Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Easter Monday

April 10, 2023

Acts 2:14.22-33, Ps 16, Mt 28:8-15

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.10.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today on this beautiful Easter Monday, we encounter a huge contrast in the readings about how to respond to the startling fact of Jesus’ resurrection.

* The chief priests and the elders of the people responded with denial. It wasn’t enough for them to use betrayal to arrest Jesus, illegality to try him, slander to accuse him before Pilate and malice to whip up the crowd to choose a murderer Barabbas over him. Now when the guards they had requested be placed at the tomb returned to them to tell them what happened during the night — that angels appeared, that there was a burst of light, that the stone was rolled back, that Jesus wasn’t there but his garments were left — the chief priests and the elders reacted once again with evil. They bribed the guards to lie, to say that while they were asleep, Jesus’ disciples came and stole his body and somehow carried him naked while the Sabbath was still occurring to some other part of the city. Of course if they were asleep, they would have had no idea what happened to Jesus’ body! But once people have become accustomed to, not to mention indomitable in, living a lie, they’ll begin to wrap it with many other lies not even grasping the implausibility. There are still many who want to deny the reality of the resurrection but as St. Thomas Aquinas once wrote, if the Resurrection didn’t happen, then the fact that a bunch of barely literate fishermen and nobodies from Galilee could convince so many down-to-earth people throughout the ancient world falsely that it did and all be willing to lay down their lives for that invented reality would be a greater miracle than the miracle of the Resurrection itself!

* There are some who deny the resurrection asserting that Jesus had just risen from the dead in disciples’ hearts, as a thing of faith. St. Paul responded very sharply to these ideas that were prevalent in ancient Corinth. If Christ didn’t rise from the dead then our faith is worthless. It’s all based on a lie. There are others who, while not denying the fact of the resurrection, want to deny its consequences. They don’t want to live with the Risen Jesus. They choose to remain down in the dumps. They choose not to seek the things that are above with the Risen and living Jesus, as we heard St. Paul urge the Colossians yesterday morning, instead choosing the things of darkness, sadness, sin and death. We need to be alert to these signs even in ourselves, that there are parts of us that want to deny the power of Jesus’ resurrection because we prefer not to be transformed in the dramatic way that the resurrection transformed Jesus’ dead body! Pope Francis wrote in his apostolic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel that many Catholics behave as if life is a long Lent without Easter, as if they’re perpetually returning from a funeral. Not even the fact of Jesus’ resurrection can brighten their day because the prefer to focus their attention and live in the negative. There are also other Catholics, far more common, who likewise don’t live in practical denial of the Resurrection, who don’t behave as if they’re perpetually returning from the cemetery, but who don’t comport themselves as if their life is much influenced by the reality of the Resurrection. To the extent that Easter is a transformative experience for them, it means mainly that they can eat chocolate or drink wine and beer again after the Lenten Season! It doesn’t mean that they have been changed at their core.