The Christian Impossibility, Easter Saturday, April 2, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of Easter Week
April 2, 2016
Acts 4:13-21, Ps 118, Mk 16:9-15

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, St. Mark gives us a summary of the reaction of the apostles to news of the Resurrection of Jesus that we’ve been hearing throughout the week. He tells us that after Jesus had appeared to Mary Magdalene and sent her on a mission as the “apostle to the apostles” to tell them to go to Galilee where they would see him, she found them “mourning and weeping.” Then when she told them he was alive and she had seen him, “they did not believe.” They didn’t go to Galilee. They stayed put in their misery. After this, St. Mark continues, Jesus appeared to the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus, who then returned and told the apostles, “but they did not believe them either. Finally, Jesus appeared to the apostles himself, while the disciples on the road to Emmaus were briefing them. The accounts in the other three evangelists stress that Jesus wished them “shalom” or peace, that he showed them his hands and side, that he ate fish with them, helped them to see — as he showed the disciples on the road to Emmaus — that all that had happened to him was the fulfillment of a prophecy, and then eventually breathed on them the power of the Holy Spirit and gave the apostles the power in his name to bring his peace to the world through the forgiveness of sins. St. Mark, however, tells us what happened first. “While the eleven were at table, [Jesus] appeared to them and rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed those who saw him after he had been raised.” Jesus upbraided them because their hearts were hardened. It wasn’t that their heads couldn’t grasp the fact of Jesus’ resurrection after he told them about it three times before it happened and the prophets had multiply alluded to it. After all, after all of his predictions about his betrayal and crucifixion happened to the letter, it should have been easier to accept the other part of his promise, that on the third day he would be raised. The issue is that they didn’t want to believe what the prophets had foretold, what Jesus himself had foretold, or what Mary Magdalene and the Emmaus disciples had said to them. The reason Jesus rebuked them was not that he thought they should be gullible and believe anything anyone said, but that their hearts were hardened to the Good News. They preferred to hold onto their “mourning and weeping,” their sadness, their darkness than embrace the Good News. We’ll see the same thing happen with St. Thomas in tomorrow’s Gospel, when he’ll refuse to believe even the testimony of his fellow apostles until he would have the chance to probe Jesus’ wounds.
• This isn’t something that afflicts only Jesus’ first followers. It’s still very much present today. Pope Francis wrote in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium that there are Christians who look like they’ve always come from a funeral, who live as if life is a perpetual Lent without an Easter. Rather than seeking the things that are above where Christ is seated at the Father’s right hand, they’ll keep their eyes, heads and hearts below. They’ll pick their own spiritual or emotional scabs rather than bring them for healing. They’ll nourish their resentments rather than hope, looking backward rather than forward. They’ll focus on what they don’t have rather than on what they do. They’ll obsess about their problems rather than their opportunities. Many times our hearts, too, are hardened to resurrection, to Jesus’ rising from the dead and the way he wants us to experience his risen life. Rather than coming alive with Christ, we seek the “living One among the dead,” not giving him the cooperation he needs to raise us from the dead with him. Today, with love, Jesus rebukes us for our “mourning and weeping,” for our stony hearts, for our lack of faith in what he continues to say to us through Pope Francis and through all the other emissaries he sends us with news of how he is risen, fully alive, and wants to bring us fully alive.
• We see the contrast between hearts that are dead and stony versus hearts that are risen and alive in today’s first reading. The chief priests, Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees and other members of the Sanhedrin who had arrested Peter and John had igneous hearts. They refused to believe even when the soldiers they had gotten Pilate to send to guard the tomb had told them about the resurrection. They refused to believe even when Peter and John had healed the cripple. As Jesus himself said in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Lk 16), if they didn’t accept the law and prophets, neither would they believe if a man appeared to them from the dead, as a man named Lazarus in fact did after Jesus had raised him on the fourth day (Jn 11). They tried to forbid Peter and John from ever speaking in Jesus’ name. But the apostles wouldn’t be intimidated by the men who had conspired to murder Jesus. Their fearful hearts had been raised by Jesus. If not even crucifixion could extinguish life, then they knew they had nothing to fear from the threats of those whom Jesus by his resurrection had definitely answered. They replied, “It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.” It was impossible for them not to share the good news, not to share their risen life, not to share new of Jesus. They were carrying out Jesus’ command, given at the end of the Gospel today, to go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature, including those who had the most hardened soil of all.
• Likewise for us, if our hearts have truly been raised, it is impossible for us not to speak of what we’ve seen and heard, what we have touched, what we have experienced. There are many Christians who have some faith but who remain in the tombs, who remain locked up, afraid. Jesus wants to work in us the same type of transformation he worked in the apostles. He does so through his Divine Mercy, which we’re invoking yet again today. And he does us by placing his own risen Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity within us, to raise us from within from the dead, so that we might be able to witness to the world by what we say and what we do, by the joy that comes from his presence and the fruit of mercy that flows from it, that Jesus has truly risen and that he has not only appeared to us, but lives in us. And then Jesus sends us, like he sent the apostles, into the world world, beginning with our homes, neighborhoods, parishes, and social circles, proclaiming that he really is alive.
• Today we celebrate the 11th anniversary of the death of someone who took this risen life of Jesus seriously, who showed the Christian impossibility of not speaking about Christ, about what he’s said to us about the miraculous transformations we have seen him accomplish. It was eleven years ago today, at 9:37 pm Rome time, that God called now St. John Paul II home. It was the last time that the vigil of Divine Mercy Sunday fell on April 2 — and the last time it will occur until 2157. But enveloped within the divine Mystery of Divine that he received and proclaimed, St. John Paul II was called home. We know that he believed in the power of the Risen Jesus, which is why the communists couldn’t intimidate him in Poland as a seminarian, priest, bishop and Cardinal. We know that he believed in the transformative power of Christ’s mercy, which is why he was able to visit Ali Mehmet Agca after the assassination attempt. It was how he was able to persevere with Christ on the Cross of his suffering with Parkinson’s Disease until the end, because he knew the power of the Christ’s triumph over suffering and death was working within his frail body. Today we ask him to intercede for us in a particular way, so that we might believe in the Resurrection as he did, and live with the mercy, joy, and life-giving love that he also showed. May he help us recognize the impossibility of not proclaiming what Christ has done and continues to do in us! May he help us not to be afraid and open wide the doors to the full power of Christ raising us to share his life!

The readings for today’s Mass were: