Sermon for Tuesday in Easter Week
“They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”
This text from Zechariah concluded the reading of the Passion in Holy Week in John’s account of the Passion read on Good Friday. And yet, this text also provides us with a way to think the mystery of the Resurrection. We see that wonderfully today in the second story of the Resurrection that Luke tells.
Yesterday on Easter Monday we had the amazing story of Christ and the disciples on the Road to Emmaus; the point is that the disciples’ hearts “burn[ed] within [them]” as Jesus talked with them on the way and opened the Scriptures for their understanding about the logic of his Passion and Resurrection. In other words, they are pierced, as it were, by what they have learned in the encounter with Christ who provides an interpretation through things said and done. “He was known of them,” specifically “in the breaking of the bread.”
Here Jesus appears in the midst of the disciples. That alone is an intriguing concept. In the Christian story, God is in our midst in Jesus Christ as the Crucified and as the Risen Lord. As an image it captures the central dynamic of the Incarnation. In the Gospel reading for Easter Tuesday Jesus appears in the midst of the disciples who are shocked with joy and disbelief. Their confusion and uncertainty becomes the setting for learning about the Resurrection from the Risen Lord. Beyond the empty tomb of Easter Morn, beyond the report of Mary Magdalene and the other women, beyond the words of an angel, beyond the report of the other disciples, there is the whole matter of Christ making himself known to us in the truth of his Resurrection.
We cannot know this ‘scientifically’ in any kind of empirical sense; paradoxically, though, the Resurrection is one of the strongest concepts that makes science possible. Why? Because it affirms the intelligibility of the material world. We cannot know the Resurrection of Christ experientially only spiritually and imaginatively, intellectually, we might say. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” as the old spiritual puts it; the point of the rhetorical question is that we are there not literally but symbolically and really in terms of our sins being the cause of his being pierced. But ask the question about the Resurrection. Were you there when he rose from the dead? And the answer is both yes and no. How do we know the Resurrection? Through the power of these accounts that show us how the idea of the Resurrection takes hold of human minds and changes human lives.
