Are You Utterly Amazed?

Homily for April 5, 2015 (Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord)

Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118; Colossians 3:1-4; Mark 16:1-7

I guess there’s no need for a “spoiler alert” for today’s gospel or even for our larger celebration of the Triduum.  After all, we all know how this story ends; and since we’ve already been confronted with the of solemnity and impending doom of Holy Thursday and the horrors and sorrows of Good Friday, that’s probably not a bad thing. 

Or is it?  Since we’re two millennia removed from the actual events, too much comfort may also inure us to what the first witnesses of the resurrection really experienced.  In today’s passage from Mark, the option for Year B in the Lectionary cycle and the oldest of the four gospels included in the biblical canon, we get an idea of it as the women are described as being “utterly amazed” when they come upon the tomb of Jesus and find the stone rolled away and his body no longer there.  But there’s an additional verse, one that’s missing from this reading but that most scripture scholars believe was also the last one in the original Marcan manuscripts:

Then they went out and fled from the tomb, seized with trembling and bewilderment.  They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid (16:8).

Now that’s some serious stuff.  We come to yet another Easter celebration, a day when the church pews are a little (or a lot!) more filled than on a typical Sunday and when many people come quite literally in their “Sunday best.” It is a day when the power of the Easter proclamation— “He is risen!  Alleluia!”—can easily get lost in a swirl of new shoes, hats, suits, dresses, chocolate and bunnies, just as surely as one’s favorite jellybeans can be obscured by tufts of artificial grass at the bottom of a basket.

Mary, Mary and Salome had no such diversions.  They went to that tomb expecting to end a story, to write the final act of a tragedy.  Instead they found a young man dressed in white announcing to them that they were part of an still-unfolding drama:  “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified.  He has been raised; he is not here.” 

Would that we could have that same sense of wonderment and holy fear in response to the resurrection!  St. Peter had it, as we see in our first reading with his proclamation of the kerygma or the heart of the Christian message to Cornelius and his household:  Jesus was God’s anointed one (or Christ); he did good and healed “all those oppressed by the devil;” he was put to death but was raised from the dead; and we have been commissioned to live and share this good news with the world.  To train ourselves for this great task, we are also to heed the exhortation of St. Paul to seek and think of “what is above,” that is, what is of the kingdom of God—a reign that is not yet fully realized. 

Today above all days we should celebrate where we see resurrection and new life—in our own lives, in our communities and in our world.  We might begin with the tens of thousands of people here in the USA receiving the sacraments of initiation this weekend, particularly those adults and older children who are being baptized and other Christians who are being received into full communion with the Church.  But we certainly don’t have to stop there:  God is doing great things in many places and among many people all the time.  The Lord’s “Sunday best” is every day.  Happy Easter! +