A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Two of the disciples of Jesus, that same day, the first day of the week, were making their way to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. It's a pretty good walk. And they were talking about what it all all that had happened in the last few days. In the course of their conversation, Jesus approached and began to walk along with him.
That's they didn't recognize him. However, they were restrained from recognizing. Jesus said to him, what are you talking about as you go along? They halted in dis they stopped. They halted in distress.
And one of them, Theophus by name, said to Jesus, are you the only resident in Jerusalem who doesn't know what has gone on there in the last few days? Jesus said, what things? And they said, all those things that had to do with Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet, powerful in word and deed in the eyes of god and indeed in the eyes of all the people, how our chief priests and leaders delivered him up to be condemned to death and then crucified him. Now listen. We were hoping that he was the one who would set Israel free.
What's a flock? He didn't do it. So then they continued, besides all of this, today, the third day of the week, since these things happen, some women of our group have just brought us most astonishing news. They were at the tomb before dawn but failed to find the body. They returned with a tale that they had seen a vision of angels who declared that Jesus of Nazareth was alive.
Some of us went out to the tomb and found it empty just as the women had said, but him, they did not find. Then Jesus said to now notice, here, this is were these men expecting a resurrection? Did they have any concept resurrection of Christ? Were they looking forward to it? None of that's true.
None of them. They were completely fabricated. Their highest hopes were absolutely gone. Well, then Jesus said to what little sense you have. How slow you are to believe all that the prophets have foretold.
Did not the messiah have to undergo all of this so as to enter into his glory? Now they still don't recognize him. And then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted for them every passage of scripture which referred to the messiah to himself. By this time it's about a half hour's walk. By this time, they were near Emmaus, the town to which they were going, and Jesus acted as if he was going to go on continue on to the evening.
But, they did they pressed him, saying, stay with us. It's nearly night. The day is practically over. So Jesus went in to stay with them, but they still don't recognize him. When he had seated when Jesus had seated himself with them to eat, he took bread, pronounced the blessing, then he broke the bread and began to distribute it to those disciples.
And with that, their eyes were opened, and they recognized Jesus. Whereupon, as soon as they recognized him, he vanished. They said one to another, were not our hearts burning inside of us as he talked to us along the road and explained the scriptures to us. And then they got up at once, left their meal, and returned, went back to Jerusalem where they found the 11 and the rest of the company assembled, and they were greeted by the the assembled crowd. The lord has been raised.
It is true. He has appeared to Simon. Then they, the ones in Jerusalem, then they recounted everything that had happened and how they had come to know Jesus in the breaking of the bread. This is the word of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. In 1966, Hugh Schoenfield published a book called the Passover plot. There wasn't anything actually new in that, but he developed a a whole theory to explain the empty tomb and and all the of course, to explain away the resurrection of Christ from the dead. That's the point of the book. It was a it's a rehash of most of the stuff that's gone ahead.
There was nothing new about it, but we keep on hearing it. And the point what I wanna ask you good people this morning is this. You see, one of the basic arguments against the the resurrection of Christ is the credibility of the witnesses. Now we have the three synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We have Saint John.
We have some of the epistles, one of Peter's. And then, of course, we have Saint Paul. And then we have the book of the Acts written by Saint Luke. There's your written testimony. All of all of the written testimony.
But remember, the Catholic church is not does not rest upon a book. Just keep that in mind. People say it, but it ain't true. The church was in existence and flourishing for for for several decades before we had anything written. Now here you have the witnesses, and the testimony they give does not agree in details.
You don't have to be a literary critic. If you have two or three brain cells working, anybody can read it and see the differences among them. They're not substantial. It's a matter of details, where the cause were, who went in first, and all that kind of stuff. There's nothing substantial different, but there are details different.
And, of course, you say, well, if you have witnesses who disagree among themselves, their testimony isn't worth a tinker's damn. You know the story of David, I mean, Solomon and so forth. Now, and in any court of law, if you can get witnesses to contradict each other, their testimony isn't worth anything. Now here's my question that I've never seen brought up. But these documents, these papers that we have, the the the three synoptics, Saint John, the book of the acts, Saint Paul's letter to the Corinthians, and Saint Peter, they they were not written simultaneously at all.
Some of the gospels may Saint John may not have been written much before a 100 A. D. Saint Paul's letter to the Corinthians where he talks about the resurrection of Christ as something already accepted, at least 57. At least. So in between there, you had these books coming out, the written documents.
Somebody wrote it up. Of course, there was a there was an oral tradition before it was ever written down. But the thing is, we're dealing with the written word here, and they were not written simultaneously. They weren't written in the same place. They weren't written by the same people.
That's for absolutely sure. We're sure of all those three things without any shadow of a doubt. Now here's my simple question. If these dear early Christians were out to build up a plot of the resurrection, why didn't the later writers correct the inconsistencies? They had every opportunity of doing it.
They could have said that claws were all here, well, let's put them all at the foot of the tomb. We'll put to whoever they corrected the text, the claws were at the foot of the tomb, and so forth. Why didn't they do that? Why did they leave these consistencies untouched if they thought they were inconsistencies or if they thought they were substantially important? Why didn't they change them?
They had every opportunity. Have you ever seen that raised? It's a very sensible question. Here you have you have a number of which is about six or seven witnesses. They had every opportunity to have the to have the the narratives corrected.
They had every opportunity to make the narratives absolutely consistent, but it was not done. They let the con inconsistency stay. Now if those inconsistencies were so important, why didn't they do something about it? In other words, what I'm arguing is that these inconsistencies prove the credibility of the witness. Remember, you can argue this both ways.
Because if you have three or four witnesses getting on a on a stand in a court of law, and they all give you verbatim, as sometimes happens, verbatim the same story of an accident, you know what the what the attorney's going to say. They have they have all been tutored. Somebody wrote this thing out, and they've memorized it, and they're right. So if you have a number of witnesses and they and their testimony is almost perfectly consistent. You'll say there's been collusion, so the testimony's thrown out.
What I'm saying is just a little fact just one little tiny item of this. There is no reason to to to think that these inconsistencies, because none of them are none of them is cons substantial, disqualifies the the testimony of the the witness. They're not that sort of that sort of thought. And my point is if the contemporaries who wrote it and read it, if they thought they were inconsistent, why didn't they just simply erase it, as they could have done? And as in some instances, it has been done with the text.
We know that. This is a very important point. In my little opinion, because I think it's based upon good, solid reasoning. The testimony for the empty tomb is overwhelming and would hold up in any court of law. Because this appeal to a public psychology that the resurrection of Christ was a projection of the early Christian faith, there is not the slightest bit of evidence for it.
Take the story we read this morning. The disciples were thought that Christ was a flock. They thought that he had come to restore the kingdom of Israel, and look where he landed, crucified on the cross. It was a washout. They were in despair.
They weren't expecting anything. They went back and started to take up their profession of fishing again. The resurrection of Christ rests on, humanly speaking, on very solid ground, very solid ground. And those who reject the simple fact that Christ rose from the dead and left behind an empty tomb, they still have to explain the empty tomb because that has never been contested. As St.
Paul said, Christ be not risen from the dead, vain is your faith, and vain is my preaching. In the name of the father, and the son, and the spirit. Amen.