Acts 10:34, 37-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-24; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9

This Sunday is Easter Sunday, on which we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The Resurrection is obviously a central event of great joy for all Christians, but it should be noted that initially this was not an experience of unmitigated joy for the disciples of Jesus. In fact, for many of them this seems to have been a time of fear and doubt, because they did not know what was happening. In the Gospel this Easter Sunday it says that Mary Magdalene, finding the tomb empty, reported to Peter and John: "They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don't know where they put him." Peter and John do not respond "Oh, of course, no one has put Him anywhere, surely He has risen from the dead." Instead, it seems that they can hardly even believe that the tomb is empty, for they rush to see for themselves if her story is accurate. Other Gospel accounts also show evidence of such doubts and misunderstandings among the other disciples. Indeed, we can read in Luke 24:37 (which is part of an alternative Gospel that may be read for some people at afternoon and evening Masses this Sunday) that when Jesus ultimately appeared to His Apostles in a group, "they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost."

To Christian readers today, some of this uncertainty and doubt among the disciples about what was going on may appear a little comic. It can seem almost ludicrous that they could so completely fail to get it. However, this should only point out to us how blessed we are to have the perspective on the Resurrection that we have. It should also make us reflect on just how dark things must have seemed for the disciples in the time before they came to understand that Jesus had risen from the dead. In a way, we have great advantages over the disciples who followed Jesus as His contemporaries on earth. While it would undoubtedly have been remarkable to follow Jesus in the same way that those original disciples did, we have the blessing of being able to see the central events of salvation history in retrospect. On Good Friday and Holy Saturday, we already know that soon it will be Easter Sunday. The original disciples had no such helpful hindsight, and for the most part they did not realize what was happening and did not understand that Jesus would rise from the dead. Of course, we still need faith to believe in the Resurrection, but faith is much easier when we already understand what it is that we are to believe with faith. These disciples that we see so troubled and uncertain in the Gospels knew only that their Lord had been killed. As Catholics today, we not only know about the Resurrection from the Gospels, but also have almost two thousand years of Church teaching and explanation to help us understand Christ's Resurrection and the fulfillment of God's plan for our salvation.

At the same time, while we do not have to face the same uncertainty about the plan of God on Easter Sunday that the original disciples faced on the first Easter Sunday, certainly everyone can identify with the kind of things that they must have been thinking and feeling then. Broadly speaking we may have many aids to understanding the Resurrection of Jesus and the plan of God for the salvation of humanity, but on a more specific level, we are often subject to nagging doubt and uncertainty about the presence of Jesus in our own lives and the plans of God for us personally. This is where we are sometimes called to have faith without understanding, and that is always a difficult thing, no less for us than for the first disciples. When Mary Magdalene found the empty tomb, she did not see immediately that this meant that the hopes the disciples had placed in Jesus were being fulfilled. Indeed, at the very time when their hopes were being fulfilled, and only a short time before the truth of the Resurrection would be made clear to them, many of the disciples must have faced perhaps their darkest hours, when they probably felt most deeply lost in seas of doubt, fear, and depression.

Therefore, as we celebrate the joy of the Resurrection on this Easter Sunday, it is also helpful to remember how dark and hopeless their lives and the whole world must have appeared to many of the followers of Jesus as they first awoke on Easter day. It is important to keep this in mind because we will face those kinds of days ourselves in some periods of our lives, when it will be difficult to maintain our faith because we do not understand the plan of God. There will be times in our lives when we want to follow Jesus but He seems very far away, when the Easter joy of the Resurrection seems very distant and unreal, and perhaps many aspects of our lives seem hopeless. At these times, we can find some comfort and strength for our faith in the fact that the greatest hopes of the original followers of Jesus were realized in a way greater than any that they imagined, during the very time when all those hopes seemed to have been destroyed.