Acts 5:12-20; John
20:19-31
Christ is Risen!
Indeed, He is Risen!
Today
we continue to celebrate the most fundamental and joyful proclamation of our
faith: Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life! He is our Pascha, our Passover, from death to
life, for Hades and the grave could not contain the God-Man Who shares with us
His victory over corruption and decay in all their forms. In a world enslaved to the fear of the grave,
He has illumined even the dark night of the tomb with the brilliant light of
heavenly glory. As Christ said to Martha
before He raised Lazarus, “I
am the resurrection, and the life: he who believes in me, though he die, yet
shall he live.” (John 11:25) Because death did not have the last word on our
Lord, it will not, by His grace, have the last word on us or on any who call
upon His Name. As St. John Chrysostom proclaimed, “Let no one fear
death, for the Savior’s death has set us free. He that was held prisoner of it
has annihilated it.”[1]
When the Savior rose from the
dead, He did so as a whole Person Whose glorified body still bore the physical wounds
of His crucifixion. He was born, lived,
and died with flesh and blood every bit as much as we do. He was as dead as anyone else lying in a tomb.
Thomas doubted the news of the
resurrection because he was not present when the Risen Lord first appeared to
the disciples. He said that he would not
believe unless he saw and touched the marks of His torture and death. When Christ appeared again eight days later,
He told Thomas to do precisely that.
Thomas responded by recognizing Him as “My Lord and my God!”
This
encounter demonstrates how essential Christ’s bodily resurrection is for our
faith. Simply put, there would be no
Christianity and no Church without it.
The Savior died through a public form of capital punishment on the Cross
at the hands of Roman soldiers who knew their grim trade all too well. It was literally just another day’s work when
they broke the legs of the two thieves in order to get them to die more quickly.
They did not break the Lord’s legs, however, for those seasoned professional
killers knew that He was already dead.
The Roman Cross had apparently made its point yet again about what
happened to anyone perceived as a threat to the Empire. It is hardly surprising that the disciples had
fled in fear at the Lord’s arrest with Peter denying Him three times, for they
had no expectation of His resurrection.
They had wanted a military Messiah to crush the Romans and establish an
earthly kingdom, not a Savior Whose great victory would come through public
torture and execution by a Gentile army of occupation. Of course, it would be
absurd to think that those who had denied and abandoned their Crucified Lord
would have later made up a story about His resurrection and then died as
martyrs for Him. The women disciples,
who showed greater love and courage by going to the tomb in order to anoint
Christ’s dead body when all seemed lost, obviously had not anticipated His
resurrection either.
St.
Paul taught, “[I]f Christ
has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith.” (1 Cor.
15:14) The Savior proclaimed His divinity by forgiving sins and saying that He
and the Father are one (John 10:30) and that “before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:58) The high priest
asked Him at His arrest, “Are
you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Christ responded, “I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of
the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” (Mark 14: 61-62) If One Who had claimed to be God was wrong in
predicting His resurrection and had simply decayed in the tomb like anyone
else, there would be no reason for anyone to remember Jesus Christ today as
anything but a failed Messiah with grandiose delusions.
Orthodox
Christian faith is not grounded in sentimental memories or warm feelings about an
inspiring personality who lived a long time ago, but in the joyful proclamation
that “Christ is Risen!” in victory over death as a whole Person. His bodily resurrection is our hope for “the
resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,” as we confess in
the Nicene Creed. To quote Saint Paul
again, “[I]if Christ
has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then
those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this
life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor.
15: 17-19) If Christ did not rise from the dead as an embodied Person, then St.
Paul and all the martyrs wasted their lives for nothing. Remember that he became a Christian only
after the Risen Lord miraculously appeared to Him in blinding light on the road
to Damascus Apart from the reality of
the Savior’s resurrection, the conversion of St. Paul from a persecuting
Pharisee to the apostle to the Gentiles makes no sense at all.
St.
Thomas believed only when he touched the wounds of the Risen Savior’s glorified
body. In our reading from Acts, the
apostles healed the suffering bodies of many sick people. The Lord’s resurrection reveals the great
dignity of the human body, which is destined for heavenly glory. Salvation is
not an escape from the physical dimensions of our lives but requires our purification
and fulfillment as whole persons united to Christ. True faith in the Savior demands
that we offer every aspect of our existence to Him for healing and
transformation, holding nothing back. Even
as He healed the sick and fed the hungry, the most obvious practices of faithfulness
involve caring for people in their bodily weaknesses and infirmities. By showing tangible signs of mercy for our
neighbors, we also touch the wounds of Christ, for He is present to us in
everyone in need. In light of His resurrection, the bodily sufferings and
struggles of others appear not as irrelevant distractions from genuine
spiritual concerns, but as invitations to manifest a foretaste of “the life of
the world to come.” Regardless of any context or circumstance, to refuse to
abandon our neighbors in their bodily sufferings and to provide whatever care
we can is to provide a sign of God’s gracious purposes for all who bear His
image and likeness. If we refuse to do
so, then we live as though the Savior’s bodily sufferings, death, and
resurrection had no great importance. Because
“Christ is Risen!,” we must care for our neighbors in practical, tangible ways that
convey the divine mercy that shines from the empty tomb.
In
order to follow our Risen Lord into the joy of the resurrection, we must also open
our deepest personal struggles and wounds to Him for healing. The problem is not that we have bodies, but
that we have allowed the fear of death to fuel our passions in ways that corrupt
every dimension of who we are in this world.
Because God creates and saves us as whole persons, we must embrace the Savior’s
victory over death by living as those who are in a “one flesh” communion with Him
in every dimension of our existence. We are living members of His Body, the Church,
and nourished by His Body and Blood in the Eucharist. We must live accordingly with our bodies
every day of our lives, for Christ’s resurrection has glorified the human body
and calls us to holiness. Our
relationships, actions, and desires must be healed and reoriented to the
Kingdom in order for us to enter into the joy of our Lord’s resurrection as
whole persons. That is not a disembodied
or abstract vocation, but a tangible and practical calling that impacts every dimension
of our lives as embodied persons.
Because
“Christ is Risen!,” we must not use the fact that we have bodies as an excuse
to remain enslaved to corruption in any form.
We fall into pride, hatred, greed, sloth, gluttony, drunkenness, lust, vanity,
and other sins not because we are flesh and blood, but because we have not yet entered
fully into the joy of the resurrection of Christ. The season of Pascha calls us all to embrace
our Risen Lord as the restoration and fulfillment of every dimension of our
personhood. We cannot become truly human
apart from Him, for only He has conquered the fear of death that is at the root
of all our corruption. The more fully we
unite ourselves to Christ in joyful obedience, even as we remain flesh and blood in this world, the more
truly we will be able to say with St.
Paul: “It is no longer I
who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the
Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20) The struggle to
do so is ultimately one of joy as we enter more fully into the gloriously good
news of this radiant season of Pascha.
It is a struggle that we must all undertake if we are to respond in
faith like St. Thomas to the God-Man Whom death could not destroy, for “Christ
is Risen!”
