He saw and he believed
I remember when I was a child learning Math.
Sometimes the concepts came easy,
sometimes they took a while to figure out.
Most often it took a good teacher to explain
those difficult concepts to me before I got it;
before the penny dropped, so to speak!
I am sure that has happened to you in Math, too.
But until that moment, we remain confused and bewildered.
And after that moment, it unlocks everything
and we sail along with our Math until we hit the next level.
That is why we call those moments “ah-ha moments.”
This is a great image for what the resurrection is meant to be for us.
It is meant to be a great “ah-ha moment.”
The resurrection of Christ changes everything
and it certainly did for the disciples.
Until the Lord was risen from the dead,
nothing made sense;
the disciples were confused and bewildered.
That is exactly what we celebrate today.
The ultimate ah-ha moment
after which our whole lives makes sense.
But I suspect that many of us remain confused
because we have not fully experienced the resurrection ourselves.
I don’t mean, that we have died and gone to heaven ourselves
although I know that will be our final destiny.
But rather, we haven’t had a true ah-ha moment of the risen Christ.
Or to use that language of today’s gospel,
we haven’t gone into the empty tomb like the beloved disciple
who saw and believed!
What does it mean then to “see and believe” for us today?
Pannenburg, the great German philosopher, says
that all our life will only make sense in our own resurrection.
Until then, we must choose to believe that our life has purpose;
we must choose to see and believe.
In order to do this well,
we need to look with eyes of faith
so that we can truly see what is before us.
That is the greatest challenge, to really look and see!
Time and time again, the disciples looked but did not see.
That remains our greatest challenge as disciples today.
How can we really see?
Let’s go back to our Math teacher to help.
The best of teachers are those
who are the champions of their students;
who want their students to experience what they are learning
and not just learn what they are teaching.
In the concepts of Math,
it is applying the Math to a specific practical problem
such as how much would it cost to buy so many apples
to explain multiplication
or how pool balls hitting of each other explains physics.
For Jesus the master teacher
he showed his disciples repeatedly
that he was the way, the truth and the life
and his practical way was the way of love.
You see, the resurrection is about love.
That despite all the bitterness, the ugliness, the cursing
the beatings and the suffering; the poison and the hate
that Jesus received on Good Friday;
Jesus takes all that in and absorbs it, transforms it
and gives back blessing and forgiveness.
Jesus gives back love.
That is what changes everything.
Love casts out darkness.
Love heals every wound.
Love overcomes every kind of evil.
Love is victorious.
That is the message of Easter.
Love has the power to change everything.
That is the great ah-ha! Love changes everything!
Yet we must internalize that and live that message at home.
It’s great that we all come here to Easter Mass.
Don’t get me wrong. It is wonderful.
But if that is all we do, is come to Mass,
it is an absolute scandal to the gospel.
It is an absolute scandal to our faith.
If all we do is come here and celebrate
and go home and have a nice big dinner,
then empty is our faith.
That is not Easter at all.
That is not our faith at all.
And it is most certainly not the Resurrection.
What we need to do is go and live it.
Apply our learning.
Apply what we believe it is
and teach each other by the way we love one another.
We must see, believe, and love.
So when there is darkness in our lives
then we shine the light of love;
Because if it is not us then who?
You and I are the ones today who claim to believe in the risen Jesus.
If not us, then who?
We do as Ron Rolheiser says, we become like water purifiers.
Think for moment what a water purifier does.
It takes in water that is polluted and contaminated,
it absorbs all the pollutants,
transforms it and gives back clean water.
This is the very thing that Christ does
in transforming the cross into the resurrection.
We are called to the same thing.
When we receive hatred
that we will take it in, hold it, transform it, and give back love.
When we get cursed, we hold it, we transform it, and give back blessing.
When we are afraid, take it in, hold it, we transform it and give back freedom.
When we see all the different traits of Satan and all his empty promises,
we take them in, we hold them, transform them
and give back God in all his wonder and awe.
In the end, we take in sin, our own and others,
we hold it, we transform it, and we give back forgiveness.
That is the Resurrection.
Love will be our final word.
My friends, today we gather to celebrate Easter and so we should.
We celebrate the great ah-ha moment, the resurrection.
So we come to see and believe, and we come to love.
And love changes everything.
