A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. The women hurried away from the tomb, half overjoyed remember, they found it empty. Half overjoyed and half fearful, and ran to carry the good news to his disciples. Suddenly, without warning, Jesus stood before them and said, peace. The women came up to him and embraced his feet.
They got ahold of something and did Jesus homage. At this, Jesus said to them, do not be afraid. Go and carry the good news to my brothers that they are to go to Galilee, the North, where they will see me. As the women were returning, guard at the tomb went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. They, in turn, convened with the elders and worked out their strategy, giving the soldiers a large bribe with these instructions.
You are to say, his disciples came during the night and stole the body away while we were asleep. If any word of this gets to the procurator, we'll straighten it out for you and keep you out of trouble. So the soldiers pocketed the money and did as they had been instructed. In other words, the body had been stolen while they were asleep. And this is the story, says Saint Matthew, that circulates even to this day among the Jews.
And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Many explanations have been given by those who do not want to accept the fact of Jesus' resurrection, physical resurrection from the tomb.
Notice I said physical. It's not it isn't just something mystical as so as many people today are trying to tell us, even in the fold. It was a physical thing. After all, these women grabbed ahold of his feet. They got ahold of something.
Well anyway, the problem is, you have an empty tomb. That's agreed to today. They all accept it. Now the question is, how do you explain the empty tomb and these apparitions or whatever you wanna call them of our blessed Lord to the disciples. If if it wasn't Jesus.
If it wasn't Christ resurrected. Or how do you figure it out? Well, of course, one of the solutions is that Christ didn't really die. That's the latest. I mean, that's the current one today.
That he didn't really die. That he was put in the tomb and revived, and then the disciples came and got the body and revived Jesus. Of course, where is the evidence for this? Well, anyway, it's funny. The point is, a holy Roman Catholic church without any equivocation teaches that the resurrection of our lord is a physical fact, f a c t, fact.
And that Christ by his own power rose from the dead, because other people rose from the dead, any number of them. Now you will say, yes, but we all we have prayers. We have text which says that that Christ rose by the power of his father. Well, you see, here we here we get into this problem of who is Christ? Who is Jesus Christ?
And again, the holy Roman Catholic church teaches without any equivocation in the terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, that in Jesus Christ you had one person, but you had two distinct natures totally complete, the human and the divine. But that the person is divine, so that you can truly say that Mary is the mother of God because she was the mother of that baby. And that baby is one person, and that person is divine with two natures. And while we profess belief in the trinity, we are not polytheists. However, you may explain the trinity, the church teaches there's only one God, one in three persons.
And so, our blessed lord never ceased to be God. He never lost his divine nature. So when you say he rose by the father, all you're saying is he rose by God and he is God, and therefore you're right back to home place again, as we should be, as the place to be. Yesterday I quoted Merrittan. Now Merrittan was a was a Jew who became a very fervent Catholic and one of the outstanding scholastic philosophers, the neo scholastic philosophers of this century, Jack Maritan with his wife Raisa.
I knew them both. Now I merely quote him because here you have a man who was a philosopher, a rationalist, and one of the best. A man who was accepted not only in Catholic universities, where today probably wouldn't be accepted at all, but in many non Catholic state universities. He was a respected man, and yet he says exactly what Saint well not exactly, but he gives the same thought as Saint Paul. Maritane says that the resurrection of Jesus is the rock, the rock of Christian faith and of life.
Notice that. Of Christian faith and of life. It's not something merely theoretical. It's not just an apologetic that Christ fulfilled a prophecy or that he fulfilled his own promises and all of that. No.
It the resurrection is something that enters into our daily living. And he says it is the great truth that separates a Christian from a non Christian in his daily living. And Saint Paul said, unless Christ be risen, your faith is in vain and so is our preaching. Now, the point that I think is terribly important, at least in my experience of this worldly life, is Easter Sunday is only one Sunday out of 52. And when you walked into this church this morning, when I walked into this church this morning, there's a little teddy bear down in one of those pews right about in there, a little tiny teddy bear.
And I thought, I don't know, but that little teddy bear just reminded me of the of the difference between today and yesterday. Everybody is you know, there's a glow about and I I'm not this is great. This is wonderful. We absolutely need it. But you can't live your Christian life on that Easter sentimentality and the emotions.
You can't do it. I think of Colby, and I think of Edith Stein, and she died in the same same Auschwitz, you know, one year later. She was a Jewish convert too, the Carmelite, Edith Stein. To be a Christian is not to be on top of a sense of an emotional wave. Christianity is tough.
It is tough. It's a rock. And we're different. And if we're not different there's something either wrong with us, or the world has been been converted to Christ. Take your pick.
Read the Washington Post. So let's come back to it. To be a Christian is to say my lord and my god, even when we don't want to say it. In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.