Readings of the day: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9
I have all confidence
in us, sisters and brothers: “We are witnesses to all that [Jesus] did” through
the tradition of our Church handed on from the Apostles. Be not afraid of “not
yet” understanding; of mystery. Go out and seek the risen Christ in prayer; in
our world; in one another. Our Beloved has “already flown so high” and invites
us to take “the prey.”
Christ is risen! Alleluia! Who does the
risen Christ invite us to be? The risen Christ invites us to be witnesses to
him. As his witnesses, the risen Christ invites us to seek him. “We are witnesses to all that [Jesus] did,” we hear this
Easter morning from the Acts of the Apostles. “If you were raised with Christ,
seek what is above,” we hear from the Letter to the Colossians.
But has anybody here ever heard this
kind of objection to our Christian faith: “If Jesus really is God and, if
Christianity really has the fullest access to truths revealed by God for our
salvation, then why did Jesus only appear to a few of his disciples after his
resurrection and not to everybody he wanted to believe in him”? The Apostle
Peter, in Acts, speaks to this very problem. Peter says in our first reading
today: “This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible, not
to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance.”
Why would God have chosen a few, “not…
all the people,” as first-hand witnesses to an event so central to our faith as
Jesus’ resurrection? I think there are a few possible answers to this question.
One of these answers is given to us in the same reading from Acts we have just
heard: Jesus sent these first-hand witnesses to his resurrection “to preach to
the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God as judge of the
living and the dead.” Many generations after these first-hand witnesses, Jesus’
first disciples, this is now our responsibility: “Preach… and testify.” Preach
and, even more importantly, be witnesses to Christ’s resurrection by the way we
live. This responsibility does not end here at the pulpit, or here in the
church; it is ours to carry forth into the world; to live out.
How do we live this, our witness to
Christ’s resurrection? We might ask: How did Jesus live? Jesus “went about
doing good.” He went about healing the sick and “all those oppressed by the
devil.” And so this is our witness to Christ’s resurrection: Doing good;
deliberately and continually acting with small acts and words of kindness,
expecting nothing in return; lifting the burdens of oppression; of poverty;
building a world where nobody has need of basic necessities of life. In these
ways we become witnesses to our world to the resurrection of Christ that we
celebrate today. In these ways we “seek what is above.” We seek and we will
encounter the risen Christ in our lives; in people we meet and serve.
But still, why were there not more
first-hand witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ? If Jesus’
resurrection is so true; so central to our faith and to our salvation, why do
not more people accept and believe in this truth? Perhaps the best answer to this
question that I can give is that all this is a mystery. Now how many of us; how
many people not of our Christian faith would find this answer somewhat
underwhelming? “Really,” might some of us be thinking, “we ask why there were
only a few first-hand witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, and why more people do
not believe in Christ and the central truth of his resurrection today; why some
outright reject this as truth, and the best you can say is that this is a
mystery”?
This answer is underwhelming or not,
depending on how we understand mystery. What do I mean by this? Mystery, I
think, is not so much something we do not understand as something we do not
fully understand now, in this moment. This is the sense of
mystery captured in our Gospel reading this morning from John. Mary of Magdala
arrives at Jesus’ tomb “while it [is] still dark”; with the day ahead still a
mystery. She sees the empty tomb of Jesus and runs to Simon Peter and “the other
disciple whom Jesus loved,” but not to tell them that she is certain that Jesus
is risen. No, Mary Magdalene is caught up in the mystery of the moment: “They
have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we do not know where they put him.”
How would Peter and the beloved disciple
have felt upon hearing Mary Magdalene’s announcement: Perhaps extremely
frightened? But this does not stop them from venturing out into the night, into
an encounter with the mystery of Christ’s resurrection, to the empty tomb. And after seeing the empty tomb but not
yet the risen Lord, John says to us that Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the beloved
disciple “did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the
dead.”
“They did not yet understand”… But this
did not stop Jesus’ first disciples at the empty tomb. We do not yet
understand, but this has not and will not stop us, either. Why? Mystery is not
something we cannot understand, nor is it primarily about understanding
something. Mystery is about an encounter with somebody. The mystery of Christ’s resurrection, Pope Benedict XVI
once said, is about an encounter not with a thing or “a lofty idea, but the
encounter with an event; a person.”
So how are we to witness to this central
event of our faith; to the person of the risen Christ; to this mystery of
Christ’s resurrection? We do this by following the example of Mary of Magdala;
of St. Peter; of “the other disciple whom Jesus loved.” We witness to this
mystery; this event; this person, Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, by going
out and seeking him. We go out and seek the risen Christ in one another;
through our acts of service; through our words and works of kindness,
especially toward those most in need. We do “not yet understand,” and will not
fully until we are in heaven, risen from the dead ourselves. But this need not
stop us from witnessing to the mystery of the resurrection; from going out and
seeking the risen Christ, so present in our world and in our relationships with
one another; so present in this Eucharistic celebration.
St. John of the Cross, sixteenth-century
Carmelite, wrote a poem about witnessing to mystery; seeking the risen Christ;
seeking love in prayerful service. Imagining himself as a bird of prey on the
hunt, he begins:
I went out seeking love
And with unfaltering hope
I flew so high, so high,
that I overtook the prey.
But St. John of the Cross, like the
disciples at Jesus’ tomb and perhaps like us, soon realizes that to overtake
“the prey”; to witness to mystery; to go out; to seek Christ risen; to seek the
Beloved, takes a most profound act of humility and courage. It means continuing
to fly; to “go out”; to “seek what is above” when we do “not yet understand”:
That I might take the prey
of this adventuring in God
I had to fly so high
that I was lost from sight;
and though in this adventure
I faltered in my flight,
yet love had already flown so high
that I took the prey.
My sisters and brothers in the risen
Christ, we make two movements here, of which St. John of the Cross and the
disciples at the empty tomb speak: We go “out seeking love” and we witness to
the risen Christ by our deeds and words. We do “not yet understand”; we falter
many times in our flight toward the Beloved, but this will not stop us. We are
here to worship! And we will “go out” on our “adventuring in God”; our
encounter not with a thing or idea but with a person.
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