April 12 Easter Sunday Homily Have a Blessed Easter Season (All 50 days!)
Some of you may be hoping for a short homily today. If all I said was “Jesus has been raised from the dead” and then sat down, many of you may be very happy, and say Alleluia! and Thanks be to God!, but you don’t get off that easy! It is true that Jesus has been raised from the dead. It is an article of the faith and the anchor which holds together everything we believe. But to say he has been raised is to say something even more important- Jesus Christ is truly alive today!
When we speak about Jesus and his life and ministry, we often use the past tense, “Jesus said, or Jesus did.” Those statements would be true, but not complete. Because we believe Jesus is raised from the dead, we can say without a doubt that Jesus says, and Jesus does, and Jesus loves.
Jesus is a real, living, divine person today. He is not simply a historical person from the past that we remember. The resurrection is not something he did once upon a time. He is acting in the world today. He desires to act in and love each one of us right now. He comes to us and calls us by name and says, see my body wounded for your sins; see my risen body glorified for your salvation. See in me, the living God, all that you need in this life to have joy and meaning and hope in the midst of hardships.
Some people thought in the past, and some still believe today that we make Jesus real. We believe in the resurrection because we want to, it is a creation of our mind. It is simply a delusion we came up with. Nothing could be further from the truth. In faith, we do not believe that we make Jesus real. It is just the opposite. Jesus risen from the dead makes us real. He gives us our true identity. He suffered and died for us so that in our suffering and death, he would be with us. He makes it possible for us to receive the inheritance that God the Father has desired to give all of his children- the gift of everlasting life!
If we desire to take our life seriously, then we must take Jesus Christ seriously. One of the ways we testify to the importance of Jesus Christ is to renew our baptismal promises. In these we profess our faith in Jesus Christ. We also commit ourselves to a life lived in Christ by daily prayer, service to God and neighbor, and living a morally upright life in line with Gospel teaching.
We profess that the Eucharist, the greatest of all God’s gifts to his people, is truly the living Body and Blood of the living Jesus! We do not just celebrate the resurrection today, but in a profoundly sacramental way, we receive the resurrection of Jesus today and every day that we eat his Body and drink his Blood. His reality is now our hope of bodily resurrection on the Last Day.
We have so much to be thankful for today: The gift of new life, the gift of God’s wisdom to be a real witness to the living Jesus, the true outpouring of God’s love on each one of us by Jesus living in our midst. Let Jesus be someone with whom we share our lives with every day, as individuals and as a Church, because he is truly alive and wants to share his divine life and love with us.
