Running To and From the Tomb, Seeing and Believing, Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Campus Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Easter Sunday
March 31, 2024
Acts 10:34.37-43, Ps 118, Col 3:1-4, Jn 20:1-9

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Every Easter, the Church has us enter into the drama of what happened at the tomb of Jesus. St. Mary Magdalene went very early before sunrise to the tomb, saw the stone rolled away, and immediately worried that grave robbers had gotten there before her. Despite the fact that Jesus had predicted three times that after he had been betrayed, mocked, scourged, crucified and killed he would rise on the third day, the possibility of his resurrection was far from her mind. She ran to St. Peter and St. John and anxiously informed them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb and we don’t know where they put him.” So the two apostles ran to the tomb — if they left from the Upper Room, it would have been a sprint of about 12-15 minutes in tunics and sandals. The younger John outpaced Peter and arrived at the tomb first. He must have arrived a good deal before Peter, because he says he had time to bend down at the entrance and look in and see the burial cloths as he waited for Peter finally to catch up and enter first. The great Catholic novelist Graham Greene once said that these seemingly insignificant details helped lead to his conversion. He wrote to a priest friend, “In St. John’s Gospel, the run between Peter and John towards the tomb, Peter leading the way until he lost breath and then they young man arriving first and seeing the linen cloths but afraid to go in, it’s like reportage.” In other words, it’s not the work of a novelist, but of a witness and participant, providing details of what really happened rather than weaving a tale. This fact-telling journalistic veracity led Greene to trust in all of the rest of the elements as well. When Peter and John entered they saw the burial cloths there and the cloth that had covered Jesus’ head not rolled up in a separate place. John tells us that he “saw and believed.” What did he see that caused him to believe? He grasped that no grave robber, if he were intending to steal a corpse, would strip the cadaver and transport a dead man naked. Nor would he carefully roll up the head covering, as if he were making a bed in someone else’s hotel room. John intuited that the only way that those cloths would have been found in the way they he discovered them were if what Jesus had three times told them would occur on the third day — that Jesus had to rise from the dead — had in fact happened.
• This dramatic scene raises the important subject of the credibility of the resurrection of Jesus. St. Paul emphasized in his First Letter to the Christians in Corinth, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain and you are still in your sins.” There were some in Corinth, based on the platonic dualistic idea of a good soul trapped in a bad body that there can be no such thing as the resurrection of an evil body and therefore that the body of Jesus, too, could have never risen. The apostle emphasized, “If Christ has not been raised, then empty is our preaching; empty, too, is your faith” (1 Cor 15:12-17). Everything in our faith, in fact, hinges on the fact of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. If he did not rise from the dead, then the slowest one to leave this Church tonight and abandon Christianity would be the biggest fool. When I was younger, every year around Easter various major print and television magazines would do stories putatively about the resurrection but in fact trying to debunk it by saying that if Christ’s body were actually found, that it would make really no difference to their supposedly Christian faith. Some scholars even ridiculously argued that finding Jesus’ corpse would even strengthen their faith, because then, they said, their Christian life would not be grounded on an historical fact of a resurrection but on faith in one. But the occurrence of such pseudo-sophisticated arguments, not to mention the prevalence of so many people who don’t really engage the historicity of the resurrection and what it would mean for everyone if it is true, makes it imperative for Christians to be able to be able to make the case for the truth of the Resurrection in response to critics, doubters, and what we might call the indifferent masses. It’s all the more important for Christians at Columbia to be able to do so, because to whom more is given, more is to be expected; our knowledge of the most important truths of faith should therefore be commensurate, even superior, to our knowledge of any and every other discipline.
• It’s important to note that Christians have had to respond to challenges to the resurrection of Jesus since the beginning. The empty tomb itself is not proof that Jesus rose from the dead, just that Jesus’ body was not there on Easter Sunday morning; it doesn’t answer the question as to why his body wasn’t there. Tomorrow at daily Mass, St. Matthew will tells us that the Jewish authorities — who had pressured Pontius Pilate to provide a guard for Jesus’ tomb because lest the disciples of Jesus be able to remove his body and claim that Jesus had risen on the third day as he promised them he would if they destroyed the temple of his body — then had to bribe, “with a large sum of money,” those same guards to lie and say that the disciples stole Jesus’ body while they were sleeping. St. Matthew, writing about 30 years after the Resurrection had taken place, notes, “This story is still told among the Jews to this day.” But that suborned perjury is of course ridiculous to anyone with common sense: if the guards say they were asleep, how could they then possibly know what happened to Jesus’ body? How would the disciples not have awakened them in moving the huge stone from the tomb? Why would they have wanted to steal Jesus naked and carry him unclothed through the streets of Jerusalem? Most importantly, why would they have come at all to take the corpse of someone who had just been crucified as a criminal and who, if he didn’t rise from the dead, was a liar who not only got himself killed, but, as we will in the Acts of the Apostles, would get his disciples in a lot of trouble as well?
• Others over the centuries have tried to posit that Jesus hadn’t really died but just swooned on the Cross as a result of the accumulated trauma of the scourging, crown of thorns, carrying of the Cross and six hours on the Cross, but of course this wouldn’t make sense of Jesus’ heart being pierced with a lance with a torrent of blood and water coming out to prove he was dead, not to mention that if this is what had occurred, Easter Sunday would obviously have been different, with feelings of sympathy toward Jesus and acts of first aid. It would also make Jesus and all of the apostles co-conspirators in the hoax of a resurrection.
• A third counter-explanation for the resurrection is that the disciples were all unwitting recipients of collective hallucination: missing Jesus so much, wanting Jesus to rise so badly to validate everything he taught and did, they claim to have seen him after his death and body-snatching. Once Mary Magdalene claimed to see him, it set off a chain reaction in which nearly everyone else began to think they saw him, too. But this does not agree with the data or with common sense. An hallucination would mean that one of the disciples would see someone and mistake him for Jesus; but what happened was that various disciples saw Jesus and mistook him for someone else. Mary Magdalene saw the Risen Jesus and thought he was a gardener; she didn’t see a gardener and jump to the confusion he was the Risen Jesus. The disciples on the Road to Emmaus saw and spoke with Jesus, but thought he was just a casual passer-by; they didn’t see an anonymous wayfarer and naively guess he was Jesus. The apostles in the Upper Room saw Jesus and thought he was a ghost; they didn’t see a ghost and mistake him for Jesus. At the sea shore of Galilee, Peter, John and five other disciples saw Jesus on the shore and thought he was a stranger telling them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat; they didn’t see a stranger in the morning haze and conclude he was Jesus. Most poignantly is St. Thomas the Apostle, who was totally prejudiced against Jesus’ resurrection. He resisted forcefully and insisted on experimental proof before he would accept the testimony even of the apostles. To ensure that he or the other apostles wouldn’t be hallucinating, he demanded before believing to probe Jesus’ wounds. That’s precisely what he did.
• The positive case for the resurrection involves two categories of evidence. They are, essentially, the same categories that would be used in a modern trial: the inherent coherence and credibility of the evidence and testimony themselves; and the credibility of the witnesses giving the testimony. With regard to the evidence and testimony, there are two main sources. The first is the empty tomb. Although not in itself proof that Jesus rose from the dead, it is evidence that the Christian explanation is plausible: Jesus’ body was simply not found in the tomb and it was never found afterward there or anywhere else. The second source of evidence is found in theappearances of the Risen Lord. Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene; the disciples on the road to Emmaus; the ten in the upper room on Easter Sunday; the eleven the following week; Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, James and John and two other disciples fishing in the Sea of Galilee; 500 disciples most of whom, St. Paul tells the Corinthians, were still alive when Paul was writing and therefore could be interrogated; James, and then ultimately Paul on the road to Damascus. All of these people testified to seeing the Risen Lord. Either all of them were deceived in one way or another by some false image (which would have been an extraordinary feat in its own right!), or all of them were lying, or they were telling the truth that they had indeed seen Jesus risen from the dead.
• To determine which of these three seems most likely, we do so on the basis of the credibility of this witnesses. And it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed by the evidence in favor of their believability. The men who were testifying to Jesus’ being risen from the dead were people who had abandoned the Lord in the Garden when he was alive but merely seized. Why would they speak boldly after his death? If Jesus hadn’t risen, they would be testifying to a liar, someone who had deceived them for three years, had gotten them to leave their families, their businesses, and their livelihoods in what would have turned out to have been a grand hoax. They would have more likely resented, even hated, Jesus rather than posthumously praised him. The apostles, moreover, would have had nothing to gain financially from propagating such a falsehood. They traveled, by Jesus’ instructions, with no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, and no extra tunic. They had no notable persuasive abilities, all coming from obscure Galilean villages with little education — and, let’s be honest, proclaiming a crucified man as risen from the dead would not have been an easy sell even for famous Roman orators. How would these fishermen, tax collectors, and other relative nobodies have gone to the ends of the earth to plant a made-up story of the resurrection? In proclaiming the Gospel, moreover, they were ostracized from their religion, repeatedly beaten and ultimately killed. Why would they have gone through all of this unless they had truly seen the Lord risen from the dead, just as they testified? St. Paul’s case was slightly different, but in some ways even more powerful. He was a Christian killer, terrorizing the Christians of the 30s in the Holy Land like Nero did in Rome in the 60s. Why would Saul of Tarsus have changed all of a sudden and become a Christian when it would have meant the loss of his position within the Jewish authorities as well as the fact that some of his former colleagues would put a contract on his head for the rest of his days? Yet this extraordinarily intelligent man said in simple, highly believable language, “Last of all, as to one untimely born, Jesus appeared also to me.” Again, either Paul was a liar, completely deceived, or telling the truth. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of his telling the truth, as it is with all of the other witnesses.
