May 25 1989
The Lord has truly risen!
The wonderful thing about the gospels is they do not demand that we take the Resurrection of Christ at face value. Their authors, Luke and John in particular, take great pains to show that for the disciples themselves, the first Easter was no fait accompli.
Indeed, so totally traumatic must have been the passion and crucifixion of the Master that at the outset, these lowly fishermen found it virtually impossible to believe that He would come back from the grave as promised. He had died. They were lost. That was all.
Alas. The women were no help. At crack of dawn after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James and Salome, had gone to anoint the dead Jesus, found His tomb empty, and come back with some wild story about apparitions, but why trust them? They were probably still too distraught over the shocking events of the past few days.
Under the circumstances, the most plausible explanation was that robbers had broken into the tomb and taken Him away. Meanwhile, the priests at the temple were peddling quite another story. It was the disciples themselves who had stolen His body!
At that moment, the disciples could do no more than hide and huddle together, petrified by dark forebodings about what lay in store for them. For with the Master gone, who would save them from the Sanhedrin and an end as ignominious as His? How to mollify that unruly mob now loudly complaining they have been had by a false messiah and his minions? Spared either fate, where would they go and what were they to do with themselves next?
It is amidst such confusion and trepidation that the real story of Esther begins to unfold, a story of longing perfected by love, fear vanquished through hope, and doubt yielding to faith. In the end, as the gospels of John and Luke tell it, the Resurrection is all about human frailty overtaken and transfigured by divine grace.
A repentant sinner, two cowards, and an obdurate, ornery man: to these unlikely characters above all the rest Jesus revealed the real meaning of and import of His Resurrection.
In John we find Mary Magdalene remaining outside the tomb after the others have left, unabashedly weeping “Because they have taken my Lord and I don’t know where they have put him.” So distressed is she that when Jesus himself appears, she mistakes Him for the gardener and pleads, “Tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.”
Her grief, persistence and courage are rewarded. Quietly, gently, in a voice she could not have mistaken for anyone else’s, He calls her by name: Mary! Immediately she recognizes Jesus and exclaims: Rabboni, Beloved Master!
He calls, she replies. He is risen. At that moment, everything else is superfluous.
Luke next recounts that later in the day, two disciples were going to Emmaus, ‘a village seven miles from Jerusalem.” Their hopes crushed, they were on their way home, distancing themselves from the terrors of the previous days and trying to come to terms with an uncertain future.
A stranger joined them on the road. It was Jesus, “but their eyes were held and they did not recognize him.” They told him the reason for their dejection; three days after he was crucified and buried, their Master had disappeared from the tomb. Their women were spreading strange stories but “Some friends of our group went to the tomb…but him they did not see.”
Patiently He explained Scriptures to them, but they were unconvinced. As it was growing late, they asked Him to spend the night with them at Emmaus. There, “When they were at table, he took the bread, said a blessing, broke it and gave each apiece.” Only then did the two recognize Jesus, but He had vanished.
But what they had failed to see with their eyes earlier they had felt in their hearts. For as they now realized, ”Were not our hearts filled with ardent yearning when he was talking to us on the road and explaining the Scriptures?” Mysteriously, unexpectedly, anguish had turned to stillness, sadness has given birth to joy.
No such thing for another disciple, however. John explains that when Jesus first appeared to the rest, “Thomas the Twin, one of the Twelve, was not with them.” When told that they had seen the Lord, he replied that he would not believe until he had seen the mark of the nails with his own eyes and put his hand in Jesus’ side.
Eight days later, he got exactly what he asked for. The Risen Christ stood in front of him and said,”Put your finger here and see my hands; stretch out your hand and put it into my side. Doubt no longer but believe.” To which a shamefaced Thomas could only reply, as doubtless all of us will someday:” You are my Lord and my God.”
Beside an empty tomb, on the road to Emmaus, face to face with the Savior: at the sound of His voice, from the glow in our hearts, and at the sight of His wounds, we know that we woill rise as He is risen and rejoice our waiting.
To my brothers in Malaybalay, a blessed Easter.
