Homily: Easter Sunday (Mass during the Day) – Cycle A
Praised be Jesus Christ! [Now and forever!] My dear friends, all of us, I’m sure, know that death is a human condition that no human being holds the power to reverse. Funerals have a way of demonstrating this for us. After praying in the church for our deceased loved one, we take his/her body to a grave in which it is placed and we do not see that person again. The memories of that person live, of course, and we sometimes get glimpses of that person in children and grandchildren, but never again do we see the person him/herself in the flesh. In fact, no one in history has ever been known to be dead, yet who has later been seen to be alive (that is, by a power that isn’t beyond all human power). This is a fact of life.
Another truth of our humanity is that every loss that we experience is a death. Loss of a job, a home, a friendship, a pet, changing schools, moving from one place to another… these are all experiences of loss and each of them is like experiencing a death: because each of them, once they are gone, will never be seen again in the same way. In these last years, we have lost many things. Many of you have lost loved ones, in both expected and unexpected ways. You’ve watched significant changes in your community take place and have suffered the loss of a changing landscape and population. You’ve lost a beloved pastor and have been asked to embrace a new one: and have been asked to embrace (and to be embraced by) a neighboring parish community. We all, in varying degrees, acknowledge and accept that losses come and that we have to deal with them, even though we wish that they didn't happen. In these past years, however, it seems that we have been in a regular state of mourning for what we have lost (and for what we are still losing).
Perhaps, therefore, on this Easter morning, we are better prepared to allow the utter strangeness and power of the resurrection to touch us. Yes, it's Spring and we're happy that we can wear brightly colored clothes and celebrate the budding of plants and trees, and perhaps forget about death and loss for a while. But we shouldn’t allow this to gloss over the fact that the resurrection of Jesus is something radically strange and powerful.
For example, what if instead of saying "happy Easter" to you today, I'd say: "Your husband/wife who has died, is alive and I have seen him/her" or "Your mother/father, grandmother/grandfather, sister/brother, your son/daughter, your best friend who has died, is alive and I have seen him/her"? Think about this for a moment. If tears are welling up in your eyes and an anxiety is starting to churn in your stomach, then you're starting to feel the utter strangeness and power of the resurrection. These, I imagine, are the same things that Mary Madalene, Peter, and the “beloved disciple” felt when they went to Jesus’ tomb that day.
Mary is the first. She “came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark…”, the Gospel writer tells us. When she saw the stone removed from the tomb, she ran, straight away, to Peter. There is no comment that she looked into the tomb, but she must have seen inside enough to know, in spite of it being “still dark”, that the body of Jesus wasn’t there. And when she arrives, what does she say? “It was all true! He is risen!!!” No, that’s not what she says, right? Rather, she says, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb and we do not know where they put him!” Bewildered by the events of Good Friday and trying to come to terms with the loss of her beloved rabbi, Mary is grieved still further by the sight of the empty tomb: so incomprehensible is the resurrection to her still.
Peter, whom Jesus acknowledged as the head of his disciples, after receiving this news, runs to the tomb himself and finds everything as Mary had described. The Gospel writer does not give us his reaction, but we are left to infer that he, too, remained bewildered at the sight. In fact, the reading closes by reminding us that, “they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.”
A few verses later in the same Gospel, the writer tells us “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews…” Can we recognize that these great saints found the idea of the resurrection so incomprehensible at first that they shut themselves up in a locked room? In other words, they found it so difficult to believe what had been declared to them—that is, that Jesus would die an ignominious death and be buried, but would rise again—the last part being so incomprehensible to them that at first they locked themselves in a room for fear that they might suffer the same death as he did. My friends, if the idea of the resurrection doesn’t bewilder us like this, then I’m not sure if we truly understand it.
Therefore, my friends, today is the day that we must let the strange and powerful truth of the resurrection touch us again. This truth should cause us fear and trembling at the power of God, who has the power beyond our human power to restore life that has been lost to death. It also should turn us to adore and praise God and to rejoice that this gift of resurrection is promised to us who have died and rose with him in baptism. Then, as we are absorbed by this incomprehensible truth, we can begin to recognize once again that, as witnesses of this truth, we are called to give testimony.
Mary Magdalene, we will read later in the Gospel passage, soon encounters the Risen Jesus. As she ran immediately, without belief in his resurrection, to tell the disciples, “They have taken the Lord…”, she now runs to boldly proclaim the truth that, just hours before, she couldn’t comprehend: “I have seen the [Risen] Lord!” Then, some time later, as we heard in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Peter, a witness to this same truth, testifies to it in the house of the centurion Cornelius. As witnesses of these things, my brothers and sisters, we, too, are called to give testimony.
We testify to this truth both directly and indirectly. Directly, when we profess Jesus Christ as Lord and that he, being truly human and truly divine, died in his humanity and rose in his humanity by the power of his divinity, and that he now lives eternally. We testify indirectly when we confront the inevitable sufferings in this world with the hope that all has been made new in Christ and so strive, in spite of all of the obstacles that we encounter, to form our families and communities to be places in which this hope permeates everything that we do. We do this by expelling the "old yeast" of malice and wickedness from our lives and replace it with the "unleavened bread" of sincerity and truth. Can we imagine for a moment what our lives would be like if everyone lived in sincerity and truth? It would be the kingdom of God! My brothers and sisters, as witnesses, it has been given to us to declare this strange and powerful truth into the world. This year—this Easter—can we commit ourselves to declare it?
Friends, we have lost much over these past years: but all is not lost. Rather, we continue to be an Easter people and "Alleluia" is still our song! Therefore, let us allow the power and strangeness of the resurrection to permeate us and to transform us into witnesses who proclaim this good news in all that we do, so that the kingdom of God—the kingdom of sincerity and truth… the kingdom of life after death—might manifest itself among us.
Given at St. Charles Borromeo Parish: Peru, IN – April 5th, 2026
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