Homily for Sunday, 31 March 2024– The Resurrection of the Lord, Mass of Easter Sunday

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

Sisters and brothers: Christ is risen, alleluia! He is truly risen, alleluia!

Within the Scripture readings we have just heard on this Easter Sunday morning, I am always profoundly drawn to the descriptions of Jesus’ first disciples, the diversity of their experiences of Jesus’ resurrection and the preaching of apostles like Peter about Jesus’ resurrection.

First, I invite us to focus our attention on Mary Magdalene. She, not any of the Twelve, is the first to see the empty tomb of Jesus, with the stone rolled away from its entrance. She runs to tell Simon Peter “and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved,” that the tomb is empty. But at this point, Mary Magdalene’s experience is not one of excitement and joy; it is one of confusion. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

In her anxiety and confusion, Mary Magdalene reaches for the first logical conclusion that comes to her mind: Somebody has stolen, has relocated Jesus’ body. Peter and the beloved disciple run together to the tomb to investigate Mary’s claim that the tomb is empty. I imagine that, when Mary Magdalene first tells Peter and the beloved disciple that the tomb is empty, they would have thought this was preposterous. But, to their credit, the two men go to the tomb. Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb, too, but remains in the garden outside it, weeping.

Simon Peter and then the beloved disciple enter the tomb. They see the stone rolled away, the burial cloths rolled up in separate places, the head cloth from the body cloth. And the next line in John’s Gospel always amazes me, every time I hear it: The beloved disciple (and we can presume Peter, too) “saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

The beloved disciple believed first. Only later would Jesus’ disciples understand this mystery of the resurrection: “He must rise from the dead.” In the Church, dating back to the eleventh century Benedictine monk St. Anselm of Canterbury, we have a neat little phrase to sum up the goal of the Christian intellectual tradition: It is “faith seeking understanding”—fides quærens intellectum.

Now, maybe this speaks to the smallness of my faith, or maybe it is a more widespread phenomenon of contemporary Western thought (I will leave this question to the philosophers), but I have real trouble believing in something if I cannot first begin to understand it intellectually. I have trouble believing something if it is not at least reasonable to me. Simon Peter and the beloved disciple believe before Jesus’ rising from the dead becomes something reasonable, understandable to them. This is very bold on their part!

And Mary Magdalene, lingering, weeping in the garden outside the tomb, is bold in her own right in John’s account of Easter morning that we have just heard. She does not understand why Jesus’ tomb is empty any better than Simon Peter and the beloved disciple do. She thinks that somebody has taken Jesus’ body and laid it elsewhere. But Mary Magdalene does not flee her complex set of emotions and thoughts, her experience of the present moment: Confusion, anxiety, sadness because, as far as she knows, Jesus is still dead. Mary Magdalene remains in the garden to encounter this experience head-on. And she is blessed, because of her boldness, with an encounter with the risen Lord. Jesus asks her, “Woman, whom are you looking for”?

At that moment, Mary Magdalene recognizes the voice of her Lord, our Lord, immediately: “Rabbouni”! But she is still caught up in trying first to understand before she can believe that he is truly risen, that nobody has taken Jesus’ body away. Jesus reminds her, and reminds us, that the greatest faith precedes understanding—having everything worked out intellectually. Faith seeks understanding, ideally, not the other way around.

“Do not hold onto me,” Jesus tells Mary Magdalene. “Do not hold onto” this very human desire to understand, to make rational sense, before we can believe. “But go to my brothers,” Jesus says, “And say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

So Mary obeys Jesus. She goes and announces to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” And then they, too, come to believe that Jesus is truly risen from the dead. They become vocal preachers, witnesses by their way of life, to Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus’ disciples can at last begin to understand, once they have believed. And then they can act on their faith, their understanding, to found and grow the Church, this communion of “witnesses” to the risen Christ as Peter calls those who hear him preach in the Acts of the Apostles, our first reading this morning.

But this story all begins in a garden, with the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen Lord, and in the tomb, when Simon Peter and then the beloved disciple enter to find the tomb empty and the burial cloths displaced. That our first encounters, in John’s Gospel, with the risen Christ happen in a garden and inside an empty tomb is no accident.

It was in a garden where, Genesis says in its account of the creation of the first humans, God created Adam and Eve. It was in a garden where Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s lie that eating the forbidden fruit would make them wise, would make them their own god, able to understand everything as God does, without the need to believe and depend on God whose goodness had created them and sustained them and all things. Yet it was in a garden where, when Adam and Eve sinned, God’s Spirit first blew through Eden and whispered to them, “Where are you”: Where are you, not a wise and all-knowing God but naked and ashamed? And it was in a garden, still, before Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, where God first promised to redeem us from, overcome, destroy sin and its effects.

