Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Easter Sunday (B), Vigil

April 3, 2021

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.3.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Happy Easter, everyone! This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to wish you and your family a Happy Easter as we enter into the consequential conversation the Lord Jesus, risen from the dead, wants to have with each of us. He wants to meet us like he met Mary Magdalene in the Garden and call us by name. He wants to converse with us like he did with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, to make our hearts burn as he explains the word of God to us, and help us to recognize him in the Breaking of the Bread. He wants to speak with us like he spoke with the fearful apostles in the Upper Room, to wish us peace, to show us his hands and his side, to impart to us the Holy Spirit, and to send us out from the Upper Room, like he sent them. Jesus ultimately wants to change our lives this Easter and help us to enter more deeply than ever before into his triumph of light over darkness, joy over sadness, love over hatred and life over death. For this to occur, however, we can’t live Easter in a routine way, as just another important day that will be over within 24 hours. We can’t live it just as an Octave or a 50 day season. We really have to let what Easter means sink deeply within us so that it changes our thinking, our being, our doing, our loving. We have to enter into the Easter metamorphosis.

* After the incarnation when God the Son took on our nature and entered the world, Easter is the most important occurrence and fact in the history of the world. It’s a fact that, even though the prophets like Ezekiel foretold it, even though Jesus explicitly mentioned it on several occasions, the disciples and apostles were slow to believe. Mary Magdalene thought Jesus’ cadaver was stolen and didn’t even recognize him initially when he spoke to her in the Garden. Peter, when he ran to the tomb, saw the burial cloths and thought they were evidence not of the resurrection but of the theft. Thomas, even after the other ten apostles told them Jesus had appeared to them, refused to believe unless he could probe his sacred stigmata with his own hands.

* Easter is a fact, moreover, that many have actively opposed. It started in the ancient world with some of the religious leaders of the Jewish people who tried to bribe the guards to say that Jesus’ disciples just came to steal his body. It happened in ancient Corinth where many, including those who claimed to be disciples, said that it didn’t really matter whether Christ physically rose from the dead, because the only important thing is whether we believe he did, a foolish idea that still pops up in heterodox theology faculties at various universities and in scores of articles and documentaries around this time in which so-called “experts” who try to claim that Jesus’ resurrection is just a myth. But St. Paul replied that if Christ didn’t rise from the dead, our faith is vain, it’s worthless, it’s nothing more than a belief in a fairy tale. And worse than that, he says, we’d still be in our sins and we’d still be doomed to die eternally.

* As Christians, we have to be vigorous in believing, explaining and defending the fact of the resurrection. The early Christians knew clearly what they were professing about the resurrection and why. They had to, because they were continually ridiculed for believing that a god could die or a man rise from the dead. The Romans deemed them insane, much like we today would view someone who claimed...