Studying history gives us a sense of inevitability regarding the outcomes of particular events.
Of course, the Allies won World War II; the victory of the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War seems like the only possible conclusion.
Yet, both the Allies and the Union only began to gain ground in the penultimate years of those terrible conflicts.
For a long time, the Axis powers and the Confederacy were winning their respective wars.
I use these examples to illustrate the point that we fail to be surprised by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the tomb on Easter morning.
We are so familiar with the story that it seems to have an absolute inevitability about it.
Of course, Jesus rose from the dead, so we say.
Not so inevitable
It was not that way at all for Jesus’ followers. They were crushed by His betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. They fled from the cross, not even wanting to be known as one of the disciples.
Their hope, joy, confidence, and understanding of Christ’s identity and mission were shattered on Good Friday.
Even though Jesus had spoken of His rising from the dead often, these words were forgotten in the grief of the moment.
Just as the sun’s eclipse cast darkness on the world on Good Friday, so too the horror of Christ’s death had snuffed out all hope for those who had put their faith in Him.
The death and resurrection of Christ is the drama of the absolute struggle between Christ and Satan, good and evil, grace and sin.
The Son of God defeats the powers of sin and death by entering into death, embracing it, giving Himself to it, so that by the resurrection, its power would be forever vanquished.
In the Paschal Mystery, God turns death against itself. Just as humanity’s salvation was lost on a tree in the Garden of Eden, so too our salvation was gained for us on the tree of the cross.
A beautiful aspect of the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels is the refusal to hide or omit the skepticism and resistance of the disciples to the fact of Jesus’ rising.
They do not immediately believe and rejoice. They struggle with the seeming impossibility of such an astonishing outcome. They give no credit to the testimony of the women who go to the tomb and find it empty.
The Gospel authors put on full display the challenging process of coming to believe in the resurrection of Jesus.
Only when the disciples see, hear, and touch the risen Lord, do they come to a full faith, based on their experience.
Belief in the resurrection
We call our Catholic Faith “apostolic,” which means that our Christian belief in its fundamental aspects rests on the witness and testimony of the apostles.
They are the ones who saw the risen Lord, came to believe in Him, preached the kerygma of Jesus’ death and resurrection as the source of our new life, and gave their lives as martyrs for the truth of the Faith.
If the resurrection of Christ was a fiction which they had cunningly promulgated, would they have gone to an excruciating death for its sake? I think not.
We believe in the resurrection as the most fundamental fact of human history, as the most beautiful, true, and good thing that ever happened!
God the Father transformed the tragedy of the crucifixion of His Son into the greatest of all possible outcomes.
We are forgiven of our sins and promised eternal life because of the events we celebrate this week.
We rejoice that the Lord loves us so, that our souls are that precious to Him, that we are fundamentally worth being saved forever.
When life is difficult and harsh, which it often is, when our best efforts produce no fruit, when we face the dark night of suffering and death, when the evil of the world feels overwhelming, we need to ponder and renew our faith in the resurrection, to know afresh that Christ has already gained the victory over darkness, and that He is here with us in the Scriptures and the sacramental life of the Church, never failing in His promise that He is with us always until the end of the world.
The conclusion of every Easter Mass preface states that we “are overcome with Paschal joy.” I love that!
When we have walked through the shadow of death and have experienced the light of Christ, we are overcome, indeed overwhelmed by the love of God.
We should never fail to be somehow surprised by Easter because Jesus’ rising from the dead is not simply a past historical event.
His risen life abides within us now, beats in our flesh, turns sin into grace, sanctifies our spirits, and leads us home to the Father.
Here is an apt quote from St. John Paul II: “Kerygma: The initial ardent proclamation by which a person one day is overwhelmed and brought to the decision to entrust himself to Jesus Christ by faith.”