April 14, 2002

The first Christian "parishes" existed in response to the Resurrection of Christ. Accounts of the empty tomb are found in all the Gospel records (Mark 16:1-8), (Matthew 28:1-10), (Luke 24:1-6) and (John 20 :1-2). St.Paul, who was not one of the original apostles, may have got his information from Ananias (Acts 9:9-10) or Peter (Galatians 1:18) or possibly from disciples in Damascus (Acts 9: 19b) who were

explaining to him how it was possible for him to have encountered the crucified Christ alive on the road to the city.

The first reaction of the apostles was disbelief. This was not a story that "developed" in the early years of Christianity. It is the reason Christianity started. No one was able to produce the body to prove a fraud. The accounts of the witnesses agree on essentials and differ exactly according to the uniqueness of the encounter just as different witnesses to an accident on the TV news give different insights. A doctor describes the kind of injury, a policeman tells what law was broken, while a relative represents the reaction of the family. If they say the same thing, word for word, they are actors. Different slants on the event indicate its authenticity.

Recently a deranged young man shot himself in the rectory office of the cathedral. The priest who witnessed the tragedy, and who may have saved the lives of others in the office by warning them that the man had a gun, was greatly shocked by the carnage. He was able to avoid the subsequent commotion of the media by coming to our rectory for quiet. Suicide, said GK Chesterton, is not just a terrible crime, it is "the" crime, for it tries to give death a power over life. Christ does just the opposite, giving life power over death. Had there been no Resurrection, with a power over death that is given in Baptism, suicide would be logical. That is why there are people today who would de-criminalize it. They work within a logic of death that lives off despair, like some kind of strange orchid that lives off bad air. A man who seeks out a church for "the crime", has a frail spark of hope in eternal life. The risen Christ is the Light of Life, and without that Light, there would be no moral difference between good and evil, holiness and sin, life and death. So the Resurrection of Christ fractures the illusion of life as tragic and death as final. The life we live in this world is only a glimpse, and not a very clear one except for the saints, of the life beyond this world.

Fr. George W. Rutler