Sunday Gospel
Reflections
EASTER
SUNDAY OF THE
RESURECTION
OF THE LORD
April 20,
2025, Cycle C
JN 20:1-9
Fr. Richard A.
Miserendino
Reprinted by permission of "The Arlingon Catholic Herald"
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Happy
Easter! For the
last two millennia on
Easter Sunday, the church has rightfully celebrated the most
unusual event to ever
happen on earth.
Jesus
Christ
was crucified, died and rose from the dead on the third day. Yet, even that
sentence falls terribly short
of catching the magnitude of it all.
Words fail to capture the mystery.
The
difficulty
is compounded by the fact that 2,000 years of Christianity
buffers
us from comprehending exactly how astounding the Resurrection
was to the early
church, especially to those within John’s Gospel, which we hear
today. We expect
Jesus to rise because we look
backward to those moments. The disciples didn’t
have that luxury.
Consider:
As
a priest, I’ve celebrated hundreds (If not thousands) of
funerals at this
point, fully believing in the Resurrection.
Not one person has come back. I
would still be alarmed if they did. Imagine if that happened,
even for a
second. For me,
after the paramedics
restarted my heart, I would still need time to wrap my head
around it. It would
flabbergast the world.
This
helps
us to understand Mary Madalene’s response, as well as Peter and
John’s
slow growth in believing that the tomb is empty. It also explains the
closing line in the
Gospel: “For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he
had to rise from
the dead.”
True
enough,
the Lord told them that he would rise.
Yet, it’s one thing to hear the words, another to believe
them in an
abstract sense, and an entirely different thing to talk to the
very person whom
you witnessed being brutally murdered and buried just three day
earlier.
The
Resurrection
remains bold, unpredictable, energetic, explosive even, no
matter
how one cuts it.
This
renewed
sense of perspective raises questions for our Gospel reading,
however. For
instance, we can ask: Why
didn’t Jesus just wait in the tomb and patiently explain things
when Mary
Magdalene, Peter, and John arrive?
Wouldn’t that have been simpler?
A
few reasons
come to mind. First,
the entire
narrative of the Gospel today hints at the fact that our faith
(cross,
Resurrection and all) will necessarily unfold in our lives
through gradual
points of increase in understanding. Our
hearts and minds need time to take it all in.
One suspects that if Jesus had merely greeted them
without giving them
space to unpack, they might he simply died of shock. Mary Magdalene is the
first witness of the
risen Lord mere lines later in that Gospel, but only after she
has remained and
pondered the mystery, a nod to the need for contemplation in
Christian life.
Second,
what
better way to show you’ve utterly conquered death than to walk
clean away
from tomb like it was nothing?
Christ
thinks about it no more than a butterfly thinks about its old
cocoon. Jesus
doesn’t limp out of the tomb need to be
nursed back to health, nor does he need to wait to be fetched or
found. Neither does
he emerge bound by hatred and
revenge,
seeking to exact vengeance on those who struck him down. None of that weights
him down. He leads
a new Exodus from death, and we can
encounter hum only if we follow him on the way.
Put anther way: It’s a sign that God isn’t boxed in by
the limits of our
reason and imagination, or even sin and death.
He remains profoundly free, alive and other.