A blessed Easter to all of you and to all of your families. The gospel today comes from the Evangelist John, and as you know, John begins his gospel in the way different than Matthew and Luke, which tells us of the birth of Jesus, we don’t hear any of that at all in the Gospel of John. Rather John switches back to the Book of Genesis, for he begins by saying, In the beginning was the word, just as Genesis begins, In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.

And so, throughout his gospel John is moving us to this precise moment in which he relates the story of the resurrection of Jesus. He wants us to understand that the life of Jesus, the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, is a new beginning, it is a moment of New Creation. We said that as much in the psalm response, This is the day the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice. And so for us as we celebrate this day, it’s not just about marking something that happened 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem. of Jesus coming forth from the tomb, but rather it’s an invitation for us to really believe in the power of the resurrection to the point that we see today as a new opportunity, the first day of creation, in which we can leave everything behind and begin again, just as God recreated the world in the resurrection of Jesus.

Think of what that means. For us to be able to say, we can give everything over to the Lord in our past and start fresh and begin anew, and the disciples who experienced this new day of creation, give us some hints at how we should approach this new life or what should take place in our lives.

The first thing we see is that there is a lot of running around going on. Mary Magdalene runs to tell Peter and the beloved disciple and they run as well to the tomb. It’s a reminder that we have to make this resurrection our own, we have to become involved, it has two in some way grip us totally in our lives to the point that we run with it. It becomes a part of who we are. And what they do is accept the death of the Lord as not the end, and that’s the invitation to us.

What are our fears about dying? Yes surely, our own mortality as human beings that one day we will perish from this life. Does it in some way force us into making decisions, compromises in life, ways in which we deny our mortality by trying to save ourselves here with the accumulation of goods or power, position, in which we convince ourselves in a fantasy world that we’re going to live forever.

But there’s also those kinds of dying that takes place in our lives that also bring fear. The dying that so often is involved in reconciling with another person and forgiving them, because we know in some way we have to give something of our pride over, or the dying that comes in being generous to someone who is in need rather than claiming all of our possessions for ourselves, or the dying as well that goes on in our lives, when we are filled with anxiety about something that we have to do that’s difficult and we make it so much bigger than it is. The Lord today tells us that we should be willing to always walk into that tomb, because it is empty, it has no meaning, it should have no grip on us, we should put away the fears of forgiving another person, thinking that maybe they won’t respond or putting aside the anxieties we have of the problems we face as, Oh, they’re going to overwhelm us, because the Lord gives us a new day, an opportunity to see that he will not disappoint us in that death, we will rise to something greater as we will rise from our own death.

But there’s something else we see in this gospel. Notice that when they go into the tomb, Peter sees as well as John, the beloved disciple, that Jesus clothing, the one that shrouded his body, is in one side and the one that covers head is kind of rolled up kind of neatly. I often wondered if that reminded the disciples that Jesus fixed his bed every day. Maybe they saw something about Jesus’s practices of what he did, they recognized that yes, Jesus would have done that. And so too, in our own lives we should look for ways in which we recognize the presence of the Lord in our lives, just as maybe we recognize the traits of our ancestors in each one of us.

Some years ago, as a priest in a parish I was getting things ready for mass and I was walking across the sanctuary and there was a man who came in the back of the church, he came up and talked to me and he said, Pardon me, he said, I’ve been praying for a while and I’ve noticed you are getting things ready, do you know John Mayhan? Did you know John Mayhan? And I said, Well yes, why would you ask that? Well, he said, because many many years ago, when we were both teenagers, we hung around together, and I haven’t seen him for a long time and I know he died already and when I saw you walk across there, you looked just, you carried yourself just like John Mayhan did. And I said, Well, that’s interesting, because John Mayhan was my grandfather.

– [Congregation] Oh!

I had a great devotion and love for him and I probably picked up the way that he gestured and walked and carried himself. Well, so often in life we recognize people by the way that they carry themselves, and maybe sometimes we also have those kinds of habits as well.

So with the Lord today in the resurrection is calling us to do is to look at especially the life of Jesus, the stories of Jesus in the gospel and see what is it that we can do to make sure that people recognize the presence of Christ in the world, because we’re doing what he did. Reaching out to those who need healing, comforting those who are sick and mourning, making sure that the sinner is not excluded from the community, but always is the lost sheep that’s brought back. Having the generosity to give of ourselves like that woman at the temple who gave her two pennies, all that she had in order for others to have something more.

How is it that we are showing the presence of Christ and that the world will recognize that the risen Lord is truly risen, because we have picked up his habits, that we have in some way shown how he acts in the world. That is the message of the Resurrection today, that we have the courage to walk into the tomb, the death that we fear so much and face it, and know with our hearts that the Lord will see us through, not only the death that we suffer physically in our mortal beings, but all those other kind of deaths that we have in our life, but also that we take seriously the task of acting in such a way in the world that people will recognize that Jesus truly is alive and present and active in the world.

That is the day of New Creation for us. That’s the invitation that we have on this Easter day. And so let Christ rise in each one of us and let us take up this first day of creation as those disciples did and run with it.