Parish of St. Ignatius of Loyola; Chestnut Hill, MA
27 March 2016; 12:00 p.m. mass
The Resurrection of the Lord: The Mass of Easter Sunday
Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118:102, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9
GREETING
Alleluia! Christ has risen, just as he said!
With our Lenten journey of sacrifice and penance complete,
let us pray for the grace “to be glad and to rejoice intensely
because of the great glory and joy of Christ, our Lord” (Sp. Ex., §221),
who has conquered death.
HOMILY
Happy Easter!
We have likely already said these two words many times this morning, and,
technically speaking, we should keep repeating them for the next week,
for the actual day of Easter, like Christmas, is celebrated in the church
over the course of an octave, that is, for eight full days.
It may be difficult for us to keep up that joyful tone for so long,
but the gospel readings these days do their best to help us.
Within a week’s time, we will have heard from all four gospel writers,
each of whom will share with us some key part of his account
of the events surrounding Christ’s resurrection.
If you are keeping score at home, you will note that all of those stories
come from either the last or the second-to-last chapters of the gospels.
But let us be clear: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
were not sitting in Jerusalem with all of their other gospel chapters completed,
simply waiting for the perfect ending.
If there is no empty tomb, if there is no resurrection,
if there is no reason to say “Happy Easter” today or any other day,
then there is no Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John worth remembering,
then, simply put, there is no Gospel.
Our packed church this morning tells us, however, that all these “ifs”
amount to nothing more than pointless speculation:
the tomb is empty;
Jesus Christ has risen from the dead;
he is alive.
Alleluia.
But how did that small band of Jesus’ followers explain what all this meant?
Sure, they could tell people that it happened,
but our mothers and fathers in faith wanted to talk about
how or even why it happened,
and they grasped for ways to do so.
We should feel the same burden whenever we say, “Happy Easter!”
Usually, someone echoes the greeting, and we move on from there.
Your uncle at your family party later today, for instance,
will probably not respond to your “Happy Easter” with,
“‘Happy Easter’? What do you really mean by that?”
But what if he did? What would you say?
What claim are you and I really
making about Jesus today?
We have already heard one answer to this question in this very liturgy,
and we have our organist, Timothy, and our cantor, Michelle, to thank
for making that answer sound so beautiful.
Recall the line that echoed off the walls of this church just a few minutes ago:
“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Ps. 118:22).
This, my brothers and sisters, gets at the heart of what Easter is all about:
it tells us who Jesus is, who our mothers and fathers in faith were,
and who we are.
“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
The church repeats this verse from Psalm 118 every single year on this day,
and in so doing, she puts herself in good company:
that exact line also appears in five places
in the New Testament (cf., Mt. 21:42; Lk. 20:17; Acts 4:11; Rom. 9:33; 1 Pt. 2:7),
each time referring back to Jesus.
I imagine the appeal of the image for our spiritual ancestors
was much the same as it is for us today:
one need not be a construction worker or an architect to get it.
A builder sorts through the stones of a quarry looking for the materials
to be used for a major construction project.
After the builder picks some stones and discards others,
the builder goes through round two,
doing the same thing again with the chosen stones,
picking the very best of the best to become the cornerstone, that is,
the most important stone in any construction project –
the stone upon which all the other stones depend.
To call Jesus the stone that the builders rejected is to say that,
when we first glanced at him, human beings found him quite unremarkable,
unlikely to be of much consequence.
Even more, we would have thought him profoundly unlucky
to fall afoul of the Roman Empire as he did,
something that cost him his life.
But to declare that Jesus, the rejected stone, actually becomes the cornerstone,
is not simply to say that we got it wrong about him,
but that we considered him to be the exact opposite of what he is.
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Not only did he not lose his life forever,
he also guaranteed that we would not lose our lives forever.
This is how the church has spoken about Jesus since the beginning, and the people
who first spoke this way, people whose names we have heard today,
were also rejected stones that now sit at the very foundation of our faith:
Peter, who, on Thursday,
denied three times even knowing who Jesus was,
this morning shows himself to be the rock of faith
by proclaiming the Resurrection;
Paul, who once persecuted the church, now confesses Christ as Lord;
Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons
were cast out (cf., Mk. 16:9, Lk. 8:2), becomes, for a while,
the only member of the church,
for she is the first to discover the empty tomb,
and she is all alone when she does it.
What is true of these giants of our faith is just as true of you and of me.
Many of us are the sorts of stones that the logic of the world would discount,
would regard as not being worth a second glance.
Some of us might make it to the second round,
but precious few are, again, according to the world’s lights,
cornerstone material.
But we come here, we come to hear the Word, to break the bread, to pour out the wine,
even if we come here and do these things only on occasion,
we come, we do these things, because somewhere, deep in our very being,
we see Peter, we see Paul, we see Mary Magdalene, we see Jesus,
and in seeing them, we see something about ourselves.
Hopefully, we see something as well about the other stones around us
whom the builders of the world ignore:
the refugee, the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, the undocumented.
When we look at them, when we look at ourselves,
we see the cornerstones not of some fancy building,
but of the whole infrastructure of the Kingdom of God,
which even now, is in our midst.
“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
This, my brothers and sisters, gets at the heart of what Easter is all about:
it tells us who Jesus is, who our mothers and fathers in faith were,
and who we are.
May this truth, this unlikely piece of Good News,
be with us throughout this Easter season.
And these days especially,
may they undergird all of our greetings of “Happy Easter.”
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