risen! Now What?”
by Fr. Dominic DeLay, O.P.
[This is the text composed by the homilist prior to delivering the homily.]
Jesus is risen! Now what? Chocolate? That’s a great start, but it’s hard sometimes to bite into and taste the real meaning of Easter for our lives, isn’t it? For most of us, the challenge with Easter isn’t so much to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, as outlandish as that is. We take it for granted. But what does Jesus’ resurrection mean for our lives, for the world, especially in the here and now? This is a scary question to ask. What if it’s beyond us to understand the resurrection, to live it out in our daily lives, and to metabolize its power to transform our broken world? But we want Easter to be about more than the fact that Lent is over, that we can now get back to normal. We want to find ourselves living life anew, but is that possible?
In today’s story, when Mary Magdalene sees that the stone as been removed from the tomb’s entrance, she panics, running to tell Simon Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved, “They have taken him!” The men race each other to see what Mary’s going on about. The other disciple investigates with just a glance inside the tomb, then Simon Peter actually goes in. He sees not just the oddity of Jesus’ wrappings but also, rolled up neatly all by itself, the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head. Somehow this stirs him. The other disciple now dares to step inside. He’s the one who sees and somehow believes. But does he really? The story tells us they don’t yet understand that Jesus must rise, so they trudge back to their separate homes without a word to each other or to Mary, whom they leave behind. None of them communicates with the others. They each see and understand something different. They’re together but not together at all. Surely their coming to faith is going to take some communication, some community.
Mary, weeping, finally looks into the tomb. What does she see now? Two angels in white sitting where Jesus’ head and feet had been. “Why are you weeping?” they ask. “They’ve taken my Lord, and I don’t know where.” Can she not see their angelic authority through her tears? When she turns, she sees Jesus standing there, but why doesn’t she recognize him? “Why are you weeping?” he asks. “Who are you looking for?” Still no recognition. She assumes this is the gardener and he’s the one who has taken Jesus. “Mary!” Jesus says. And now she knows him: “My master!” But he tells her not to hold on to him, for he simply can’t be held on to as if he’s there only to assure her and to let her think everything’s back to normal. He’s moving into the future and wants to bring them all along with him. “Go tell the others that I’m ascending to my God and your God.” Does this make any sense to her? Regardless, she goes and tells the disciples what she’s seen and heard. Finally, someone here is communicating with the others. But do they believe? Does she? Believe what exactly?
This risen Jesus continues to come to them in various ways, sometimes customized for the individual, so that they can grasp and live out the meaning of Easter. That evening, we finally see them all together, except for Thomas, but they’re afraid and hiding behind locked doors. Locked doors can’t stop the risen Jesus, though, and he enters: “Peace be with you.” They rejoice, but do they believe yet? He comes back a week later for Thomas, who does believe: “My Lord and my God!” But how can we fully know the implications of his profession of faith? The only other appearance of the risen Jesus, according to this gospel writer, at least the only one he or perhaps a follower, is when he comes to the seven disciples who have resorted to their old normal and gone out fishing. Jesus comes, but it’s not until they make a catch, a huge one, that they recognize him, beginning with Peter: “It is the Lord!” He’s so enthused that he leaves the boat, the fish, and the others behind, jumping into the water and swimming to his dear friend. After they all eat together, Peter has his challenging and wonderful dialogue with Jesus, the three-fold healing from his three-fold betrayal: “Do you love me?” “Yes.” “Feed my sheep.”
They’re starting to get it. Get what, though, exactly? [Pause.] That’s for us to discover. We know Jesus’ resurrection gives final authority to what he promises about the huge, central things of our lives: Freedom from death in the future and freedom from sin right now. But what does that really look like? As with the disciples, coming to Easter faith takes us awhile. We need to be willing to encounter the risen Jesus in various and surprising ways. We need to walk together along the way and share our encounters with each other. We need a lifetime to allow Easter life to take hold of us, but just as we have forty days of Lent every year to allow the risen Christ to humble us and remind us that we can’t accomplish even the simplest of Lenten disciplines on our own, we have these fifty days of Easter every year to chew on, savor, digest, and learn to act on the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection.
Many of us were inspired by the faith of our newly-initiated last night. We all continue to walk with them during this season of mystagogia, when they, and we with them, probe the mysteries of faith. Easter is a season of celebration, deep celebration. What have we learned from our Lenten experience about what helps and what gets in the way of authentic, really joyful celebration? On the coming Sundays, we’ll spend more time with the resurrection stories from John and the others. With the wild adventure of the Acts of the Apostles, we’ll discover anew the power of the risen Jesus’ Spirit in the life of the first Christian communities as they fight and celebrate each other. For the truly indulgent, there’s the feast of weekday Mass as well. We’ll have many opportunities in this season of grace to pray, learn, and celebrate together. And Fr. Xavier is going to continue his daily email reflections for the first great week of Easter, then I’ll email to those who wish daily reflection and prayer prompts from the book Prayer, Our Deepest Longing. Remember that book, the one most of us eagerly took home at the beginning of Lent? Ronald Rolheiser’s book has been for me these past weeks a profoundly practical and compassionate invitation to feast on daily prayer at home. Whether you used the book or not, whether you have it or not, I hope these very brief daily prompts will help us feast separately but together on the gift of prayer.
This Easter season we have the opportunity to help each other recognize the risen Jesus in our lives and to live into the meaning of the resurrection. The risen Jesus himself unfailingly empowers us to make this journey, bringing us to deeper belief and fuller, freer lives so that we can proclaim him to others, especially through our joyful and hopeful actions. As a certain Catholic Community at Stanford’s mission statement says, “We encounter Christ, radiate the joy of the gospel, and transform the world.” Jesus is risen! Now what?
