The
Solemnity of the Resurrection of the Lord
Mass
During Easter Day
Dear
brothers and sisters,
There are, regrettably, a growing
number of people throughout the western world who doubt the reality of the
Resurrection of the Lord Jesus from the dead. There are even a growing number
of people who doubt even that Christ Jesus ever lived in our human flesh.
Perhaps you know one of these persons; perhaps you are one of them yourself.
In his homily for Good Friday in the
Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, the Preacher to the Papal Household, Raniero
Cardinal Cantalamessa – whose name literally means, “sing the Mass” – spoke to
our “brother and sister atheists, agnostics, or those still searching for the
truth (if any are listening).” In his preaching, he
quoted a letter of J.R.R. Tolkien, who said:
It takes a fantastic will to
unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened,’ and more to suppose
that he did not say the things recorded all of him — so incapable of being
‘invented’ by anyone in the world at that time: such as ‘before Abraham came to
be I am’ (John 8:58). ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John 14:9).
Why
does the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings say it
takes “a fantastic will to unbelief” to doubt the reality of life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus? Leaving aside the various historical, philosophical, and
theological arguments, we have another sort of argument, a tangible one.
At Easter, we often speak of the
“empty tomb,” but, in point of fact, the tomb was not empty on that first of
the day week after the Crucifixion of the Messiah. We heard a moment ago the
account of the tomb provided for us by the Evangelist Saint John.
“So Peter and the other disciple
went out and came to the tomb,” he says. He continues, saying, “They both ran,
but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he
bend down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in” (John 20:3-5). “The
tomb was empty, then, inasmuch as nobody was there. It was not completely
empty, however;” it contained the various cloths with which Jesus had been
entombed. The presence of the burial
cloths inside the tomb is also attested to by Saint Luke (cf. Luke 24:12).
He goes on to say something
remarkable, something that is very often overlooked: “When Simon Peter arrived
after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths, and the cloth that
had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate
place” (John 20:6-7). We have, then, here mention of at least three cloths
within the tomb: at least two on his body and a third that covered his face.
But then Saint John says something
even more striking: “Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had
arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed” (John 20:8). What did he
see that caused him to believe? The tomb without the body of Jesus? Certainly
not. No, he saw the burial cloths and believed. Why? What was so special about
these cloths. You may be surprised to learn that the burial cloths of the Lord
Jesus have not been lost to history; we are still in possession of four cloths
that were found in the tomb of Christ.
First, there is a long, thin strip
of cloth that was wrapped around Jesus’ chin up to the top of his head to keep
his mouth closed in death.
Second, there is a bloodstained
cloth measuring 33 inches by 21 inches called the Sudarium of Oviedo,
because it is housed in Oviedo, Spain where it has been since at least the year
a.d. 840. It was placed upon the
face of Jesus at the moment he died to catch what is called the death blood
that came out of his nose and mouth.
Third, there is a long, rectangular cloth
measuring 14 feet by three and a half feet that bears the image of a man who
was five feet and eleven inches tall. The man depicted on this cloth was
crucified, an image best seen in photographic negatives. Although this Shroud
of Turin – so named because it is now kept in the Italian city of Turin - is
the most studied cloth in the world, the image found on it cannot be explained.
Whether considered individually or
together, these three cloths cannot be what Saint Peter saw that caused him to
believe in the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The first two cloths show
nothing but blood and the shroud could not have been unrolled inside the tomb;
even if it could have been, it would have been too dark inside to see the
image. What, then, did he see? There is a fourth cloth, a hand cloth that had
been placed over Jesus’ face, the one found not with the burial cloths, but
rolled up in a separate place, because it was quite different the rest.
This fourth cloth is called the Volto
Santo – the Holy Face – and the Veil of Manoppello, because it is housed in
the Italian village of Manoppello, where it has been since the sixteenth
century. It was kept in Rome from 708 - where it was called the Veronica, the
true image - until the sack of Rome by the German emperor until 1527. The cloth
itself measures 17.5 centimeters by 24 centimeters and is the largest piece of
byssus surviving from the ancient world. As if on the cloth, we see
…the face of Christ on a
transparent veil in delicate byssus colors, framed by shoulder-length hair
parted in the middle and a sparse beard. The left cheek is slightly swollen,
the mouth slightly open, and the eyes are open in an expression that is not
included in the vocabulary of arrest warrants: perfectly merciful.
