Pages

Saturday, March 30, 2013

NEW WITNESSES OF THE RESURRECTION



EASTER - C
John 20:1-9

     THE LORD IS RISEN!  ALLELUIA!
        
        During His Passion, Jesus offered the absolute and ultimate sacrifice.  He was the High Priest who offered Himself as the Victim on the cross.  The Resurrection is the seal of God the Father as He accepted, sanctified and transformed the sacrifice of His Beloved Son.  The sacrifice gave birth to New Life by raising His Son from the dead.   Easter is the reward of the Father for the unwavering obedience of His Son; in the future, it will  also be the gift of God to all His children so that henceforth we are called an Alleluia People living the Resurrection life!
         Through sensus fidelium (sense of faith), we believe that the Lord first appeared to His Blessed Mother after the resurrection although the Scriptures is silent  on this.  Because the Resurrection is an historical fact, the evangelists needed people to testify to the event who were not blood-related to Jesus.
         The certainty of the resurrection is not totally based on the empty tomb which was only a sign, but rather to the apparitions of the Risen Christ. These resurrection appearances enkindled in the apostles and the believers the belief in the Risen Christ.  One of the earliest traditions is the appearance to Mary Magdalene who visited the tomb early in the morning of Sunday not to greet a Risen Christ but to anoint the  corpse of Jesus.  When she saw the stone had been moved away from the tomb she went to Peter and John to report the incident; they went in to investigate the empty tomb. Because of his youth, John outrun Peter and reached the tomb first but it was Peter who first went inside the tomb for the first time being the head of the apostles and found the linens inside the tomb.  Between the two, it was John who first believed in the Resurrection.
A religion has to answer the basic ontological question: Where do you take my life after death?The resurrection is the central mystery of the Christian faith.  It gives us a reason to hope.  Unlike the founders of other religions, Christ  assures us after our death: I will raise you up and I will bring you home...
        Two thousand years after the resurrection, we celebrate it not just as a commemoration of  an historical event but rather a re-living of a memorial.  We may not be privileged to have actually encountered the Risen Christ like the early disciples but we believe that we form a “continuum of the resurrection story”.  We are the new witnesses of the resurrection in the present time through our faith in the Risen Christ. 

2 comments:

  1. Amen! "We Walk By Faith". Thank you Father :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Two of the biggest assumptions that many Christians make regarding the truth claims of Christianity is that, one, eyewitnesses wrote the four gospels. The problem is, however, that the majority of scholars today do not believe this is true. The second big assumption many Christians make is that it would have been impossible for whoever wrote these four books to have invented details in their books, especially in regards to the Empty Tomb and the Resurrection appearances, due to the fact that eyewitnesses to these events would have still been alive when the gospels were written and distributed.

    But consider this, dear Reader: Most scholars date the writing of the first gospel, Mark, as circa 70 AD. Who of the eyewitnesses to the death of Jesus and the alleged events after his death were still alive in 70 AD? That is four decades after Jesus' death. During that time period, tens of thousands of people living in Palestine were killed in the Jewish-Roman wars of the mid and late 60's, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem.

    How do we know that any eyewitness to the death of Jesus in circa 30 AD was still alive when the first gospel was written and distributed in circa 70 AD? How do we know that any eyewitness to the death of Jesus ever had the opportunity to read the Gospel of Mark and proof read it for accuracy?

    I challenge Christians to list the name of even ONE eyewitness to the death of Jesus who was still alive in 70 AD along with the evidence to support your claim.

    If you can't list any names, dear Christian, how can you be sure that details such as the Empty Tomb, the detailed resurrection appearances, and the Ascension ever really occurred? How can you be sure that these details were not simply theological hyperbole...or...the exaggerations and embellishments of superstitious, first century, mostly uneducated people, who had retold these stories thousands of times, between thousands of people, from one language to another, from one country to another, over a period of many decades?

    ReplyDelete