Easter Sunday: The Resurrection of the Lord

April 8, 2007

Homily for the Anglican Usage Mass at

St. Clare Church, Scranton, PA

 

John 20:1-9

 

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

 

            The 14th Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren, once said, “I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures” (Sports Illustrated, June 22, 1968).  I am not one to do the same, but I understand his sentiment.  The media can rightly be blamed for focusing so much of its attention on man’s faults and weaknesses, his problems and the tragedies he brings upon himself.  Just on Good Friday, there was a story with a photo in our local paper of a terrible wreck on the Casey Highway.  The names of the people involved were printed, but no record could be found of the names of emergency personnel who responded to the crash.  Two angles could have been pursued, one that highlighted a failure or one that highlighted an accomplishment.  The paper highlighted the failure.  But, of course, the Scranton Times is selling papers.

 

In a free-market economy, such as we have, the media’s propensity for highlighting the lowlights is in fact a reflection of the tastes of those who buy the papers.  The media highlights the lowlights because that’s what the buying public wants.  Media outlets get ahead in many cases by being more sensationalistic than their competitors, and sensationalism has not made its mark by concentrating on the good in human nature.  No, the slant we see in the papers, the origin of Earl Warren’s complaint, is not to be found just with the editors who have a negative outlook.  The problem is that we, all too often, have a negative outlook.

 

Mary Magdalene in today’s Gospel proves that this negativism is not a recent phenomenon.  She discovered first that the stone had been rolled away and that Jesus was not in the tomb.  Jesus had told his disciples that he would be crucified and on the third day rise from the dead, but this he said to the twelve after having taken them aside.  We can’t be sure that Mary Magdalene had actually heard this prophesy, but we can be certain that she had heard of the resurrection of the dead.  Though there were some who denied it, most notably the Sadducees, belief in the resurrection of the dead was as common among the Jewish nation then as it is among Americans today.  Yet the resurrection is not what came first to Mary’s mind.

 

As our Gospel makes clear today, Mary thought that Jesus’ body had been stolen.  There were two possibilities, that Jesus had risen from the dead, or that his body had indeed been stolen.  She thought first of the latter, telling Peter and John, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:2).  Considering what she had just witnessed on Good Friday, it is no surprise that she assumed yet one more indignity had been committed against her Lord.  She says, “They…”, but we know who she’s talking about: the same “They” who had Jesus whipped, stripped, mocked and killed.  If these people were willing to do such evil to an innocent man, to what depths would they not sink?  Stealing a body would simply be par for the course.

 

Mary’s experience is not that different than ours.  We did not witness the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but if we’ve sent The Passion of the Christ, we have a pretty good idea about what it looked like.  Even so, we wouldn’t have to see in person Christ crucified to know that the innocent suffer in this world and the guilty often go free.  When I was in Newark last year Archbishop Myers showed us lower Manhattan from his office window, a mere seven miles away.  On September 11th his staff had watched from those very windows as the World Trade Center was destroyed.  The Archbishop told us that one priest on his staff was watching his friends, neighbors, and parishioners die: he knew more than fifty people who died in that attack.

 

In the meantime we spend billions of dollars to prevent such a thing from happening again, while Osama bin Laden makes videos and brags about how proud he is for having killed so many, threatening to kill even more.  When we contemplate the injustice with which we are intimately familiar we can understand Mary’s anguish.  We can understand the conclusions she jumped to.  We can understand why she thought that the travesties Jesus suffered in life would continue in death.  Like so many survivors of horrific events she expected that her suffering would not end, that instead it would be multiplied, and the people who did this to Jesus and to all who loved him would be the ones having the last laugh. 

 

But, of course, she was wrong.  Jesus had not been stolen.  He had risen from the dead.  He had overcome the worst that the wicked could throw at him.  It would take Mary a while to recognize the Good News.  Even after seeing two angels in the tomb she repeated her charge that the body had been stolen.  When she saw Jesus she was still in the negative mode.  She thought he was the gardener, and she asked him if he might have been the one who took the body away.  That’s right, she asked Jesus himself if he had stolen his own body, because her vision had been so clouded by the terrible things she had witnessed.  Not until he said her name did she recognize him.  Not until he said her name did she realize the truth of what had happened.

 

On this Easter Sunday it is helpful to remember the front page of the newspaper, to recall Earl Warren’s complaint from almost forty years ago.  To remember this complaint is to remind ourselves that just as Mary Magdalene’s vision was clouded, so ours often becomes clouded, as well.  Our experiences, the wicked things we have seen, the evil with which we have come into contact, these things cause us to become like Mary Magdalene.  Whatever evidence to the contrary is before us, no matter bright the Good News is shining, we can’t see it, because our eyes and our assumptions are drawn to the negative, to the worst case scenario.  To counter this propensity, we must begin to see the world through the eyes of faith.

 

To have faith in the resurrection means that we understand the powers of darkness do not have the last word.  It means that hope enters into every element of our lives.  And I’m not just talking here about the big issues that have to do with the life to come.  We know that we have a future to look forward to that is not of this world, that we need not fear death because we have an inheritance with the saints in light.  The hope that Jesus gives us in his resurrection from the dead should permeate our outlook, so that it transforms the way we see events in the here and now.  Because sin and death have not triumphed, because hope is real, we see how God is present in the souls of the rescuers, rather than just staring at the car wreck.  We see how God is active in the souls of the first responders at Ground Zero, who risked their lives, and who are now dying, because they were willing to sacrifice themselves in order that others might live.  No matter the enormity or the banality of the evil before us, our faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ enables us to see the good that is also present in every circumstance.

 

This is not a matter of donning rose-colored glasses, of fooling ourselves into seeing what is not really there.  We do not delude ourselves, nor do we deceive others.  Our faith, rather, enables us to see Jesus present, where he is actually present.  We concentrate on the other side of human experience, informed by our faith, in order to assert that change can happen, that life can spring from death.  We can be reformed, our relationships can be salvaged, our neighbors will sacrifice for us, and the world is not coming to an end.  All that there is to life is not found on the front page, and if we dig a little deeper we can find the accomplishment, the graces of God, even in the midst of the devastation.  After all, the Body was not stolen.  That Body is in heaven, and one day we will be given the opportunity to touch and feel him for ourselves.

 

For now, Jesus has left us his Church.  Where does one consistently find this perspective that I have just described?  Where does one find hope and success when every media outlet wants only to trumpet despair and failure?  Where can we find a man who stands in the place of Jesus, who calls us by our name, and shares with us that all is not lost, we are still loved, and tomorrow will be better than today?  We find this only in the Church, the Church that Jesus Christ founded upon the apostles that first proclaimed His resurrection.  No other institution offers hope so consistently.  No other institution has been so hopeful for so long.  Nations come and go.  Ideas are born and die.  Ideologies ravage the world and then disappear.  But hope remains, because the Body was not stolen.  Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, and he left us his Church to remind the world of this Truth until he comes again.

 

So if you want hope, go to the Church.  It’s the one place we can be sure to find the perspective that wins out in the end, the perspective that won out on the first Easter Sunday, the perspective that Mary Magdalene finally adopted.  And one more thing: as encouragement goes, it’s a much better option than the sports page.

 

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.