Easter Sunday (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, April 16, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Easter Vigil, C
April 16, 2022

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 privilege for me to be with you as we enter together into dialogue with the Risen Lord Jesus as we begin the Easter Season.
• After Jesus’ resurrection, he engages in various consequential conversations with his disciples: with Mary Magdalene in the Garden, with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, with the ten apostles in the Upper Room, with Doubting Thomas, with Saint Peter at the Sea of Galilee, with about 500 disciples as he prepared to ascend to the Father’s right side.
• But as we see in the Gospel passages chosen for the Easter Vigil and for Easter morning, the emphasis is mainly on the fact of Jesus’ resurrection, what that reality says to us, and what we say to ourselves, God and others as a result. In St. Luke’s account that we hear this year at the Easter Vigil, Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Mary the mother of James head to the tomb at daybreak to anoint Jesus’ body with spices, but they find the stone rolled away and two angels in the tomb who tell them that the Living One is not among the dead, but has been raised on the third day just as he promised. They then ran to announce this fact to the eleven apostles, who didn’t believe them. In St. John’s version for Easter morning, a confused Mary Magdalene, after seeing the stone rolled away, told Saints Peter and John, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb and we do not know where they put him.” The apostles ran to the tomb, entered the tomb, saw the burial cloths and head covering, and St. John tells us, “he saw and believed.”
• Jesus didn’t meet them first and say, “Surprise!” He wanted them to have to confront the fact of his resurrection, fulfilling the words he had told them on at least three occasions, that he would be betrayed, crucified, but on the third day be raised. We know that even when they would see him for the first time, they would nevertheless doubt. Mary Magdalene thought he was the gardener. The apostles thought he was a ghost. The mind-blowing reality of his being alive 40 hours after his brutal crucifixion was something that they needed time to digest, and he gave them that time, to ponder his words and engage the possibility that what he had said, what the angels in the tomb had said, what the women running from the tomb had said, and for Thomas what the other ten apostles had said, was true.
• The Risen Lord Jesus wants to have a conversation with us like he did with Mary Magdalene calling us by name, with the disciples to Emmaus making our hearts burn and helping us to recognize him in the Eucharist, with the apostles confirming us in the gift of Divine Mercy as we’ll speak about next Sunday, and with the great multitude as he gave us the commission to go to the whole world, proclaiming the Gospel to everyone, baptizing in the name of the Trinity, teaching them to carry out everything Jesus commanded, and knowing the Risen Lord Jesus will be with us always until the end of time.
• But he also wants us to confront the fact of his resurrection and draw its conclusions in our life. The Resurrection is the definitive confirmation of everything Jesus said and did and so it must be consequential. That’s why at both the Easter Vigil and Easter morning Mass the Church has us renew our baptismal vows. Reflecting on the fact of Jesus’ resurrection, the Church asks us whether we reject Satan, his evil works and empty promises, whether we believe in God the Father, God the Son risen from the dead, God the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church God founded, the communion of saints in this world and in heaven, the forgiveness of sins made possible by Jesus’ passion, the resurrection of the body to share in Jesus’ glorified body, and the eternal life that Jesus has gone to prepare for us in the Father’s house. The Resurrection of Jesus is a summons for us to live with him a new life, to share in his triumph over the devil, the sin to which he tempts us, and the eternal death that he desires for us, as well as to live by faith thanks to God’s mercy a Trinitarian Life in the Church together with the saints until the time we share fully in Christ’s resurrection.
• In my column for the Easter edition for the National Catholic Register, I wrote about what it must have been like for Jesus’ first disciples to experience the reality of his rising from the dead, his appearing to them, his challenging them toward faith, his helping them to live it boldly. Meeting the Risen Lord Jesus would have changed everything, their grief, fears, confusion, and so many what-ifs. Jesus’ resurrection spiritually raised them from the dead. What would happen if we were to ponder each day Mary Magdalene bursting in to where we are to exclaim, “I have seen the Lord!?” If it happened first thing in the morning, it would change the alacrity with which we get out of bed. If we were suffering a headache or the effects of injury, her greatest news ever told would relativize the pain. If she barged into our workplace, or our kitchen, or our traffic jams, it would change how we labored, ate, handled daily contradictions and difficult people, as well as everything else.
• The fact of the resurrection is meant to change our life just as much as it changed the lives of the first disciples. The Risen Lord Jesus is still risen, is still with us until the end of time, and wants to share each day with us full-time. Recognizing that the Risen Lord Jesus is with us makes it much simpler to lift up our hearts to what he desires, to elevate our thoughts to what God cares about, to seek his kingdom rather than grasp onto the things of this world.
• As we confront the evil we’re witnessing in Ukraine, not to mention the various other challenges of our time in history, or the routine personal, psychological, spirituality, familial, work-related, economic and other issues that people face in every age, remembering the reality of the resurrection keeps things in perspective and reminds us that evil does not have the last word. The fact that the Risen Christ remains with us doesn’t mean that, after we see the bombing of Ukrainian apartment complexes, shelters, train stations and schools sheltering hundreds, we will start humming “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” but it does mean that their sad and avoidable deaths are not the end. While the fact of the Resurrection and Jesus’ risen presence doesn’t take away the pain or horror of atrocities, it contextualizes them in a much deeper reality full of hope. And if that’s what it can do for industrial scale death and destruction, it can also help us with the other challenges, hardships and horrors we face.
• How do we buttress our living of the fact of the resurrection and our call to communion full-time with the Risen Jesus? I would like to suggest a few ways.
• The first is in prayer, where we spend time with the Risen Lord Jesus, in which we strive to raise our thoughts to Christ’s.
• The second is through cooperation with the Holy Spirit, who not only raised Jesus from the dead, but leads us to “newness of life” (Rom 6:4). This is the newness the apostles experienced on Pentecost, which made them capable, in word and witness, to convey the truth of the Lord’s resurrection. The Holy Spirit wishes to do the same moral resurrection in us.
• The third is in the Sacrament of Confession. Jesus founded this privileged encounter on Easter Sunday night to communicate, I believe, that every reconciliation is a resurrection, as God the Father is able to say us, with the words of Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son, “My son was dead and has come back to life again.”
• The fourth is growing closer to Our Lady, who could never forget that her Son had risen from the dead or lose the joy that that reality communicated. We invoke her throughout the Easter Season by the Regina Caeli, in which we, pondering her joy at her Son’s triumph, ask God the Father to grant us the same everlasting joy.
• The fifth is loving people by spreading the faith and doing works of charity. Paying the Risen Christ’s gifts forward is a far greater way to appreciate them.
• The sixth is celebrating for no reason other than the best reason of all: Jesus’ resurrection. Throughout the 50 days of the Easter season, celebrate more than you would a birthday, a Super Bowl Championship, even a Nobel Prize, so that the grace of supernatural joy can build on natural ones.
• The last and most important is the Mass. I have had the privilege about 15 times to celebrate Mass inside the tomb of Christ within the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. Each time I do, I am conscious that I am returning the risen body of the Lord Jesus to the empty tomb. If that’s not incredible enough, I marvel — and try to help others to do so — that I then put that same risen Lord Jesus into communicants. He who promised that whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood will live forever makes a down payment on that promise by allowing us to enter into communion with him, here and now, risen from the dead.
• As we prepare for Easter Mass, let us ask the Lord Jesus to strengthen us in the fact of his having risen from the dead, in the truth of his presence with us, so that we may live always as disciples of the one who has conquered the world and spread, like his first followers, the news of the resurrection and Jesus’ summons to live with him, now and forever, the newness of risen life.
• Happy Easter and God bless you all!

The Gospel on which this homily was based was: 

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