Sermons from the Latins/Sermon 25
Easter Sunday.
Christ's Resurrection and Ours.
"He is risen and goeth before you into Galilee, and there you shall see Him." — Mark xvi. 6, 7.
SYNOPSIS.
Ex. : False and true motives for joy at Easter.
I. Christ's Resurrection : 1. Basic truth. 2. Testimony of Christ. 3. Of Jews and Apostles.
II. Proofs: 1. Many necessary witnesses. 2. Reliable. 3. Constant unto death.
III. Our resurrection : 1. Pledged in Christ's. 2. Laws of Nature and justice. 3. Christ can and will redeem His promise.
Per. : 1. Tragedy and comedy. 2. Infidel, Christian, Catholic. 3. Faith, hope, love.
SERMON.
Brethren, Lent with its sorrows and Easter with its joys and glories have come and gone, and what impressions have they left? Alas! I fear, we mourned in Lent as children do, not knowing why, but weeping just because the Church, our Mother, wept. Our Easter joy, I fear, is woefully conventional, inspired perhaps by the genial breath of spring, or the consciousness that fasting and sackcloth have given way to feasting and the respectability of brand-new clothes, Easter rejoicings, my Brethren, should be more thoughtful, more rational. They should be founded on the deep-laid truths that lie beneath it all, and on the vast field of possibilities the Resurrection opens up to Christians. " For," says St. Paul, " if Christ be risen from the dead, therefore we also shall rise again; therefore we are true witnesses of God; therefore our preaching is true and our faith divine; therefore the penitent's sins are forgiven; therefore they who have died in the Lord have not perished; therefore we shall all rise again in the resurrection at the last day."
Brethren, Christ's Resurrection is the fundamental truth of Christianity. Prove to me that Christ arose not, and in a moment I am an infidel; prove to me that Christ arose, and in that instant I conceive a faith broad enough to accept all the teachings of Christ and Christ's Church; a hope that stops not short of everlasting life for my soul and for my body too, and a charity for God and my fellowman which, God willing, will procure me a happy and a blessed immortality. For if Christ rose again, then beyond all peradventure, He was God, and every word He uttered and every truth taught by the one true Church wherein He promised to abide forever, must be infallible beyond all doubt. For Christ had said: " I have power to lay down My life, and I have power to take it up again," words, which, if justified by the event, proclaim the speaker to have been a God. Lazarus, and other few before and since, have been recalled to life, but always, mind you, by a power other than their own, but only God, the Arbiter of life and death, could say: " I die at pleasure and at pleasure do I rise again." In fact on this one truth, viz., that He should rise again, Christ staked His reputation as a man and His claim as God upon the world's credence and fidelity. All His other miracles had a distinct purpose immediately in view, whether it was that He pitied the widow of Nairn, or had compassion on His famished followers, or rescued them from shipwreck; and invariably He enjoined silence concerning such evidences of His Godhead, until He should be risen from the dead. Nay, when pressed by His enemies for a proof of His divinity, He refused the sign they asked, saying: " No other proof shall be given you but that of Jonas the prophet, who after three days came forth from the whale even as I shall from the tomb, for if you destroy this temple, My body, in three days I shall raise it up again." His position, therefore, was that His Resurrection was to be the crowning proof of His divinity and that without His Resurrection He and all His teaching and wonder-working would have come to naught. Not only Christianity, but all religion from the beginning, would have been discredited had not God's promise to our fallen parents that their seed should conquer sin and death been fulfilled in the person of the risen Saviour. This supreme importance of the Resurrection as an historic fact was recognized by Christ's enemies and friends alike. The Jewish nation's honor was at stake, for if Christ rose again they were forever branded as the murderers of the Messias, but if He failed to rise they could take credit to themselves for having justly punished an impostor; and hence they sought by every means to prove His promise unfulfilled. The Apostles, on the other hand, seem to have preached at first as though the Resurrection was the only dogma of our faith, styling themselves the witnesses thereof and taking care to elect as Judas's successor an eye-witness of the Lord's arising. " For," says St. Paul, " if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain and our faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God and we are yet in our sins, and they who have died in the Lord have perished and we are of all men the most miserable." Whereas, I repeat, and repeat and repeat again, if Christ did rise from the dead we are bound by inexorable logic to admit His divinity, to accept all His teachings and all the teachings of His Church, and to conform our lives thereto — we are bound to fall at the Saviour's feet with St. Thomas, and repeat Thomas's all-embracing profession of faith: "My Lord and my God."
