EASTER DAY: THE SUNDAY OF THE RESURRECTION

4 April 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 18-24; 

I Corinthians 15:1-11; John 20:1-18

Yesterday evening, we celebrated the Great Vigil of Easter. This morning’s Mass, of Easter Day, the Sunday of the Resurrection, has a slightly different emphasis. I don’t want to overblow the distinction, but the Easter Vigil focuses on the mystery of what happens in darkness of the tomb between Good Friday and Easter morning: Christ’s descent among the dead and his miraculous Resurrection to new and eternal life. It’s also pre-eminently a baptismal liturgy. The Mass of Easter Day focuses, by contrast, on what happens in the daylight: the finding of the empty tomb, and the risen Lord’s appearances to chosen witnesses. The readings that we’ve just heard highlight three of those witnesses: Mary Magdalene, Peter, and Paul.

The appearance of the risen Jesus to Mary Magdalene as recounted by Saint John is surely one of the most poignant scenes in the Gospels. She is arguably the first human witness to the Resurrection in that wonderfully tender and emotional encounter in the garden outside the empty tomb.

The second witness introduced by today’s readings is the Apostle Peter, who testifies to his experience of the risen Lord in a sermon he preached on the streets of Jerusalem fifty days later, on the Jewish Feast of Shavuot, better known to us as the Day of Pentecost. Peter proclaims to the people: “They put [Jesus] to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him and made him manifest, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” 

Two details are worth noting in what Peter says. First, the risen Jesus appeared not to everyone, but to chosen witnesses. Second, their eating and drinking with Jesus highlights the Resurrection’s physical reality. The risen Jesus is not a ghost or a spirit or an angel, for such immaterial beings don’t eat and drink. This detail also hints that eating and drinking together will continue to be a primary means of fellowship with the risen Lord in the years to come, as Christians gather week by week to break the bread and share the cup in his Name.

Our third witness is Saint Paul, who relates in his First Letter to the Corinthians how the risen Jesus appeared first to Cephas (that is, Peter), then to the twelve, then to five hundred brethren at one time, then to James (that is, the Lord’s kinsman who became the first Bishop of Jerusalem), and then to all the apostles. (It’s interesting that in Paul’s mind a distinction clearly obtains between the original Twelve and a number of unspecified others who also bear the title “apostle.”) Last of all, Paul writes, “as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” In other words, Paul is telling us, Christ’s appearances didn’t end with his Ascension into heaven. As we know from the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s life-changing encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus took place at least several years later.

So, although there were many witnesses to the Lord’s Resurrection, today’s Scripture readings present us with a representative three: Mary Magdalene, Peter, and Paul. And to each of these three chosen witnesses, Christ gives more or less the same command: Go and tell others what you’ve seen, heard, and experienced of me.

Outside the empty tomb, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene: “Go to my brethren and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my father and your father, to my God and your God.’” Obeying the Lord’s command, Mary Magdalene then goes and tells the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and relates the things he’s said to her. For this reason, Mary Magdalene is sometimes given the title “Apostle to the Apostles.”

In his sermon on the Day of Pentecost, Peter concludes his account of the risen Lord’s appearances thus: “And he commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that he is the one ordained by God to be judge of the living and of the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him received forgiveness of sins through his name.” Similarly, the purpose of Paul’s Damascus road experience is not only to divert him from his persecution of the Church and convert him to being a follower of Jesus but also to commission him to his lifelong calling of being an apostle to the Gentiles.

In all three cases, the Resurrection appearances and the apostolic preaching go hand-in-hand. The risen Christ appears to chosen witnesses—Mary Magdalene, Peter, and Paul—precisely so that they can go in turn to proclaim the good news in ever-expanding circles radiating out into all the world.

And so it continues to this day. The challenge for us, then, is to carry forward our witness to the reality of Christ’s Resurrection in our lives so that others may have the opportunity to know the joy of the risen Lord in their lives.

Our natural reaction to this challenge may well be, “What? Who, me? You must be mistaken! You must have me confused with somebody else.” We’re apt to feel a certain sense of unworthiness to such a high calling, and that’s not totally inappropriate. But there’s the rub. More often than not, the Lord chooses the least likely people to be his witnesses.

While there’s no biblical warrant for the tradition that Mary Magdalene was a reformed prostitute, Luke’s Gospel does record that she’d had seven demons driven out of her. So it seems fair to say that she had a troubled past, at the least. And then Peter, before he became the Prince of the Apostles and the rock on which Christ would build his Church, denied Jesus three times before cockcrow in what must have seemed to all involved an unforgivable betrayal.

But Saint Paul wins first prize for a (not unrealistic) sense of unworthiness. He follows his account of the Lord’s resurrection appearances with the heartfelt protest: “I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” Nonetheless, bearing witness to the transforming power of Christ in his own life, he concludes: “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.”

So, while we may think of Mary Magdalene, Peter, and Paul as great saints of the Church, otherworldly haloed figures in stained-glass windows, they were in reality highly fallible and often deeply troubled human beings. The good news is that the risen Christ chose them to be his witnesses anyway. And if he so chose them, he can certainly so choose us, as well.