In all honesty, I find it difficult to preach on the Resurrection of Jesus. Not because I don’t believe it – it’s the only reason I am here!

Making doctrinal statements about the Resurrection is easy enough, even if it is just to say, “the Lord is truly risen.” Hopefully you already know these statements, and although it does no harm to repeat them frequently, I am always left with some uneasiness when it comes to trying to “explain” the Resurrection.

It is like trying to grasp a square circle: He is truly dead, yet He truly lives!

I don’t think I am alone in this.

Mary of Magdala, Peter, and later, Thomas and probably others were somewhat bamboozled by the notion.

The Magdalene was sure the body had been stolen. Peter was initially silent. Thomas and the others were, to put it mildly, a little skeptical.

Later on, in the mission of St. Paul, the Greeks would burst out laughing when he talked of Resurrection. Some of the Jews dismissed the whole “Jesus-thing” as sacrilegious.

Philosophers throughout history have baulked at the notion. I have even heard of one Anglican bishop who does not believe in the Resurrection! Now there is a square circle!

Hopefully, all of us here believe without hesitation in the Resurrection. The Lord is indeed truly risen! But do we really understand it?

Suffering and death: now there’s something we understand - in a sense. We don’t like them, and we certainly don’t want them, but somehow they form part of our experience.

But Resurrection is quite different. We do like the idea and we probably want to experience it, but it is frankly a great unknown and perhaps, therefore, even a little frightening.

Could this explain why people seem to love Good Friday, but find the Easter Vigil and Sunday a little less attractive?

The dead Christ we can hold in our arms; but the risen Christ ...?

In the Gospel, Jesus raises three people we know of: the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of Naim and Lazarus. All three of these, however, are restored to the mortal life they had before dying. It’s a turning the clock back.

And there is not one of us here who would not want to have back a close relative or friend who has died. That’s the kind of resurrection we like. But we would want them back as we knew them. We would want them back almost in a selfish sort of way.

Jesus understands this. He restored those three people to life, partly to assuage the grief of those left behind, but partly, and more importantly, as a sign of his own Resurrection.

I say a sign, because their resurrection was only a pale shadow of that of Jesus.

Jesus’ Resurrection was the real thing.

Jesus is not restored to the Apostles in the same way as Lazarus was restored to Martha and Mary. He does not rise only to die again, as did Lazarus.

We must try to understand that Jesus rose to a kind of life which is deathless – immortal. His very body, though the body in which he was born and crucified, no longer breathes the air of this planet or of any planet in order to live.

The risen Jesus breathes the “air of God”, the Holy Spirit.

His risen body contains within itself no seed, root or cause of decay. It is subject neither to space nor to time as we know them. That is why it can be bread and wine; that is why, somehow, we can eat his body and become his body, the Church!

This is something beyond our experience, which defies our microscopes and our science and technology. Immortality is not a gene as yet undiscovered in our DNA. It is not some supreme version of the molecules which make up our mortal body.

The Resurrection “busts” all our categories. It implodes and explodes them. It is the bursting into creation of an absolutely new beginning. It is the new “big bang.” It is, in effect, the birth of the new creation.

My friends, the Risen Body of Christ belongs to a completely different order of reality from the one perceptible to our senses. This may explain why the Risen Jesus did not, as it were, “stay with us” in the kind of visible form we are used to.

In those brief forty days after Easter Sunday, as St. Peter says in the Acts of the Apostles, it was “granted that he be visible, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance.”

Those forty days were a kind of divine pedagogy, “classes” which God gave, if you like, to ensure that the Apostles would gradually grasp the astounding truth that the God-man Jesus had conquered death in his flesh.

Why did the Apostles get this special treatment? Certainly not for themselves only, but for our sakes, for the sake of humanity, so that in believing in the risen Jesus we, too, would be able to share in his risen life, provided we try to share also in his freedom from sin and in his suffering and death.

We believe in the Resurrection of the body!

Perhaps you noticed that, in our Gospel reading from John today, the risen Jesus does not even appear! Reading beyond that passage Jesus does gradually appear to his chosen witnesses, as if respecting their weakness in grasping that he was risen.

Jesus also gradually renews to them their vocation to follow him and their mission to preach the Gospel to all nations before leaving them. And once he has gone, he sends forth (in a different manner and degree) that same Holy Spirit in which he lives upon them and upon all who would believe in Jesus because of their words.

The text I quoted a moment ago is also instructive.

It reads, “This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance.”

What does it mean that “God granted that he be visible”?

It means quite simply that our mortal eyes are not of themselves able to see the risen Lord. They are blind to that dimension of reality, heaven, in which Jesus now lives.

In fact, in the Gospel, the evangelists use two verbs for “to see”: one verb is used of the Apostles when they see Jesus before the Resurrection, as it is used for all other references to people seeing; but the other verb is used only of those who see the risen Jesus.

This was the evangelists’ way of conveying the truth that the eyes of the apostles had to be enabled by a special grace to see the risen Lord.

We might say that, during the time they see him as risen, Jesus draws them momentarily into his own risen milieu. This grace, this gift is among the core graces which qualify the apostles as witnesses of the resurrection.

Our faith, rooted in the Resurrection, is the gift which enables our mortality to see the immortal Christ, but only through a dark glass. That dark glass will be broken when we die and our faith will give way to clear unadulterated vision of the beauty of the Risen Lord.

All our friends who have died and have been pleasing to Jesus now share in that glorious vision. Even if they could, they would not want to come back to us.

Their mortality has been swallowed up in immortality.

If our love for them is not selfish, we should rejoice that they see God face to face.

They will not return to us, but we will go to them, and one day the Christ this world does not, cannot, see will emerge from his invisible presence for every eye to see.

Those who have loved him in this life will be reunited and immortalized in their bodies and, from their risen flesh, all redeemed humanity will gaze upon God.

The Resurrection will be complete; the circle will be squared.

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, April 16^th, 2006

Annunciation, DC: 8.30 am