Easter Sunday, Year C
First Reading: Acts 10:34a, 36-43
Second Readings: Rom 6:3-11, Col 3:1-4, 1 Cor 5:6b-8
Gospel Reading: Lk 24:1-12, Jn 20:1-18, Lk 24:13-35
The readings this Sunday lay great stress on the facts of Christ’s Resurrection: Christ has died, but he is not dead. He has risen! He is alive!
“The Resurrection above all constitutes the confirmation of all Christ’s works and teachings,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. By his Resurrection, Christ gave “the definitive proof of his divine authority, which he had promised.”
In order that our faith might be “in accordance” with our reason, God willed that “external proofs of his revelation should be joined to the internal helps of the Holy Spirit.”
These “external proofs” include “the miracles of Christ and the saints,” the fulfillment of the prophecies, “the Church’s growth and holiness, and her fruitfulness and stability,” the Catechism says. All these “motives of credibility” show that the assent of faith is “by no means a blind impulse of the mind.”
However, Christ’s Resurrection is the supreme example.
Many people refuse to accept the facts we hear in this Sunday’s Readings. “It’s just wishful thinking,” they say. “The apostles were expecting him to rise again, so they imagined it; they talked themselves into it. They may even have deliberately taken his body out of the tomb and hidden it.”
However, these objections do not hold up. The apostles were fishermen and tax collectors: hard-headed, practical men. Jesus had had to rebuke them repeatedly for their lack of faith.
Moreover, as the Catechism notes, they were not “seized by a mystical exaltation” after Christ’s death; they were “demoralized and frightened.” The shock of Jesus’ death had “drastically tested” their weak faith.
When Mary Magdalene said she had seen him, they flatly “refused to believe it.” When two others said they had seen him on the road to Emmaus, they “put no more faith in them than in Mary.” Finally, when he appeared to them, He “took them to task” for their disbelief and stubbornness.”
Even face to face with him, they were still “incredulous for sheer joy and wonder.” In fact, “they thought they were seeing a ghost” and Jesus had to prove he was alive by eating some fish.
No; “the hypothesis that the Resurrection was produced by the apostles’ faith (or credulity) will not hold up,” the Catechism concludes. On the contrary, “their faith in the Resurrection was born ... from their direct experience of the reality of the risen Jesus.”
In the Readings this Sunday, the sacred writers attempt to communicate this “direct experience” to us. Their language is the language of history, even though they are describing something never before heard of. The only people who see anything unhistorical in their accounts are those who already refuse to admit the possibility of resurrection from the dead.
“If the dead are not raised, then Christ was not raised; and if Christ was not raised, your faith is worthless,” St. Paul says. “You are still in your sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ are the deadest of the dead”—however much we praise their “legacies” and pretend that they will “live forever” in our memories.
Jesus, who is God the Son, allowed a real death to separate his human soul from his human body. However, even then, his body and soul remained united to the Person of God the Son and so divine power preserved his corpse from corruption. Now we, as members of his Mystical Body, the Church, can expect to rise from the dead “in him.”
“The Resurrection of Jesus is the crowning truth of our faith in Christ,” the Catechism says. It was “believed and lived as the central truth by the first Christian community, handed on as fundamental by Tradition, established by the documents of the New Testament, and preached as an essential part of the Paschal mystery along with the cross: Christ is risen from the dead! Dying, he conquered death; to the dead, he has given life.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-28 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 29, “Virtue,” will be available in YouTube form starting April 17.