4/12/20: Easter Sunday: The Life that Breaks Forth from Jesus

On this Easter Sunday we hear the Gospel of Mary and the disciples discovering the empty tomb. St. John tells us -- unlike the other Gospel writers -- that they discover the empty tomb "in the night". He is referring to the darkness of their faith at that moment. Death has a finality to it that fills us with dread. The repulsion and fear that we feel in the face of death was ritualized in the Jewish impurity laws. Touching a dead body was believed to render a person unclean for days -- so contagious was death that it was thought to infect life with its disorder. But Jesus does the opposite... By allowing death to touch him to the core, he was not rendered unclean. In fact, he is so clean that he is able to transform death so that it no longer carries with it the finality that it once had. In Jesus death no longer has the last word. This is what is shown to us in the Resurrection!