Homily for Easter Sunday
April 4, 2021
Collect
Acts 10: 34, 37-43
Holy Name of Jesus, New Rochelle, N.Y.
“O God, on this day
thru your Only Begotten Son you have conquered death and unlocked for us the
path to eternity” (Collect).
Why have you come
here this morning? What are you looking
for? Assuredly, it’s not pretty Easter
eggs. Whom are you seeking? Assuredly, it’s not the Easter bunny.
No. You’ve come, like the women at the tomb, looking for Jesus. They went there looking for his dead body. As all the gospels show, they were entirely amazed not to find his body and to be informed that he was, in fact, not dead but very much alive; and in the coming hours and days, along with the 11 apostles and other disciples, to meet him, speak with him, eat with him—and be commissioned by him “to preach to the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God” for the “forgiveness of sins thru his name” (Acts 10:42-43).
Do you believe that
this Jesus is truly alive? Do you
believe that when you come to celebrate the Eucharist you find his living body
and you eat his living body, the very body that rose from the tomb and wasn’t
there for the soldiers to guard or the holy women to anoint?
The apostles testify,
we the Church testify, that God the Father raised his Only Begotten Son Jesus
from death, and thus “conquered death,” the penalty for our sins, for all of
us. In Jesus Christ God has “unlocked
for us the path to eternity”—not just any eternity but an eternity of
light, life, glory, and happiness.
There is another
eternity. St. Peter preached (in the 1st
reading) that God “appointed Jesus as judge of the living and the dead”
(10:42); we profess that in the Creed.
As judge, filled “with the Holy Spirit and power” (10:38), he has the
power to grant us forgiveness and “open up for us the path to eternity”; and
also to declare the unrepentant unfit for an eternity of light, life, glory,
and happiness, but instead, by their own choice, guilty still in their sins and
doomed for eternal darkness, anguish, and hatred—an outer darkness of “wailing
and the gnashing of teeth,” as Jesus says in several of his parables (Matt
8:12; 24:51; Luke 13:28).
That dark eternal
path is the one all of humanity was on until God, in his limitless goodness and
compassion, sent his Only Begotten Son to us, to conquer sin and death, to call
us to life. We come to church this
morning to celebrate that, to thank God for so loving us, to commune with the
living body of Jesus.
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