Brethren, what evidence, therefore, have we of the truth of Christ's Resurrection? What evidence! In all history there is no fact more clearly proven. God's providence, recognizing* the tremendous importance of this truth, has employed the hatred of the Jews and the incredulity of the Apostles — the gravest obstacles to belief in it — to be the strongest arguments in its favor. A lawyer with Christianity for his client, engaged to prove Christ's Resurrection against the modern Pharisees and Sadducees, would find the earning of his fee an easy task indeed. For, a fact to which many and necessary witnesses testify; witnesses so obstinate in unbelief that they could not be deceived and so circumstanced that they could not deceive others; witnesses willing to seal their wonderfully unanimous testimony with their blood — a fact like that, I say, must be accepted for certain by every impartial, or even prejudiced, tribunal. Now they that saw the risen Saviour were, first of all, many. To say nothing of the angels in the vacant sepulchre who said to the holy women: " He is arisen; He is not here," or of the guard of soldiers who saw Him rise but held their tongue through bribery, we find in the New Testament, which, whatever else it be, is at least true history — we find therein, I say, explicitly recorded twelve distinct apparitions of the resurrected Saviour, one of which at least five hundred persons witnessed. That many other apparitions went unrecorded St. Luke declares, saying that "Christ showed Himself at frequent intervals for forty days speaking to His followers of the kingdom of God." But why, you ask, did Christ appear exclusively to His friends? Why did He not confound His enemies by appearing to them too? Brethren, Christ's life-long practice was to hide His glory and reveal His shame. Only three climbed Thabor, but vast throngs lined the slopes of Calvary, And justly so, for the kingdom He came to found was not of earth, nor to be built by means so earthly as to seem to rest on human causes. Besides, it is a law of Nature and of grace that all great changes and reforms result from the efforts of a few. The surging masses cannot be converted instantly, but are as plastic matter which skilful hands must gradually work and mould. Nothing is so fickle as a throng. The eleven, when they saw their Lord, believed and were glad, but many of the five hundred doubted. The multitude had seen His wondrous miracles but with what result? To-day they cry: " Hosanna," tomorrow, " Crucify Him; " and if they had refused to credit Him in life, neither would they have believed Him risen from the dead. Still witnesses, if need be, may be found even among Christ's enemies, for St. Justin, then a Jew, declares the Resurrection was taken by all for granted. It is admitted by the Jewish historian Josephus, and according to Tertullian a circumstantial account of it was written by Pontius Pilate to the Emperor Tiberius. Now are our witnesses reliable? Certainly their opportunities for knowing what they testify were most exceptional. Intimately acquainted with Our Lord, they had through forty days repeated chances to establish His identity. It was but natural that at His first appearance they should suspect they saw a spirit, but Christ dispelled that notion saying: " See by My hands and feet that it is I, Myself; handle and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as you see Me to have." St. John tells us the Apostles and disciples " as yet knew not the Scriptures that He must rise again from the dead." They did not expect and could hardly believe His body had arisen, though the fact that His ignominious death had not shaken their faith in Him seems to prove they looked for His return in some spiritual, ghostly shape. But now their error is corrected, for there is Jesus as in life standing in their midst. Some wondrous change has taken place indeed, for lo! He comes and goes, the doors being closed, but still it is the solid human body of the Saviour, wounded in hands and feet and side. And not His body only but His soul, for by eating, conversing and expounding Scripture He shows Himself endowed with vegetative, sentient, and rational existence. And not His body and soul alone, but His divinity, too, as was proved at the sea of Tiberias, where He repeated for the weary fishermen the miraculous draught of fishes. Certainly on the score of knowledge of the event, our witnesses are beyond reproach. But were they over-credulous, perhaps? " Oh foolish and slow of heart to believe " were the words with which Christ Himself upbraided their incredulity. For when the women returned to tell of the empty tomb, of the angels and the folded cloths therein, the Apostles rejected their words as idle tales, nor did they credit even Peter and John, nor Magdalen who came just then from speaking with her Lord. Thomas voiced the secret sentiments of them all when he said: " Except I shall see in His hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe." Now would men so set against deception be apt to set about deceiving others? And if so, how was their deceit accomplished? The Saviour's transfixed heart and the official death certificate given to Pilate by the centurion both attest that Jesus really died on Calvary. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus asked for and secured the body, embalmed it and laid it in a tomb hewn out of solid rock and closed by a huge boulder. To make assurance doubly sure, the Jews sealed up the rock and posted a guard of soldiers. Meantime, the Apostles were hiding for fear of the Jews. Did the Roman soldiers betray their lordly masters and league themselves with poor, despised fishermen? Absurd. Did sentinels trained in the iron discipline of Rome sleep on their watch, and if so, how could the sleeping soldiers know the Apostles stole the body? Absurder still. Or did the timid Apostles overcome the armed soldiery, roll back the stone, carefully fold the winding sheet and escape with the dead uninjured? Most absurd of all. No, if Christ arose not, the tomb still held His body — which, too, is false, for the Jews would eagerly have produced it to vindicate themselves and discredit Christianity. Christ, therefore, did arise. The Apostles' and martyrs' blood and the conversion of the world attest it, for men die not to uphold a lie nor is the world so easily won by fraud. " For if in this life only," says St. Paul, " we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable, but now Christ is risen from the dead the first fruits of them that sleep."
