A homily for The Resurrection of the Lord (Easter), April 20, 2025
Acts 10:34a, 37-43, Colossians 3:1-4, John 20:1-9
Sometimes, I just don’t get it.
Every now and then, there are things I “should” understand, but don’t.
Every now and then, the harder I think about certain things, the more my brain hurts, and I still don’t understand.
Yet the biggest challenges are the things I kinda-sorta understand. Those can be incredibly nettlesome. I’ll bet we all have some of those buzzing around our brains.
I know the Earth’s rotation changes our perspective on the Sun throughout the day, but it still looks as if ol’ Sol is rising over the Atlantic every morning and setting over Liz and John’s house every night.
I know our cats can’t really speak, let alone speak English, yet their mewling in the morning sounds a lot like “brek-faaasst” and their victuals alert at 10 p.m. is definitely “now!”
Yes, we all have puzzling experiences in our lives. Head-scratchers. Things that, on the surface, make no sense, yet here they are.
Even more puzzling are the ones we experience by proxy, which we learn about from people with firsthand knowledge.
And then there are the ones passed down through generations, through centuries, through millennia. We don’t have access to people with firsthand knowledge of the phenomena; they long ago passed into the arms of their Maker.
Regarding those, our puzzlement becomes twofold. First, we ponder whether what we’ve heard comes from a reliable source. Then we try to dope out what we’ve been told.
Often, the answer to the first aspect determines the second: how we assess what we’ve heard. If we hear something puzzling, even improbable or seemingly impossible, from a nonetheless believable, reputable source, then we accept it as truth.
That’s how we come to believe without firsthand knowledge.
We hear and we believe.
We believe what we’ve heard to be truth.
We believe it to be truth, in mind and heart, right down to our toenails.
And the truth we celebrate today, the truth we believe today, the truth handed down for 2,000 years via reliable sources powered by grace and inspired by the Holy Spirit, is this:
Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, Prince of Peace, Son of Man, descendant of King David and itinerant rabbi, overcame his wrongful execution by rising from the dead under his own divine power on the Third Day. In doing so, he atoned for the sin of Adam and for every sin ever committed until his time on Earth and for every sin yet to be committed, until Judgment Day, the last day.
Christos anesti! Alethos anesti! The gates of Heaven are open!
Still, for some of us, total belief in the Resurrection can be a heavy lift.
Our modern curiosity and our contemporary immersion in science and technology compel us to ask how he did that. And the Resurrection doesn’t get a chapter in any Organic Chemistry textbook.
Other aspects of our lives threaten to diminish the power of The Lord’s Resurrection, to render it as No. Big. Deal.
Our fictional CGI films and television and streaming platforms often show resurrections supposedly willed by the deceased person. Every video game more advanced than Pong has built in more lives than the proverbial cat. All a player needs to do is hit a button and voila! They’re back in the game. Alive again.
What Jesus did was no game. What Jesus continues to do is no game. What Jesus wants us to do is no game.
Our Easter celebration revels in the truth that the flesh-and-blood Jesus is risen from the dead, inhabiting a glorified body and bridging the earthly and the divine.
We celebrate that Jesus Christ is risen today, and we are free again to sing Alleluia.
As one person of our omnipresent Trinitarian God, Jesus stands alongside every one of us to support us and guide us through our lives. In return for his awesome devotion to us, Jesus asks us to devote ourselves to Almighty God and to our neighbors, our sisters and brothers, especially the least among us, the Christs among us who have been pushed to the edges of society. Of them, there are many.
As we will hear in Scriptures through the coming weeks of the Easter season, whenever Jesus appeared to his disciples after the Resurrection, he commanded them to continue his work and share his Good News.
Today, Jesus appears to us with that same command.
