Today is not the Monday after Easter. Nor is it Monday of the First of Week of Easter. Today is Monday in the Octave of Easter. Today is Easter!
The Church observes the entire first week of Easter as one day. For those of us who pray the Liturgy of the Hours, the hymn, antiphons, and psalmody could easily become numbingly repetitive. Yet, somehow, they don’t, given the enormity of what we celebrate.
What do we celebrate? Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The Lord’s rising from the tomb is so mind-bending that over nearly two millennia there have been no shortage of theories about what this might mean.
When it comes to Christ’s resurrection, I tend to take it fairly literally. Apart from there being difficulty in some account of recognizing Jesus risen from the dead, there is nothing in Sacred Scripture that indicates the Lord’s resurrection is to be taken in any way other than how it is described by those who claim to be eyewitnesses.
In our Gospel this evening, the two Marys have no difficulty recognizing Jesus, whom they encounter while running to tell the other disciples about the empty tomb. Seeing Him, they worship. Unlike when disciples fell at His feet during His earthly ministry, when He raised them up, He lets these two disciples worship Him in awe.
It is the sense of awe they express that causes the Risen Lord to reassure them by telling them not to be afraid. Due to its spontaneity and sincerity, the worship the two women offer is nearly perfect. It has both immanent and transcendent dimensions. Jesus is concretely “there,” they hug His feet, but He is resurrected and glorified.
While the two disciples went on their way to tell the others, not just that they found Jesus’ tomb empty but that they had seen Him risen, the quandary of the empty tomb had to be dealt with by the chief priests and elders. This leads to the first and even now persistent explanation: Jesus’ disciples took His body from the tomb, placed it somewhere else, and told everyone He rose from the dead. On this account, Christianity is built on a great fraud.
What does it mean to say Jesus rose from the dead? Well, in epistemological terms, it is a justifiable belief as is any belief that is not an outright impossibility, not a logical contradiction. On the contrary, insisting that it is utterly impossible for someone who is dead to come back to life is a bit of a fallacy. But when examined in this way, even a believer is forced to admit that the probability is low.
It is important, therefore, for belief to be bolstered by experience. To experience the Risen Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit, who is the mode of Christ’s resurrection presence, is a sine qua non of being Christian.
While it needs to be deeply personal, one does not have to be a mystic, like, say, Saint Teresa of Avila, to have an encounter with the Risen Christ. In the Eucharist, the Lord’s presence, by the power of the Holy Spirit, who is the agent of transubstantiation, is mediated to us under the appearance of ordinary bread and wine.
It is this mediation that makes the Eucharist real, tangible, empirical, edible and drinkable. All the sacraments are mediate (i.e., “real”) experiences of the Risen Lord.
Sometimes there is a desire to argue so fervently about the reality of what transubstantiation effects that the only way the bread and wine can make Christ really and truly present is dismissed. Here’s the truth, if sacraments are not both signs and symbols, they are nothing. This isn't to assert anything other than the bread and wine (elements chosen by Christ Himself) are the media used by the Holy Spirit to make Christ truly present.
In the other sacraments, the Spirit uses different media- water and oil, etc.- to effect the Lord's true presence.
Typically, a sign is something that stands in for something else. But the sacraments are “efficacious” signs, meaning they are what they signify. What they signify is really a who, Jesus Christ. This why we can say something like, “The Eucharist is not merely a sign.”
Sacraments are also symbols. “Symbol” comes from the Greek word symbolon. In Greek, symbolon refers to a token that is broken in half and used for the sake of recognition. In ancient times, a symbolon gave someone the right to be accepted by the party that owned the other half.
In the Eucharist, the Holy Spirit connects the ordinary elements to Christ and our receiving these connects us to Christ, transforming us into His Body. In many ways, as theologian Henri de Lubac noted, it makes more sense to call the Eucharist Christ’s mystical Body and the Church His true body. After all, it is the Church, His Body, that serves as His hands, His eyes, His heart, His feet in the world. The Church is the sacrament of salvation in and for the world.
Like the two Marys, our worship of the Risen Christ should be spontaneous and heartfelt as we recognize His immanence in breaking of the bread, while at the same time being in awe of this great mystery in which we participate by grace. The Eucharist is the primary place to encounter the Risen Lord until He returns.
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