• I’d like to bring up one other potential form of evidence, which takes us back to what Peter and John saw in the empty tomb, the burial cloths of Jesus. Why did St. John seem to focus more on their presence in the tomb than the absence of Jesus’ body? Perhaps it is because they were more than just abandoned burial bands, but something that would help the two apostles see and believe. It’s inconceivable that the apostles would have just left those linen cloths behind, considering that they had once wrapped Jesus. Is it possible that they could have contained some positive testimony to Jesus’ resurrection? The most famous relic in Christianity, perhaps the most studied artifact in history, is what we call the Shroud of Turin, which many believe is that actual burial cloth of Christ. The Catholic Church officially does not have a position on its authenticity. It’s not a matter of Catholic faith whether it is the authentic burial cloth with which Mary and Joseph of Arimathea would have devoutly wrapped Jesus’ crucified body, but a matter of reason. But it’s hard for me as a scientist, looking at all of the evidence for the Shroud and all that cannot be explained, and not conclude that the case for its authenticity is way stronger than the case against it. It’s never been demonstrated how such a faint image of the front and back of a crucified manhas ever gotten on a Shroud. It contains a witness with facts that were not known until recent centuries, like the fact that Romans used to crucify victims through the wrists, not the hands, because the hands can’t support the weight of the body. All painted images throughout the centuries always showed Jesus with nail marks through the hands. How could have an ancient or medieval forger ever known that? Moreover, what’s incredibly striking is that on May 28,1898, when the first photos were taken of the Shroud by Secondo Pia, as he was developing the negatives, he saw the image much clearer, a sign that the Shroud was a negative of a negative. There is no possible way anyone prior to the invention of photography in 1822 would have any clue how to work that into some form of painting. I could multiply other details with regard to the crown of thorns, the lacerations on the body, the blood stains, the ancient herringbone flax patterns in the fabric of the Shroud, the middle eastern pollen found on the Shroud, the 3-D information contained in the image of the intensity which allows for a 3-D image to be made, and more, but all of them together are totally consistent with what we know about crucifixion in Jesus’ time, consistent with the accounts of the Gospel, and consistent with the resurrection being an instantaneous burst of radioactive energy coming simultaneously from all dimensions of the body that would have left such an image on the surface of the Shroud. While Catholics don’t have to believe in the authenticity of the Shroud, the scientific and historic evidence in favor of its authenticity is one more ground, in my opinion, for the credibility of the resurrection. Just like with Juan Diego’s tilma with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, there’s simply no other plausible explanation as to how such an image could have ever been gotten on the Shroud.
• What does all of this mean for us? We learn more than just the evidence for a debate with non-Christians. We learn ultimately three things.
• The first regards our faith. If Jesus rose from the dead, it changes everything. This is the most important event in the history of the world. In the midst of darkness, Christ the Light rose. Imagine the darkness of the first disciples, the tremendous dejection, having thought everything was lost when they saw Jesus killed, laid in the holy sepulcher and the tomb sealed and watched by guards. Into this darkness shone the brilliant light of the Resurrection. That’s why St. Paul will tell us in today’s second reading, “If, then, you were raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” Rather than our faith being in vain, the faith is the most important thing of all.
• Second, we see that God didn’t call necessarily the smartest, bravest, most capable people to give witness to his resurrection. He called ordinarily people, down to earth, the exact opposite of naïve, whose sincerity and simplicity became a powerful motive of credibility to what they were announcing. We, too, might not be the most brilliant or talented proponents of the faith, but Jesus calls us to give witness just as he called them, and just as he called countless others throughout the centuries down to our own day. We do have a role in the new Acts of the Apostles that is being written for the third millennium.
• Third, the persuasiveness of the testimony of the resurrection depends at least somewhat on the credibility of one’s lived faith, on the credibility of the Gospel we preach by our actions. The apostles were credible because they could not possibly have had “mixed motives” in proclaiming the Gospel. Either it was true, or they were deceived, but what was excluded was their proclaiming a falsehood for personal benefit. This is still the case of Christian credibility today. Why, for example, was Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s lived Gospel so persuasive to so many people, Christians and non-Christians alike? Because it was all love. She had nothing to gain financially from spending her nearly 50 years lovingly caring for the maggot-infested dying people in Calcutta. Her vocation, and those of the sisters in her community she founded, could not possibly be understood as a “good career move!” And yet she joyfully proclaimed that they were doing it out of nothing but love for Jesus, which left those who observed her with one of two possible responses: either she was benevolently deluded or she really was inspired by a living relationship with Jesus Christ, just as she said.It’s similar with us. We’re called to live the Christian life with such joyful, self-giving heroism that proclaims to everyone that we really believe the Great News that Jesus lives, that he loves us, and that we love him — and leave others with the choice that either we’re crazy or we’re right! We’re ultimately called to give witness to the world that Jesus is someone worth living for completely and, if need be, worth dying for. He certainly was for the first apostles. He certainly was as well for the saints, martyrs and countless ordinary men and women throughout the centuries. Through this Holy Eucharist, when we have the privilege to receive the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Risen Lord Jesus, may we be strengthened to follow their example and be witnesses of this Greatest News Ever Told to others here on campus, here in this city, and ultimately to anyone and everyone we meet. Jesus has truly risen! This fact changes everything! And he is still here with us under Eucharistic form! Alleluia!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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