Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Easter Tuesday

April 11, 2023

Acts 2:36-41, Ps 33, Jn 20:11-18

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.11.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today the Church continues to teach us in the readings of this Easter Octave how to respond to the reality of Jesus Resurrection so that it might change us similarly to the way it changed forever the lives of Jesus’ first followers.

* In today’s Gospel, we see Mary Magdalene weeping copiously at Jesus’ empty tomb. She was bent over, basically heaving as she wept. She had probably been weeping like this from Good Friday, as Jesus was led to Calvary. Her tears at his Crucifixion, her sadness at his death, were blinding her to what was happening all around her. Two angels in white were sitting there at Jesus’ tomb, something that should have startled her as the appearance of angels always startles, but their dazzling brilliance couldn’t penetrate the depth of her darkness. “Woman, why are you weeping?,” they asked, likely in a tone that went far beyond curiosity or fact-seeking inquisitiveness, but with a joy-filled smile suggesting, “Ma’am, how could you possibly be crying?” But she just said, “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.” She loved the Lord Jesus and couldn’t stand to be apart from him. She thought someone had taken his body and, even though she thought he was dead, she at least wanted to be there at his body with the piety we often see in people at cemeteries visiting and praying at the burial spots of their loved ones. The fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to rise on the third day hadn’t yet penetrated. She was probably too much in sorrow that it was too painful for her to think about what Jesus had said before. Then, in one of the most touching scenes in the Gospel, Jesus himself came to her in his Risen Body, and asked her the same question, probably once again with a tone that should have suggested that the waterfalls running down her cheeks, however moving, were not in touch with reality! “Woman, why are you weeping?,” he asked. “For whom are you looking?” She turned around and saw Jesus there, but neither her eyes nor her ears recognized him. She thought he was a stranger and guessed that he was a gardener who for some reason would have had cause to move Jesus’ cadaver. “Sir, if you carried him away,” she pleaded, “tell me where you laid him and I will take him.” That would have been quite a sight her carrying Jesus’ dead body! But it was clearly a sign of her loving affection. Jesus pierced through her sadness by calling her name, “Mary!,” he said. He probably said it in a tone that she well recognized. The one speaking was not a stranger, but the Good Shepherd who calls all his sheep by name. She turned around, called him “Rabbouni,” (Rabbi, Master or Teacher), and then started to hold onto his feet with such force that she would never lose him again. We’ve all had those hugs full of emotion when people never want to let us go. Jesus had to say to her, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Jesus still had a mission to accomplish and she would not be able to keep her relationship with him as it was in the past or as it was in the present. Her relationship was about to change immediately, as Jesus made her an apostle to the apostles, saying, “Go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” And off she went, announcing, “I have seen the Lord!”

* There are so many lessons here for us! Many times, we, too, are so saddened by set-backs, pains, sufferings in ourselves and others, and even deaths,