Homily for Easter Sunday

There were no human witnesses to the Lord’s Resurrection. It was the invisible, supernatural, life-giving Will of God, 
calling to life for a second time the human body of Christ in the silence and darkness of the tomb.

It had been like this from the beginning: at the moment of the Lord’s Incarnation at the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the same invisible, supernatural life-giving Will of God … first called to life the human body of Christ in the silence and darkness of His Blessed Mother’s womb. 

Thus, the hypostatic union of the human and divine natures of Christ took place through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. The Lord’s created humanity and uncreated divinity were drawn together in that miracle called the Incarnation.

There had been no human cause for either the Incarnation or the Resurrection. These events had taken place outside the course of 
+ human events,
+ human knowledge, or 
+ human power.

Yet there had been a certain dependence upon human will, wherein God, in His unimaginable wisdom… His love and trust for His people, made His Divine Will subject to the free will He had created and placed within the hearts of Adam and Eve, and their eventual descendants, Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother.

In the beginning, things had gone badly with the human exercise of free will at Eden, yet once again God placed His trust in the free will of humanity. This time there was a “Yes” at Nazareth, and a “Yes” at Golgotha, in which Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary reversed the “No" of Eden, becoming, as it were, a New Adam and a New Eve to form God’s New Creation in Christ.

Now, while there had been no witnesses to the miracles of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, there
were discoverers of these truths:
+ Saint Joseph, hearing an angel tell him of Mary’s unexpected pregnancy, and informing him of his future role as
husband and father…     
+ Saint Mary Magdalene also hearing an angel speak at the empty tomb, sending her to become “the Apostle to the Apostles.”

These discoveries were met with an element of confusion, but not with incredulity. For both Saint Joseph and Saint Mary Magdalene, love says “Yes” to faith and the Gospel unfolds in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. These two witnesses to truth and mystery could not have been more different from one another:
+ Joseph the Just: believing in his dreams… and
+ Magdalene the Repentant: whose forgiven sins always seemed to lurk in the recesses of her memory.

This suggests that wherever we are in our quest for God… and for holiness of life, the discovery of God’s truth is available for all who believe in Him and seek His truth with trust. We shall never fully comprehend the miraculous power of God in this life, but we can trust that it will be revealed to some extent in the life to come… when our wills no longer have the capacity to say “No” to God’s Will, but only an eternal “Yes.”

This is the great gift won for us in the Lord’s Resurrection: our possibility of proclaiming our eternal “Yes” in heaven, providing the reason for our gladness, our hope, and our Alleluias on Easter morning.