Seeing the Risen Jesus

Solemnity of Easter

The entrance to the aediculum

   [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]  One of the most memorable things that I experienced when I went to the Holy Land for the first time in 2007 as a seminarian was attending Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the place where Jesus died and rose from the dead.  At the place where the tomb was, there is a small building inside the church called the aediculum, and inside that aediculum is where a slab of stone rests that held the dead body of our Lord.  The Franciscans gave us permission to have Mass there one day.  The way Mass works in that space is that the Liturgy of the Word/Mass of Catechumens happens outside the aediculum.  For the Liturgy of the Eucharist/Mass of the Faithful, the priest enters the aediculum and says the Eucharist Prayer inside there, which you can hear, but not see, because of how small it is inside.
    The great moment is when the priest gets to the point where he says, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” because the priest leaves the aediculum, and, holding the Body of the Lord above the chalice says, while showing the Eucharist to the people.  Part of the power is that this is the same risen Lord, coming from His tomb, alive for us to see, though of course under sacramental signs.
    As we celebrate Easter today, we remember the event that changed the course of human history.  While the Prophet Elisha had raised a person from the dead in the Old Testament, and our Lord had raised the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of Nain, and Lazarus from the dead, the resurrection was altogether different.  Our Lord’s Body no longer suffered under the restrictions of the physical world, as we will hear next Sunday when we hear about Him entering a locked room through the door.  While the Body was certainly His, and bore the marks of His crucifixion, in a glorified state there was something different about it.  I often imagine it as having a slight glow to it, though maybe that was not the case.  It was different enough that the disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize Christ as He walked with them, until He broke bread in a room with them.  
    But that event that changed everything, starting really with Good Friday and culminating with Easter Sunday, we celebrate and enter into each Sunday in particular, and each time we come to Mass more generally.  At the Mass, we begin by acknowledging that we are sinners and that Christ suffered for us and because of us.  We stand at the foot of the Cross and nail our sins there with Christ so that they can be forgiven.  We offer our lives–the joys and sorrows, pain and comforts, work and leisure–since the last time we attended Mass united to the perfect offering of Christ to His heavenly Father on Calvary.  We stand there at Calvary and hear God’s word proclaimed to help us understand what work God does in our lives.  And then, during the Eucharist Prayer/Canon of the Mass, we enter into Christ’s offering of Himself on the cross, and His burial in the tomb.  In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church references how the altar, besides being symbol of Christ Himself and the Cross, also symbolizes the tomb.
    And that is perhaps a bit clearer as we celebrate Mass facing the Lord together, or ad Dominum.  During the three days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Christ’s Body laid in the tomb, unseen by all others.  After the elevations which follow the words of institution, the words that Christ Himself spoke (“This is my Body”; “This is my Blood), Christ is not seen by the faithful in the pews until the priest shows the Body of Christ while saying, “Behold the Lamb of God.”  This is, as it were, Christ breaking forth from the tomb, and appearing before His disciples after the Resurrection.  The same experience I had in Jerusalem, of seeing Christ in the Eucharist come forth from His tomb you can experience as I remove the Body of Christ from the tomb of the altar and He rises so that you all can see Him and His glorified Body, which is not limited in the way our bodies are limited.
    And the Lord does not just show Himself from afar as I show Him to you.  At the time for the reception of Holy Communion, He comes near to you, as He came near to Mary Magdalene at the tomb or as He came near the Blessed Mother, the Apostles, and the disciples in the Upper Room.  He stands right before you, and then even enters in to you to bring that power of the Resurrection into your individual lives.
    And what is our response, then?  The same as the disciples who realized that Christ was risen: they had to tell other disciples, and, after Pentecost, everyone.  Knowing that Christ had died, but that He was truly risen, they could not remain silent, but shared that joy and the transformation of their lives that the Resurrection made.  Death no longer had the last say.  Sin no longer could hold them in slavery.  They could not contain the joy of that revelation, but had to tell others.  And so should we.  The joy of this day should cast away all sorrow and fear and lead us to greater holiness of life.

Inside the aediculum

    Christ has risen from the dead.  It is not just a past event, but a reality that we get to join every Sunday, which the Church calls a “little Easter.”  May we recognize the Risen Christ as we see and receive Him in the Eucharist, the Lamb of God, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, live and reign for ever and ever.

