It Was Not Christ Who Died, It was Death - The Wisdom of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

by Fr. Andrew Apostoli

4/22/04

Words of Archbishop Fulton Sheen

It was the tremendous lesson of the Resurrection that every follower of Christ would understand until the end of the world, the lesson that meant unlearning all the wisdom the world ever taught and ever will teach; and that lesson, which still thrills our hearts today, is that: It was not Christ Who died — it was death!

The Resurrection was a fact. He said He would rise again, and He did rise again! “Resurrexit sicut dixit!” (“He has risen as He said!”) Oh, think not Peter and the Apostles were the victims of a delusion; think not they had an hallucination and mistook their subjective ideas for the manifestation of the Conqueror of Death. All those who saw the One Whom they thought dead, walk in the newness of life, had to be convinced. They were not even expecting a resurrection. The absence of the Apostles at the crucifixion… prove they thought death ended all. On Easter morning the women went to the sepulcher not to meet the Risen Christ, but to embalm the body; the greatest worry was who would roll away the stone from the door of the sepulcher; even when they found it rolled away, they did not suppose a resurrection, but only a shameful theft of the body. The message of the angel inspired them not with faith, but with fear and horror.

The Apostles had the same state of mind – the one thing they were afraid of was a hallucination. Hence when the women announced the resurrection, instead of being impressed, they regarded their words as “idle tales and believed them not.” Peter and John verified the empty tomb, but still not knowing the Scripture about the Resurrection. Why, they were so far away from the idea of seeing Him upset the human concept of death that when they first saw Him thereafter they thought they had seen a ghost; Mary Magdalene thought He was the gardener, and the disciples on the way to Emmaus did not recognize Him until the breaking of bread — and when they told the other disciples, they were not believed. When He appeared in Galilee, Matthew tells us that some doubted. The very evening of the Resurrection some of His Apostles would not even believe their own eyes until they saw Him eating. Thomas even then doubted and would not be convinced until he put his finger into His hand, and his hand into the Divine Side, to be cured of his doubt and made the hope and healer of agnostics until the end of time.

If the followers were expecting Him, they would have believed at once. If they did finally believe, it was only because the sheer weight of external evidence was too strong to resist. They had to be convinced, and they were convinced. They had to admit their views on death were wrong — Christ was not dead. Life then does not mean what men call life. Hence the world and its ideas had to be remade — for here was a force greater than nature! Nature had not finished her accounting with Him, for nature received the only serious blow it ever received — the mortal wound of an empty tomb. (excerpt from The Eternal Galilean)
Reflections on the Archbishop's Words By Father Andrew Apostoli

We have recently celebrated the greatest feast of the Catholic Church, the Solemnity of Easter! St. Augustine says that we are an “Easter People,” and that we must be an “Alleluia” from the top of our heads to the tip of our toes! This is because the resurrection of Jesus is absolutely central to our faith. It would not have been enough if He only died on the Cross to take away our sins but did not rise from the dead. It would have meant that death itself had won the final victory, rather than Christ ultimately winning the victory over death by rising from it.

The Archbishop focuses in his meditation on how the Apostles and other disciples of Jesus were not expecting the resurrection to occur. Our Lord had foretold his suffering, death and resurrection at least three times to His Apostles. But His prophetic statements made no lasting impression on them. The Archbishop shows this clearly as he treats the Apostles, the women and even Peter and John as leaders of the little band of disciples. We cannot be too hard in our judgments of them. After all, rising from the dead doesn’t happen every day! (However, some people think it happens more often than we realize. I once lived with a religious brother who had a humorous sign in the part of the friary where he worked. It read, “For those of you who don’t believe that the dead can come back to life, you ought to be here at quitting time!”) What Jesus did by His resurrection, the Archbishop tells us in his meditation, was to redefine the meaning of life and death. Unless we have life in Christ, everything else would ultimately produce an emptiness that leads inevitably to spiritual death. On the other hand, being willing to die to all that the world treasures, for the sake of Christ, leads us ultimately to the life that will have no end. If we live as Jesus asks, we will experience a “dying” in terms of the struggles and sufferings that touch every human life in this world. But we will emerge from this “dying” by a “rising” to new life in Christ. The hope of a Christian is much like a great gamble: he risks any possible limited happiness in this life so that he might secure the unlimited happiness of the life to come. Are you willing to live by that Easter gamble?

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