" Christ is risen from the dead the first fruits of them that sleep," but what shall be the aftermath? We, my brethren, our bodies, for if Christ be risen, we also shall rise again. His Resurrection is the pledge of ours and proves it possible and certain. It is a law of spirit and of matter that whatsoever dissolution may take place, no particle of God's creation can be ever lost. Nature's law is universal; naught withers but to rise again, and naught can rise again except it first decay. How easy then it is for God, who made all things from nothing, to reunite the scattered portions of our being! If summer's sun resuscitates the world of plants and trees, can we deny an equal power over our bodies to the Son of God? True, the flowers that bloom this spring are not the same that bloomed a year ago, but were they rational and capable of merit and demerit, God's justice would preserve from year to year their absolute identity. And since fair lilies are often born to bloom unseen while noxious weeds encumber the choicest soil, so there must be a hereafter where justice's scales may find their equilibrium. And this is true of bodies and souls alike, for through joy and sorrow, through happiness and pain, through virtue and through sin, our bodies are the necessary inseparable companions of our souls and Both, if God is just, must share alike reward or punishment. To the saint God says: " Enter into thy rest, thou (the soul), and the arc of thy sanctification (the body)." That was the object of Christ's coming after all, viz., to show us our truest destiny is to be born like Him, to live, to suffer, to do good for others and for God, to die and gloriously rise again. We are to Him what Jacob was to Esau — we cling to His feet emerging from the womb of mother earth. He is the anointed dove sent forth by God, as pigeon fanciers do, to lead back to the dovecote His wayward companions with the odor of His ointments. He is the head and we the members of His mystic body and certainly the head and members will not remain forever disunited. Indeed, if we are destined not to rise again, the whole reason of Christ's birth and death and Resurrection disappears, so that St. Paul justly argues that if the dead rise not again, neither is Christ risen. But since Christ rose, as we have proved, our failure to arise will be because Christ either cannot or will not raise us up. That He can is evident, for He performed the vastly greater miracle of raising up Himself. To lift another from earth is hardly wonderful, to lift oneself aloft without support is marvellous. Or will we say, perhaps, that Adam's power to drag us down to death was greater than Christ's to restore our immortality? No, Christ can resuscitate us and He will. " Father," He says, " I will that where I am they also whom Thou hast given Me may be with Me, that they may see My glory." He bids us follow Him, indeed, but not merely to the cross on Calvary, but beyond it into His glory. The Scriptures teem with promises of a general Resurrection. Hear God proclaim Himself to Moses the God of the living and the dead; read Ezechiel's vision of the dried bones resuscitated; listen to the Saviour's promise to His beloved Mary and Martha concerning Lazarus; see Nature herself assert this truth in the care the world has everywhere and always taken of the bodies of its dead — read these and see and be convinced and voice your faith in Job's own words: " I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth, and I shall be clothed again with my skin and in my flesh I shall see my God."
Brethren, the poet says that all the world's a stage, and all men and women merely players. There are two kinds of plays, the tragedy that ends in death and sorrow, and the one that ends in joy and happiness. Which will our life be when the curtain rises on the final act? " Ah, we shall all indeed rise again," says St. John, "but they that have done good things shall come forth unto resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment." Brother, to-day is one scene in life's play; make the most of it, I beg of you. If you are an infidel (for they do stray into Church occasionally) — if you are an infidel, begin the study of scriptural religion with the Resurrection of Christ, and if you have a fairly balanced mind and a will honestly desirous of following God's leadings, I defy you to refrain from embracing Christianity. And if you are a Christian and in doubt which Church is Christ's, make an honest study of Christian history and I defy you to mistake the road to Catholicity. And if you are already Catholic — well, there is much left yet for you to do. Strengthen your faith with the assurance that Christ's rising proved Him God, and that therefore neither He nor the infallible Church He founded can, deceive or be deceived concerning the way to paradise. Rekindle your love for God who so mercifully redeemed you; renew your zeal for the spiritual and temporal welfare of your neighbor whom God wishes to share in that redemption. And finally let your faith and charity be ever inspired by your hope — hope in a happy immortality for soul and body; where we shall be forever reunited with father and mother, brothers and sisters; where the mother shall find her little ones, and the lover the love he lost; where the priest shall be united with the souls he helped to save; where God will wipe away all tears from our eyes, and death shall be no more; where faith is blended into vision, and hope into possession, and where naught remains but happiness and love forever and forever. Amen.