The four gospels all tell us about the Resurrection of Jesus, but the stories are all a little different. This is in contrast to the way they handle the passion and death of Jesus -- pretty much the same from evangelist to evangelist. Needless to say, scholars have spent a lot of time discussing the discrepancies. But there are some common threads. The first is that the Resurrection begins with an empty tomb. The second is that the people who discover the empty tomb are women; not as significant now as it was then. In that society women were not considered reliable witnesses and their testimony meant a lot less than that of a man in a court of law. But all the gospels insist on this fact. The third is that those women who discovered the empty tomb met with some kind of supernatural being or beings -- men dressed in white, two angels, one angel, a young man -- but something supernatural explained that Jesus had risen from the dead, and this is the important part -- as he had promised. And the fourth is that when Jesus appeared to people, they at first did not recognize him.
Sure, the scriptures tell us that Jesus appeared to his apostles, later on to more than 500 people, surely to Paul. But when you think about it, you either believe those witnesses or you don’t. It’s like so many things we hear about. If I hear that the Blessed Mother is appearing to people in Medjugorje, I guess I neither believe nor disbelieve. I figure if she wants to give me a special message, she knows where to find me. It’s the same with the appearances of Jesus. I’m sure they were momentous to the apostles and the first Christians. The appearances of Jesus gave them the courage to preach the gospel and to suffer a martyr's death. But in the long run, you either believe those witnesses or you don’t. Or if you are like me you neither believe or disbelieve; that's just the way I am.
But the tomb was empty. If you or I open a tomb, we would expect to find a body, probably in some state of deterioration. Even the bodies of saints that have been preserved are not quite like living bodies; no matter what, you can tell that they are no longer alive. But the astonishing thing about the tomb of Jesus is that you don’t encounter death there, you can’t help asking, just as the women did, “Who did this, who took the body away?”
Not only don’t you encounter death in the tomb, but you encounter life. You are reminded that he predicted this. While he was living among you, he reminded you over and over again that this must happen, that the scriptures foretold this event, that the Son of Man must be tortured and put to death, and to rise again on the third day. What the women encountered was a special insight from heaven, kind of like when Peter realized that Jesus was the Messiah of God.
Now you have to ask, why women? We could quibble over how many women were at the empty tomb; we know one woman was there at least, and that was Mary Magdalene. But remember, you certainly don’t have to believe women. In the Gospel of Luke it says that the women returned to the apostles and kept telling them about what they had witnessed, but the apostles didn't believe them. I like to picture the women who kept telling. They didn’t say it once, they said it over and over. But the apostles didn’t have to believe women.
And maybe that’s the point. Peter and John eventually go to the tomb and see for themselves that it’s empty -- but there is no angel to tell them why. They go home wondering what it all means; they still don’t believe..
Saint Paul tells us that if Christ did not rise from the dead, our faith is futile, and we are still in our sins. If it is only for this life that we have hope in Christ, then we are to be pitied more than all men. And that is the mystery.
There are scholars who have studied the scriptures and concluded that Jesus was a good man and a fine teacher, but that’s all. There are others who talk about a mass hallucination that convinced those early Christians that Jesus had conquered death. Some in fact think the hallucination came from God. And there were a lot of theories among the enemies of Christianity -- in the Gospel of Matthew, the soldiers are told to say that someone came and stole the body while they were sleeping.
In the end we are all in the position of Peter and John, of Thomas, of Mary Magdalene, of the two followers on the way to Emmaus. If the Resurrection ofJesus is to mean anything to us, we must believe, we must have faith, we must totally commit to this as a fact, like the sun coming up in the morning, or the flowers that burst forth in the spring. Because we all stand before the empty tomb that tells us death has been conquered for you and I if we believe that Jesus did what he promised to do. As Jesus told Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen, but have come to believe.”
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