This promise reaches its peak in the mystery we celebrate today: God has sent his only Son to redeem us, to overcome and destroy sin by his death and resurrection from the dead. And this promise will reach its fulfillment when the Christ returns in glory at the end of time, as we hear today from the Letter to the Colossians: “When Christ [our] life is revealed, then [we] will be revealed with him in glory.”

It is in a garden, just as it was in a garden “in the beginning,” in those first moments of our creation and fall into sin, where God once again calls out. God’s “Where are you” to Adam and Eve becomes Jesus’ question to Mary Magdalene, “Whom are you looking for”?

While this Easter encounter with the risen Christ is still a mystery, God’s Christ calls to us, invites us to enter the empty tomb, to acknowledge that he is risen and is present with and through us. God invites us to do all that, starting in a garden and an empty tomb on Easter morning, before we could ever fully understand this mystery. God invites us, as he did Simon Peter and the beloved disciple, to believe first. Only once we believe, might we understand. And then, as God called Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, the beloved disciple, and all the other Christian disciples after them through the ages, God now calls us to be witnesses.

God calls us to “go and tell [our] brothers” and sisters: We believe. “We are witnesses to all that [Christ] did.” And now Jesus Christ, who died to redeem us, is risen. He is truly risen. Alleluia!

Homily for Thursday, 28 March 2024– Holy Thursday, Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper

Readings of the day: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14; Psalm 116:1-13, 15-16bc, 17-18; 1 Corinthians 11:24-26; John 13:1-15

There is a legend surrounding Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of “The Last Supper.” Da Vinci took many years to find people to be subjects for the painting of Jesus and each of his apostles. First he found a young, handsome man in his late teens to paint as Jesus.

Seven years later, Leonardo da Vinci had finally found enough subjects, out of hundreds of possible people, to have painted Jesus Christ and eleven of his apostles. The only apostle who remained to find a subject and paint was Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Jesus. After another long search, da Vinci was told that his ideal subject for Judas Iscariot was a wretched prisoner in a dark dungeon of Rome. So, da Vinci went down into the dungeon and met the prisoner. Da Vinci had made a deal with the authorities that the prisoner could be released from prison and into da Vinci’s care if he agreed to be the figure of Judas Iscariot in the “Last Supper” painting.

When da Vinci finished painting Judas in the likeness of the haggard prisoner, he showed the prisoner his Judas in the “Last Supper.” The prisoner, taken aback, said back to da Vinci, “You don’t recognize me, do you? I’m the man you painted seven years ago as Jesus Christ. O God, I have fallen so low”!

Sisters and brothers in Christ, who has invited us to tonight’s Eucharistic memorial of his Last Supper: Even if our sinful state weakens our ability to recognize another person, or maybe even ourselves—to recognize the likeness and dignity of God with which God created us—God will never fail to recognize us. God will always and forever recognize God’s own image and likeness, God’s beauty as in the young man Leonardo da Vinci first painted as Jesus Christ in the “Last Supper,” in each of us.

God will always welcome us, tonight in a special way and every time we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, to his table in memory of Jesus’ Last Supper. Our God in Jesus Christ once welcomed twelve very imperfect men to eat his final meal with him before he died. One of those Twelve, the head of the apostles Simon Peter, would go on to deny even knowing Jesus, three times, as Jesus was being led to his crucifixion. Another, Judas Iscariot, would betray Jesus to the authorities to have him killed. All the others except “the disciple whom [Jesus] loved”—who stood by Jesus’ cross with the three Marys: Jesus’ mother, “the wife of Clopas,” and Mary Magdalene—would flee the scene of the cross.

All except one of Jesus’ Twelve apostles would fail to recognize Jesus as he was arrested, condemned, crucified to death. But God, in Christ, would recognize them for who they truly were. God recognizes us for who we truly and fundamentally are, sisters and brothers, even when we do not recognize the God-given dignity in one another or sometimes in ourselves or in all creation; even if, like the prisoner Leonardo da Vinci painted as Judas Iscariot, we “have fallen so low” into the wretchedness of sin.

Sin, and the blindness toward the image and likeness of God in each of us that sin causes, is not our original state of being. Our original state of being is one of beauty, blessing, dignity as God intended: “God blessed them and gave them dominion” over creation, the Book of Genesis says of the first people God created, Adam and Eve. This “blessed” state of being is the state God will always recognize in us, even if or when we obscure it, corrupt it by sin. This blessed state is the figure our Lord invites to share his Last Supper, this Eucharistic memorial of his Last Supper, with him.