People of the Empty Tomb

The Resurrection of the Lord—Easter Sunday

There I was, standing in line to go into the aediculum, the structure which is built over the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.  I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but I know that I was getting more and more excited just to go inside and see whatever it was that was in there.  I had been waiting in line for a while with all the other pilgrims who wanted to see the place where Jesus had been buried.  Finally, it was my turn.  I ducked down to walk inside the structure.  I waited in a very small ante-chamber for the group of four people ahead of me to leave.  And then I went in, and guess what I saw?  Nothing!

Now sure, there were candles and icons, but it was an empty tomb!  Jesus was not there.  I saw almost the same thing that Peter and John saw when they arrived at the tomb: nothing.  They saw Jesus’ burial cloths, but other than that, they saw nothing.  I wasn’t expecting to see Jesus’ Body there, but still I think I did expect to see something amazing.  Instead, it was not very ornate: just a few icons of the Resurrection and a few candles burning.

We should be people who expect to see nothing.  Our faith centers around going to a certain place to see nothing.  As believers in the Resurrection, we are believers in not seeing what we should have seen: a corpse of a 33-year-old Jewish man.  Instead, just as Mary of Magdala told Peter and John, and just as Peter and John told the other apostles and disciples in the Upper Room, there was nothing there.  We are the people who rely on the eyewitness testimony of at least four or five people that the tomb is empty.  We are also the people who rely on the eyewitness testimony of the apostles and disciples who not only saw or heard about an empty tomb, but saw the risen Jesus.  

We are the people about whom St. Peter spoke in the first reading: the people who must rely on the witnesses chosen by God in advance, the witnesses who ate and drank with Jesus after He rose from the dead.  We are the ones who received the good news from our parents, who received it from theirs, who received it from theirs, all the way back to eleven, mostly uneducated, men, who told our ancestors that they saw Jesus risen from dead and that if we want that new life, then we, too, must be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and believe in Jesus and follow Him and His rule of life.

Because Christianity has become so common, we often forget the power of the message that there is new life after death.  We forget what force that proclamation has.  But to the first believers it was incredible–literally unbelievable.  How could a man rise from the dead?  But the story was too consistent.  The uneducated fishermen, tax collector, and rag tag bunch of men had too convincing of arguments.  And they were willing to die for that message.  Certainly if they had made it up, they would have recanted as they were about to be skinned alive, crucified, or beheaded.  But they didn’t.  They were joyful, even feeling unworthy to die in a manner like their Lord, and “love for life did not deter them from death.”  Those who believed the apostles also put up with horrible pain and torture; even though they had never seen Jesus.  They just trusted the words of these men.  They were nailed to posts, doused with oil, and lit on fire to illumine the Roman evening.  They were fed to wild beasts, maimed, tortured, and mocked.  But the power of the testimony of those witnesses was strong enough to give them no fear over those who could harm the body but not the soul.  They believed the story of the empty tomb.  Do we?

To believe in the empty tomb, the empty tomb that I saw with my own two eyes, is to fear nothing but to be separated from God.  To believe in the empty tomb is to be impelled, drawn, summoned to proclaim it to others.  To believe in the empty tomb is not simply to believe in a negative, a lack of something, but to believe that the tomb is empty because Jesus is not dead, but alive, and that when Christ returns to show Himself to those who believed in the words of His witnesses, they, too, “will appear with him in glory.”

When was the last time we lived as if we believed in the empty tomb?  When was the last time we lived not worrying about those who can harm our prosperity, but focusing on the one who saved our soul?  That belief is not meant to eliminate all the suffering in our life, but to help us to realize that suffering is not the end unless we want it to be.  And then it only is the end for us because we would rather have the suffering we know than the heavenly bliss that we have to take on the words of eleven uneducated men.  

Believers in the empty tomb still struggle to make a living; still get sick; still watch their loved ones struggle with pain and even death.  But believers in the empty tomb can at the same time know that for those united to Christ in baptism, they have already died with Him, and should rise with Him, too.  

I have been to the tomb in Jerusalem.  I have seen the candles and the icons.  I have seen the emptiness which means that the Resurrection is real.  I still struggle to live each day as a believer in the empty tomb, giving proof that I do not fear what the world may throw at me because I belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God the Father, and the Father cares for those who are His own.  Maybe you struggle to live that way, too.  But today, let us reaffirm our faith in the empty tomb so that we can live like the eleven whose lives were changed by the Resurrection, and who changed others’ lives by the Resurrection.  Today, as the first of many days, let us live as people of the empty tomb with zeal for the kingdom and confidence that God will take care of us in all circumstances, just as He took care of Jesus, His Beloved Son, in raising Him from the dead.