Reflections on the readings for Easter Sunday (April 12, 2020): Acts 10:34,37-43; PS 118:1-2,16-17,22-23; COL 3:1-4; JN 20:1-9
MISSIO offers “Preaching Mission,” as a homily help, providing connections to mission from the readings of Sundays, Feast Days and Holy Days.
On this Easter Sunday, we once again hear the story of the Resurrection.
In the Gospel according to St. John, we meet three people who lead us to the discovery of that world-changing miracle. First, the loyal Mary of Magdala who walked in the pre-dawn darkness to find the stone at the tomb’s entrance rolled back. She runs to tell Peter and John that someone has taken Jesus’ body away. The two Apostles rush to see for themselves. Peter enters the now empty tomb and sees the burial cloths and notices that the one that had covered Christ’s face was rolled up in a different place. Finally, it is John’s turn. “Then the other disciple also went in, this one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed. For they did not yet understand the Scripture that He had to rise from the dead” (John 20:8-9).
In the moment that each of these three saw the empty tomb, only John truly knew that Jesus lived. Before He saw the Risen Christ, he believed from the depths of his soul. Mary and Peter were uncertain, although surely hopeful that something extraordinary had happened. But only John found something in that abandoned sepulcher to give him the certainty of Christ’s Resurrection. Surely, each of them loved Jesus. Perhaps John received this grace-filled insight because the bond he shared with his Teacher and Friend opened him to complete faith in what must otherwise have been impossible. It was a gift – one that the Son of God soon offered to the others when He appeared to them. When each of us trusts that our Savior will never fail us, never let us down, we, also, will be wholeheartedly convinced that our own death, too, has been utterly destroyed in the brilliant light of that Easter dawn.