Things were not looking good. Faced with the arrest of their master, the twelve men chosen by Him as His most intimate friends had all fled. One betrayed Him and died in despair. The one chosen as their leader denied him forcefully. Only John, barely of the age of majority, remained at the foot of the Cross with His Mother.

          Amidst this uncertainty, doubt, and intense grief, three women muster the courage to approach the body of the One who was abandoned by those closest to Him in His hour of greatest need, the One who looked for someone to console Him amidst His misery and grief and – as we heard on Palm Sunday – found no one. The women who come to the Lord’s tomb could have faced great danger. Anyone doing so would have been suspected by the authorities who have just put Him to death. Moreover, they are faced with a great difficulty: A huge stone blocks their way to the tomb. Who will roll it back for them? Are these women foolish for coming without a plan? Or are they faithful in a way that we cannot understand?

          The women are going to anoint a dead body. Let that sink in a minute. They expect to find a dead body. They display incredible courage. They express a love and devotion that the Apostles lacked on that fateful night – very early, as the sun was rising, only 48 hours after the long night of trials that saw the sun rise upon the imprisonment and condemnation of the Son of God. But they come to show that love and affection – to a dead body.

          But to their immense surprise, something incredible has happened. “He has been raised.” St. Mark’s language – he has been raised – emphasizes that God has intervened. Through it all, a mysterious plan has been at work. On the night of Holy Thursday, Judas came looking for the Lord with a band of soldiers and guards with lanterns, torches, and weapons. And “Jesus, knowing all that was to befall him, came forward and said to them, ‘Whom do you seek?’ They answered him, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’” This, my brothers and sisters, is the pivotal question for us too: “Whom do you seek?” It should thrill us with joy and excitement, because it asks what is the purpose of our entire lives. But on that fateful night, the joy of seeking and finding the Savior of mankind, the one who has loved us with a love beyond all telling, who, as we heard on Holy Thursday, showed His disciples that “I would do anything for you,” was cruelly twisted. “Whom do you seek?” They sought Him, but to put Him to death.

          Little did they know that He was in control the entire time. Through it all, a mysterious plan has been at work. The “whom do you seek?” of that fateful night is transformed and redeemed in the proclamation of the angel: “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.” No longer are they asked whom they seek. Now is not the time for furtive human questioning and self-examination. Now is the time for immense joy. Now is the time for the purposes of God to be revealed. God through His messenger reveals how He has been at work not only in the Resurrection of Christ, but in redeeming the darkest places of the human heart.

          In the accounts of the Resurrection, we see not only Christ’s triumph over sin and death, but the forgiveness and restoration of His feeble disciples. “He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.” Galilee is where it all began, where He called the disciples from mending their fishing nets, where they spent three years marveling at His teaching and miracles. There they will see Him, and the fervor they once had for this mysterious rabbi, now revealed to be so much more, will not only be restored but will become a force so great that it will transform their fears and betrayals into courage and zeal so powerful that when the next invitation comes to accompany Him in His Passion, they will not flinch from dying a martyr’s death, confessing the name of Christ, and loving and forgiving even their persecutors as He did.

          The faithful women – as it turns out – do not have to worry about moving the stone. But now they have a bigger problem. They were looking for a dead body – and their lives, and the lives of all the other believers – might have been easier if they had found one. Easier, but not better. If they had found a dead body in the tomb, they would have mourned the loss of this great and holy man. They would have cherished His memory, and tried to live according to the teachings that He left them. If they had found a dead body, the many people in our world who claim that Jesus of Nazareth was a great moral teacher, but not God in the flesh to be worshiped and adored, would be correct.

          The faithful women are not the only ones who come expecting to find a dead body. This is precisely what an increasing portion of our world expects to find in the Church. Perhaps there will be beautiful music, or the chance to see an old friend, or a somewhat uplifting message, but something that will change the way that I live my life? I’d prefer not. Thus, it is no surprise that half of the population of the US – even here in Indiana – reported last year that they attend church rarely or never. What would they expect to find? Like the faithful women on Easter morning, the best hope for many is only a dead body.

          But this is the great miracle of the Resurrection, not only that God raised Christ from the dead, so that those women found an empty tomb, and an invitation to encounter the Lord whose body they sought in a place of love and friendship, but that you too can continue encountering the Risen Body of the Lord! Like the faithful women, encountering not a dead body, but the living Body of Christ present in His Church, makes demands on us, demands we attempt to flee by religious disaffiliation, in which we easily think that we are fleeing from an institution, the Church, but are really fleeing from a Person, Jesus Christ, the One whose mystical Body the Church really is.

          “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.” The ones who betrayed and abandoned Him are his brethren again. The shepherd was struck and the sheep were scattered – “they all fled,” we read on that fateful night – but now the shepherd has returned and will gather them again. With the possible exception of His Mother, and of Peter, the prince of the Apostles, Christ’s appearances after His Resurrection are not to individuals, but to the Church. The Risen Lord gathers the scattered disciples back together and gives them a mission. In forty days, when He ascends into Heaven, He assures them that He will be with them always, continuing to be present in the Church that He has formed from the remnant of Israel.

          The critical moment for those faithful women, the moment when their search for a dead body was transformed into an encounter with the greatest event of human history, was when they looked up. On their way to the garden, they are discussing who will move the stone, but looking at the ground in grief. “When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back.”

          This is precisely what we do when we look up to behold the living body of Christ in the Eucharist. We perform not the funerary honors for a dead body, but adore the living body of the Risen Lord. When Christ asked the crowd, “Whom do you seek?” and the fateful response was given, and He responded, “I am,” invoking the sacred name of the God of Israel, the crowd fell down in terror. But when Christ appeared to the faithful women, they fell down, not in fear, but in loving and reverential worship.

          So likewise, we fall down to our knees to worship Christ in the Eucharist, recognizing that here is the living body of the Risen Lord, the one we truly seek. When Christ sent the disciples out to preach, they reported that they saw Satan fall like lightning from the sky, so powerful was the good news and the authority given them by the Lord. In this very church, looking up to the living body of the Risen Lord, the power of sin and death is broken as the chains of addiction are smashed, wounded hearts are healed, and the voice of God is heard in so many hearts – consoling, encouraging, and calling to new life.

          Look up, and behold His living body! Though we too might have come to anoint a dead body today, God has other plans for us as well. Restored and forgiven by God’s grace, we find Christ’s living body in His Church: the mystical body, the Church He founded, and His Body and Blood in the Eucharist. Today, He will not ask you, “Whom do you seek?” He will not await the feeble response of your heart. Instead, God Himself has taken the initiative. He has transformed your doubts and hesitancies, and He Himself will tell you: “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised; he is not here,” in the empty tomb, but you will find Him risen and alive in the Eucharist, in the Church.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

Easter Sunday of the Resurrection, A.D. MMXXV