A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Mary stood weeping beside the tomb. Even as she wept, she leaned over to look inside, and there she saw two angels in dazzling robes. One was seated at the head and the other at the foot of the place where Jesus' body had lain. Woman, they asked her, why are you weeping?
Mary answered, because the lord has been taken away, and I do not know where they have put him. She had no sooner said this than she turned around and caught sight of Jesus standing, but she did not recognize him. Woman, he asked her, why are you weeping? Who is it you are looking for? She thought it was the gardener, so she said to him, sir, if you are the one who carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will take him away.
Jesus said to her, Mary. She turned to him and said in Hebrew, Raboni, meaning master or teacher. Jesus then said, do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the father. Rather, go to my brothers and tell them, I am ascending to my father and to your father, to my God and to your God. Mary Magdalene then went to the disciples and said, I have seen the Lord.
Then she reported everything that Jesus had said to her. And this is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Yesterday, I merely touched upon a very, I think, extremely significant matter for those who wanna think about this matter of Easter, who wanna think about their religion, and wanna be alive, to what may be very dangerous attacks upon it. Now there's no necessity for anyone especially to to go into these matters.
You can live very comfortably on your Catholic faith in a rather passive way, and that's fine. You see, I've often said this. The Catholic church was not instituted by our lord for an elite intelligentsia. The Catholic church was given to us by god's son to save the souls of all men I the think, ability to go into these matters. Not And every man and woman has to be a theologian, you know.
Keep that in mind, that Catholic Church is for all men and all women. But on the other hand, some of us have to think about these things. And I mentioned, at least within the last dozen years, three of the most important attacks in English that have been made upon the historicity of the resurrection of our lord. Today, I wanna mention this thing. Much of these attacks upon Christ begin with a rejection of the supernatural.
They begin with the impossibility of the resurrection, and then they argue to prove their thesis that it was impossible that it didn't happen because it was impossible. That's mostly the way people argue about miracles. You never win an argument against with an opponent who says there are no miracles because they begin by saying there is no that miracles are impossible. Well, if there's a they're impossible, then you can't argue about it. Yeah.
This is very clear, for example, from CS Lewis in his essay on miracles. If there's anything missing today, and I mean missing in the lives of many religious people, it's a concept of God Almighty. Of God. Just within the last forty eight hours, I was, discussing a matter of going to mass on Sunday with a very fine college man, out of college two years, and he's beginning to learn something now. He had four good years in college, of course, but now he's beginning to, you know, to mature.
He's finding himself. And among fine and with the things he's finding, he's finding that going to mass on Sunday isn't very important. Now he's and he's a product of Catholic schools, at least elementary and and the high school. He had no concept of of the mass as worship to god, that we have to give god. He didn't have any concept of it.
I'm not exaggerating this. How do you do this? How can you go through eight years of so called Catholic education and not have a concept of god and your duty of worship? How do you do that? Well, you you can't argue against a fact.
And I had a fact within the last forty eight hours. It's a member of my own family. Now, you see, we're living even even you just look. Just look at all the confusion, the argumentation, the headlines having to do with Catholic church, father Kern, or any of these well known, theologians. How often does the word god come up?
I just ask you that. How often does god come into the picture? It's everything is about man in the generic sense of the word. Everything is about this life as an end in itself. God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world, and to stay here with the things of this world.
That's the way it's being interpreted. Look at all this talk about liberation theology. How much does god come into just read it. How much does god come into it? Just read it.
You'll see. Everything is man, this world. Now if there's anything that the resurrection of Christ does is to cut that nonsense right in two. Because here, as in no other place, we are faced with a definite claim that there is more to this life than this life, that there is more to time than just time, that there's more to living than just living things in this world, that we are here. It's as a as a veil is broken as we as it was on Good Friday, And we have a glimpse, a glimpse of something totally totally unworldly.
And if you are totally worldly, you will not have any appreciation for the unworldly. As my dear and late friend Saint Thomas Aquinas says, whatever whatever we know, we know according to the mode of the knower. You cannot recognize something unless you know something about the thing you're supposed to recognize. That is absolutely true. And the only thing can change that picture is a minor miracle.
And I say that that sincerely. It happens occasionally. But where you have a person who is completely surrounded, permeated by a worldly view now notice, in most instances, this isn't something which is explicitly entertained. This isn't a philosophical system that somebody has sat down and very calmly and painstakingly studied out. Not at all.
In most instances has nothing to do with thought at all. It has to do simply with action. How do you live your lives? And implicit in the way many people live their lives is a complete philosophy of living for this world totally. Totally.
You see, they're not even as concerned enough with the any other consideration to even consider it, not even to argue about it, not even to reject it. Now I'm not over drawing this picture. I can assure you I am not over drawing it. This is the world you're living in. You just think, if you received, Easter cards, how many of them had any relevance to the truth of the resurrection of Christ in any sense?
All everything's about peace and spring and the flowers and all that kind of nonsense. I don't think spring and flowers are nonsense. But, you see, I think they are nonsense when you exclude their creator, when they don't lead you to god. Now remember, when you're talking about God, you're not you're talking about a very, very thin you cannot have a picture of God in your mind. You cannot imagine God.
You cannot touch God, but you can Jesus Christ. Notice, Mary clung to Jesus. Notice that's what the word says. Let me tell you, with these people who, find their what they think are their arguments against the resurrection, Remember, in most instances, they begin by re rewriting Saint Mark. That's an see, they begin there.
We have Jesus Christ, the son of god. You can imagine him. You can embrace him. You can listen to him in his living church. Remember, he didn't write a book.
Keep that in mind. The Church didn't have the New Testament. It had the Old Testament in its first days until about, as I say, you don't have the entire New Testament till about '90 at the earliest. The entire New Testament. St.
Paul probably started writing it the year '57. And that was just a letter to the Corinthians. And so there's one thing is to bring home to yourself first God's existence. There is a god. Jesus Christ is his son, a human being born of a virgin, truly in his person, the son of god.
And that son of God came to give us something, something permanent, something enduring, something that we could cling to, cling to him. Because in many instances, we are desperate. We need something in those moments that we can really grasp and hold on to even though we feel we are sinking. Now those things are either true or they are false. And if they're true, we should embrace them with all our heart, our whole mind, our whole soul, our daily living.
If they're false, we should do our best to eliminate them. But I maintain you've got to make choice, and the choice is yours. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.