Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for Easter Sunday (B), Vigil
April 3, 2021
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- Happy Easter, everyone! This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to wish you and your family a Happy Easter as we enter into the consequential conversation the Lord Jesus, risen from the dead, wants to have with each of us. He wants to meet us like he met Mary Magdalene in the Garden and call us by name. He wants to converse with us like he did with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, to make our hearts burn as he explains the word of God to us, and help us to recognize him in the Breaking of the Bread. He wants to speak with us like he spoke with the fearful apostles in the Upper Room, to wish us peace, to show us his hands and his side, to impart to us the Holy Spirit, and to send us out from the Upper Room, like he sent them. Jesus ultimately wants to change our lives this Easter and help us to enter more deeply than ever before into his triumph of light over darkness, joy over sadness, love over hatred and life over death. For this to occur, however, we can’t live Easter in a routine way, as just another important day that will be over within 24 hours. We can’t live it just as an Octave or a 50 day season. We really have to let what Easter means sink deeply within us so that it changes our thinking, our being, our doing, our loving. We have to enter into the Easter metamorphosis.
- After the incarnation when God the Son took on our nature and entered the world, Easter is the most important occurrence and fact in the history of the world. It’s a fact that, even though the prophets like Ezekiel foretold it, even though Jesus explicitly mentioned it on several occasions, the disciples and apostles were slow to believe. Mary Magdalene thought Jesus’ cadaver was stolen and didn’t even recognize him initially when he spoke to her in the Garden. Peter, when he ran to the tomb, saw the burial cloths and thought they were evidence not of the resurrection but of the theft. Thomas, even after the other ten apostles told them Jesus had appeared to them, refused to believe unless he could probe his sacred stigmata with his own hands.
- Easter is a fact, moreover, that many have actively opposed. It started in the ancient world with some of the religious leaders of the Jewish people who tried to bribe the guards to say that Jesus’ disciples just came to steal his body. It happened in ancient Corinth where many, including those who claimed to be disciples, said that it didn’t really matter whether Christ physically rose from the dead, because the only important thing is whether we believe he did, a foolish idea that still pops up in heterodox theology faculties at various universities and in scores of articles and documentaries around this time in which so-called “experts” who try to claim that Jesus’ resurrection is just a myth. But St. Paul replied that if Christ didn’t rise from the dead, our faith is vain, it’s worthless, it’s nothing more than a belief in a fairy tale. And worse than that, he says, we’d still be in our sins and we’d still be doomed to die eternally.
- As Christians, we have to be vigorous in believing, explaining and defending the fact of the resurrection. The early Christians knew clearly what they were professing about the resurrection and why. They had to, because they were continually ridiculed for believing that a god could die or a man rise from the dead. The Romans deemed them insane, much like we today would view someone who claimed that Elvis is alive. For them, it could never be a question of “blind faith,” which they had and others did not. Their faith was reasonable, which was how they were able to withstand the taunts and even the torture. The early Christian witness to Christ’s resurrection at great personal cost led people of all classes in every nation to enter the Church. They knew, because of Christ’s resurrection, that they no longer needed to fear when the Sanhedrin, or the Roman empire, various tyrants and anti-Christian forces across the centuries sadististically threatened them with suffering and death, because they knew that if after Christ’s scourging and crucifixion, he were raised from the dead, God could and would do the same for them. Death no longer had its sting.
- But Jesus’ resurrection cannot remain just a fact, even if it is one of the most important facts of all time. The resurrection is far more than an event. It’s meant to be a relationship. Jesus pointed to this in his conversation with Martha before he was about to raise her brother Lazarus from the dead. In his conversation with her he said, “Your brother will rise.” She replied, doubtless because when Jesus had come over to their home, they had asked him what really happens after death and he had given some explanation of what would happen at the end of time, “I know he will rise on the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Jesus is the resurrection. More than a fact, the resurrection is a relationship, it’s living in Jesus and allowing him to live in us, as a risen vine and branches. For those in communion with Jesus, who enter into his death and resurrection by faith and baptism, death is nothing other than a change of address. That’s why Saint Paul tells us at the Easter Vigil, “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we, too, might live in newness of life. … If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. … Consequently you too must think of yourselves as dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus.” Easter is about this newness of life, in which we are dead to our old lives and live for God in Christ Jesus.
- The perennial danger for us is that Easter — even Easter 2021, in which we happily return to Churches after not being able to celebrate together last year because of the lockdowns — becomes reduced to a liturgical rite, a day we dress up, go to Church, and then gorge on chocolate Easter bunnies as kids look for plastic eggs with jelly beans and quarters. We can treat Jesus primarily as a figure from the past, an important historical personage with incredible accomplishments whom we occasionally remember but who fails radically to change us. We can marginalize him and treat him as if he’s barely alive. We can regard him as a part-time savior, as a part-time Lord, a part-time friend — all of which can make us in return simply part-time Christians, which is not a faithful Christian, anymore than a part-time wife would be a faithful wife. That’s not what God wants. It’s not what he’s made us to desire. He wants to work the same dramatic transformation in us that he worked in the lives of Mary Magdalene, Peter and John as they ran to the tomb on Easter morning. Jesus rose from the dead in order to raise us from the dead, not just later, but now. We’re not really celebrating Easter unless we allow him to do so. We’re not really celebrating Easter well if we remain, and want to remain, basically the same people we were yesterday. As St. Paul tells us, “If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above not what is on earth.” We’re not really living the Christian life with faith unless we recognize that Christ rose from the dead in order to raise our eyes, our desires, our lives from seeking after the things of the earth, the things of this world, to seeking with him the things that are above where he is.
- As we celebrate Easter, let us turn to the Lord who died and rose again for us with joy and gratitude. Let us beg him for the grace to say a wholehearted yes to his offer of a new life in this world through deeper communion with him who is the Resurrection and the Life. And let us ask him too for all the help he knows we need to respond like the apostles and disciples in the early Church, to bring the news of the resurrection, and the offer of this new life in abundance, to those we know and love and indeed to the whole world. Christ is risen! Christ is truly risen! And this changes everything. Alleluia!
The Gospel on which today’s homily was based was:
Gospel
On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark,
and saw the stone removed from the tomb.
So she ran and went to Simon Peter
and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them,
“They have taken the Lord from the tomb,
and we don’t know where they put him.”
So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.
They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter
and arrived at the tomb first;
he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.
When Simon Peter arrived after him,
he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,
and the cloth that had covered his head,
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
Then the other disciple also went in,
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed.
For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead.
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