By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Homily by Archbishop Thomas Wenski at Easter Seminar for Diocesan Priests and Seminarians at Shellbourne Conference Center in Valparaiso, Indiana. Tuesday, April 7, 2015.
"Let our lives be conquered and transformed by the Resurrection", this was Pope Francis exhortation to the faithful gathered yesterday in Rome to pray with him the Regina Caeli. He also noted that the Liturgy treats this whole week - this Octave of Easter - as if it were one day to permit us to better enter into the mystery of Easter.
That entry is facilitated for us in today's liturgy by two questions posed to us - one in each of the two Scripture readings.
In the gospel reading, we hear the one whom Mary understood to be the gardener ask her: "Whom are you looking for?" Mary did not at first recognize the Lord because she was focused on the empty tomb and her own grief. Like Mary, It's easy for us to miss the Lord when our focus is on ourselves. But, Mary hears the Lord call her name - and hearing him she now recognizes him, she now becomes the Apostle to the Apostles - I have seen the Lord, she proclaims. And this is at the heart of the Christian message: we assert that not only do we know about the Lord but that we know him, we know him personally and that he knows us - by name.
Mary's life was conquered and transformed through her encounter with the living Lord - and because he lives in a new way of existence, we too can know him, we too can meet him in an encounter as intimate and as transformative as Mary's encounter with him in the garden on Easter morning.
And that encounter presents us with that same question the inhabitants of Jerusalem posed to Peter on that first Pentecost Sunday: "What are we to do?" The answer Peter gives to them is also offered to us: Repent and be baptized. Baptism - which is a baptism into his death and resurrection - has fundamentally changed us - we are children of God and brothers to the Lord and thus baptism (and the repentence it presupposes) represents a basic reorientation of our lives. As we pray in the Fourth Eucharist prayer: "...that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him who died and rose again for us, he sent the Holy Spirit from you, Father.." With Jesus' resurrection and ascension into heaven, we discover new understandings, and new possibilities, of what it means to be human "living no longer for ourselves". This is the Evangelii Gaudium - the joy of the gospel.
"Whom are you seeking?" "What must we do?" The Aparecida document of the Latin American bishops in 2007 which in many ways was the precursor of Evangelii Gaudium offers a succint response to both questions by saying, "To be a Christian is not a burden but a gift. To have encountered the Lord is the best thing that has ever happened to us and to share him with others is our joy."