It
is the most priceless treasure in the world, the very image of the Face of God,
and served as the basis on which artists depicted the Savior for almost fifteen
hundred years, but that is a story for another day.
Byssus, the material of which this
veil, this napkin, this sweat cloth is made, is woven from the silk with which
a particular mollusk attaches itself to rocks. Byssus cannot be dyed and it
cannot be painted; its color only comes from the color of the silks taken from
the mollusk. In the ancient world, it was a precious material, never sold but
only given as a gift. Pharaohs were buried with a piece of it over their faces
and wealthy women wore it as a veil because they could see out, but others
could not see their faces through the cloth. Away from the light, byssus
appears brown, dark, and opaque, but when held in the light byssus shimmers in
golden hues and is transparent, so much so that you can read a newspapers
through it. Byssus is photoactive; it responds to light, strange as this might
seem. Today, there is only one woman in the world who knows how to weave
byssus, Chiara Vigo, who lives on the island of Sardinia.
What happened that first Easter
morning when Saint Peter entered the tomb of Christ? The cloth placed on Jesus’
face was on the ground, but
…it was not lying there flat. It
was a haze, but it must have been recognizable as a “thing,” as an “object”
that caught the first rays of dawn. Naturally, Peter bent down and picked it
up. It was the precious little cloth that had lain on Jesus’ face, the finest
sea silk. It was a light as a feather as Peter picked it up, unfolded it and
held it against the light of the entrance. What else? He must have held that
way, not toward the interior of the dark chamber, but up to the light. It was,
however, a cloth of light. It reacts to light.
What Peter saw now in the tomb on
the veil against the morning light made it in a blink of the eye as clear as
the sun: no one had taken the Lord from the tomb. Jesus had not been stolen and
carried away. Something completely new was in the world now. It was unheard of
it, what Peter glimpsed in the blue hours of the first Easter morning here, on
that transparent fabric held against the light of the entrance. Here suddenly
Christ looked back at him! With open eyes! No man had ever seen this before.
This cloth was “not made by human hands,” as was said later. It was the true
image. Three days earlier Peter has said that he did not know that man. Hours
later he had had to watch from a distance and hear how Jesus, streaming with
blood, cried out once again on the cross and died. Peter was still reeling from
the shock – when now suddenly Christ himself looked out at him from the veil in
his hand. Now he knew him. Now he recognized him immediately. “In thy light we
see light,” Israel had read for centuries in the Book of Psalms [Ps 36:9]. Did
that verse perhaps occur to him? Or did he already remember then the earlier
intimations of Jesus that “the Son of man must … be killed, and on the third
day be raised” [Lk 9:22]? We do not know. Only one thing do we know. Besides
the bewildering emptiness of linens in the tomb, this message in pictures read:
“I live.” Jesus was no longer dead. The only thing corresponding to this image
was not another image, no icon or other sort of portrait; the only thing
corresponding to what he saw there was the living man.
This
cloth is what Peter saw that caused him to believe, but it was not only Peter
who saw it.
Mary, too, treasured this cloth with
the image of the Face of her Son. We are told that
She had received it from the hands
of God himself and kept it with her at all times, so that she might always be
able to contemplate the wondrously fair face of her Son. Each time she wanted
to adore her Son, she stretched the image out to the east and prayed before it
with her gaze on her Son and with open, uplifted hands. Before the burden of
her life was finally taken from her, the apostles carried Mary on a stretcher
into a cave. In this cave, they laid Mary down to die before the face of her
Son.
We
see in this cloth that Jesus “does not limit himself merely to affirming his
love, but makes it visible and tangible. Love, after all, can never be just an
abstraction.”
Those who look upon this Face cannot but believe.
When examined forensically, the face
on the Shroud of Turin and the face on the Veil of Manoppello belong to the
same man, and the blood stains on the Veil of Oviedo belong to this same man.
This Easter, dear friends, look upon
the Face of Christ, the proof of his Resurrection from the dead. Look upon the
Face of Mercy and believe! Amen. Alleluia!
