The Power of the Resurrection in Our Lives

Homily for Easter Saturday

The text from the Acts of the Apostles relates how the Jewish Sanhedrin and the eleven apostles are faced with the acceptance or the dismissal of an overpowering event in both its nature and its effects. For both groups the resurrection of Jesus would force a major shifting of all the furniture in their lives. For the Sanhedrin, the Scriptures and the traditions of their ancestors had reached an unexpected fulfillment and must now be reinterpreted in the light of Jesus. It is all the difference between building a house and then beginning to live in it! For the disciples, Jesus’ resurrection meant that the kingdom of God would not catapult them to world prestige but would make ever greater demands upon them.

In any case, Jesus’ resurrection rolled away more than the stone guarding the entrance to the tomb. It flung wide the doors into the future, and no one could anticipate ahead of time what kind of life lay beyond those doors. Up till now, the Jewish leaders were able to control their individual steps and bring the ancient scriptures to bear upon their questions and problems. By comparing and relating the ancient traditions, acceptable answers could be found. For Jesus’ immediate disciples, especially the eleven who followed him closely during his ministry of preaching and healing, the future could be controlled through Jesus’ miraculous power and piercing wisdom.

Each group was now stripped of power and control. The Jewish leadership was blocked by the enthusiasm of the people who were praising God for what they saw happen in the healing of a crippled man. The eleven were baffled and annoyed that the first announcement of Jesus’ resurrection was brought by a woman, Mary Magdalene, and by two relatively unimportant disciples who had already decided that their hopes about Jesus were a wild but unfortunate dream.

This tension will build up continually until the coming of the Holy Spirit which we celebrate on Pentecost Sunday. It will be the Holy Spirit who will shatter any sense of power and control that both the Jewish leadership and the apostles might think they have. However, before the Holy Spirit can work effectively, the people must accept Jesus as the Messiah, the Savior, even the very offspring of God, equal to God. Jesus casts a new light upon all previous knowledge. The future belonged to God. The disciples of Jesus must use every human means yet most of all they must realize that the love of Jesus will draw the disciples into ways and byways never known by them to exist. Jesus will make new demands, which the disciples up till now would consider impossible. Life cannot be controlled, for the secret of its inner mystery belongs to God alone.

As it was for the Sanhedrin and the apostles, it is also the challenge that faces each of us. Are we willing and able to allow the love of Jesus cast as such a bright light upon our plans for the future or upon our knowledge and information, so that we are plunged far beyond our control? Do we believe that Jesus has risen in our lives, in our hopes, in our plans, in our understanding of the Bible and theology, in our organization of Church, in our desires for our family? If Jesus has risen here at the heart of our existence, our lives will be as transformed as we know to have happened to the eleven and to Judaism.