But what about our sin? Jesus’ Last Supper; Jesus’ Passion, death, and resurrection that follow his Last Supper show us two main ways in which God responds to our sin, our “fall” from the state of divine grace and blessing in which God first created us. First, the events of Jesus’ Last Supper, Passion, death, and resurrection that we will commemorate over these next three days show us that God’s response to our sin will urge us to confront our sinfulness, our woundedness, our betrayals, our denials, our fleeing the scene of the cross. Jesus’ first disciples who confronted their sinfulness would be the first to be restored to God’s grace through these Paschal events: Peter, who would weep immediately at his denial of Jesus and later be able to confess, three times, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you”; Mary Magdalene, who would be the first to tell the beloved disciple and Peter of the empty tomb on Easter morning; the other disciples upon whom the risen Christ would breathe the peace of the Holy Spirit and ask that they forgive as they had been forgiven; Thomas, who would overcome his doubt to make an astounding profession of faith, “My Lord and my God”!

Second, these events of Jesus’ Last Supper, his Passion, death, and resurrection are a continuation (and a fulfillment) of how God has always acted in history toward us, especially in response to our sin, our lack of recognition of our original state of divine blessing. Whenever we have sinned, God has not waited to begin the process of restoring us to his grace and friendship.

From the moment Adam and Eve first sinned by eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, God did not wait to promise that the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent, the Satan, the prince of deceit and evil. God would put an end to all evil, all corruption from our original state of divine blessing.

We have heard tonight from Exodus part of the long epic of how God guided the people of Israel through forty years of wandering through the desert wilderness, from slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt to the land God promised them. These people of Israel were so often not exactly worthy to be delivered from slavery, from wandering through the wilderness, as God did for them many times. The people of Israel would sin. They would complain about everything. They would test God. They would worship false gods, not the God constantly working to save them. Yet today we hear the high point of the Exodus story, Israel’s deliverance story: When God struck down the firstborn of Egypt but (literally) passed over the people of Israel, allowing them to live and continue their escape from slavery.

And tonight we have heard the fulfillment of the first Passover through the second, which began with Jesus Christ gathering his disciples for a Last Supper before he died. Jesus gives us in this renewed Passover a new commandment, “an example,” a mandate for us that gives this celebration its old name of Maundy Thursday, mandate Thursday: “That you should also do as I have done for you.”

What has Jesus done for us that is so radical, such a fulfillment of the first Passover, and why has he done this for us? He has started by washing feet, which we will remember in a few moments by replicating in this celebration. John’s Last Supper account starts with Jesus taking the place of a slave before his disciples. This act is startling to his disciples, to Peter, who refuses at first to allow Jesus to lower himself to that level.

But this is only the beginning. Jesus will go so far as to take upon himself all our sin, everything that obscures our view, our recognition of the beauty, the grace, the blessing with which God first created us, and have it nailed to a cross with him on Calvary. Tomorrow we will hear the prophet Isaiah’s foretelling of how, on Good Friday, Jesus accepted being made as one “despised and rejected… as one from whom others hide their faces” and who hold “him of no account.”

Jesus would do none of this for us, for our salvation, because we are worthy. On the contrary! But Jesus once gathered his disciples together for a Last Supper. The next day, “he was crucified, died, and was buried… And on the third day he rose again.” Jesus did all this because, no matter whether we recognize our blessedness, our beauty, the image and likeness of God that we all bear, how much God loves each and all of us (so that he, God in Jesus Christ, would die for us!), God will always recognize all this in us. To Jesus, we will always be like the figure Leonardo da Vinci painted as Jesus. We will always be, as maybe one of my favourite Psalm in the Bible (Psalm 8) begins by describing us, “little less than gods.”

And, through this celebration of Holy Thursday of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus only asks of us two things: First, remember what he has done for us on this night. And, second, do as he does: “Do this in remembrance of me”… “You should also do as I have done to you.” We remember and we do for one another as Jesus has done for us when we remember our blessedness, God’s love for us. We remember and fulfill Jesus’ Last Supper commandment to us when we recognize ourselves and one another as Jesus recognizes us perfectly. We remember and fulfill Jesus’ Last Supper commandment when we act on what we recognize, most fundamentally, in ourselves and one another: A people blessed from the first moments of our creation; a people created in and bearing God’s image and likeness (as in a da Vinci painting, but much more beautiful!); a people called to take, eat, and drink of this Last Supper of friendship, of salvation, of God’s self-emptying, of the blessing of our Lord.