Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord
Readings: Acts 10:34, 37-43; Psalm 117(118):1-2, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9
9 April 2023
GOSPEL REFLECTION with Fr Mark De Battista
Faith in the bodily resurrection
The Gospel for Easter Sunday morning is the same every year. It is always the account from St John about the empty tomb and the familiar story about St Mary Magdalene coming to tell the apostles about what she had seen. Believing her, Peter and John run towards the empty tomb to verify her account. But before we delve any further into the great mystery of today’s feast, we need to broaden our perspective a little more than the Gospel, because what is being unveiled for us is something with a wider scope for scriptural reflection than just the Gospel passage.
A cursory glance at the readings will notice that in the Acts of the Apostles we have St Peter explaining to the Roman centurion, Cornelius, about Jesus of Nazareth and his death and resurrection, and that he has appeared to chosen witnesses, and the revelation of the Holy Spirit as the one by whose power Jesus was raised from the dead.
In the second reading, we have St Paul talking about our full-blown interior life with Christ while the early Christians are awaiting his return in glory. Meanwhile, in the Gospel we have the discovery of the empty tomb and the first glimpse of faith in the resurrection and comprehension of the promise of Jesus to rise from the dead. It seems that the one experiencing the Christian liturgy is caught in some kind of time warp. The fact is that the Church is presenting us with just that.
In New Testament Greek, there are two main words to describe time. One refers to chronological time (“chronos”), whereas the other refers to theological time (“chairos”). The first refers to the gradual unfolding of time chronologically as one event following upon another. This is what we see in the Gospel, and indeed in the Gospels (including weekdays) for the first two weeks of Eastertide. In this phase of the Easter season, the Church is intent to impress upon us that Jesus Christ is truly risen in the flesh and that he eats and drinks with his disciples. He lets them touch him and he walks with them. He is back with them in body—not just in some kind of spiritual awakening. In the second sense of time (chairos), the Church is impressing a theological or spiritual sense of time. This refers to a sense of the moment in which an event is taking place that is somehow transcending or prescinding from ordinary time. This is replete with meaning, particularly when referring to God intervening in history. God is outside of time, but he acts within time—all the time.
The second sense of time (chairos) already has the Holy Spirit who chronologically does not descend upon the nascent Church until Pentecost—already working powerfully upon the apostles. We see how this same Spirit has transformed them from cowardly, feeble men, into valiant witnesses for Christ ready to lay down their lives. In the first sense, the Church is, so-to-speak, leading us by the hand as fellow disciples discovering the empty tomb and being confirmed in a once lost faith, whereas in the second sense, we are already being inspired to live a full Christian life. The Church purposely does this to demonstrate the richness of the mystery we celebrate today and which she ponders over the next 50 days until the fullness of perfection; the gift of the Holy Spirit poured out on the 50th day—Pentekonta (50 in Greek).
Turning to the Gospel passage itself, we see how in first-century Palestine, not much faith was placed in the testimony of women, not even in legal cases. It is not surprising, therefore, that Peter and John run towards the tomb to verify Mary Magdalene’s story for themselves. At this stage, her story is not that she met the risen Christ, but that the stone was rolled away from the tomb. The apparition took place afterwards. Jesus would have known this, so it shows how countercultural he was in entrusting the testimony of his first appearance to a woman.
She immediately assumes grave robbers have done their dirty work, but what the two disciples discover is something quite different. The shroud clothes are still there when they arrive. Grave robbery was not very common at that time, although not unheard of. Yet, what is striking is that grave robbers would not have wasted time unwrapping the carefully wrapped body for risk of being caught.
Moreover, in the case of the face cloth, or sudarion, it was rolled in a place all by itself. Some scholars maintain that it was still rolled up as if it was still around the face of Jesus. This was enough for the disciple whom Jesus loved to conclude that he has risen from the dead. Contrary to what some modern critical scholars maintain about the resurrection being simply a spiritual awakening in the memory of Jesus, is that the sense of resurrection maintained throughout the Gospels was a bodily resurrection. Otherwise, the apostles would never have been hounded for their claims by the leaders of the people who were accustomed to ghosts and spiritual memories.
Although the scriptural testimony does not show Jesus rising from the dead, it shows something even more effective, namely, the disciples coming to faith in the resurrection—thus, modelling for subsequent generations of believers how they, too, can come to faith in the same event that has opened for all the horizons of eternal life and forever changed the course of world history.
ARTWORK REFLECTION with Mgr Graham Schmitzer
Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man by Nicolas Poussin (1594−1665).
“Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man”, c. 1655. Oil on canvas, 125.7cm x 165.1cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain.
In the course of the Easter Vigil, the Church sings in the great hymn of the Exultet: “O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know the time and hour when Christ rose from the underworld.” The moment of the Resurrection is known to God alone, and so all the Church can do for 50 days is to wonder at the mystery. In the Acts of the Apostles, St Luke gives us an account of how this mystery affected the apostles and the early Church. This mystery, of course, involves the action of the Holy Spirit who immediately sets about animating the disciples.
What we are looking at in Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man is one of three great cityscapes painted by Nicholas Poussin in the mid-1650s (we met Poussin in Advent with his Annunciation.) The other two paintings, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery and The Death of Sapphira, are in the Louvre. All are strongly influenced by the art of Raphael, especially his tapestry cartoons of the Acts of the Apostles made for the Sistine Chapel.
Poussin’s influence reached even into modern times. Pablo Picasso is known to have admired Poussin’s compositional precision and reworked Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabine Women into one of his cubist masterpieces, said to be a comment on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Poussin died in 1665. The city of Rome gave him a magnificent funeral and buried him in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucia.
Poussin has here recorded the first miracle performed by the apostles after the death of Christ, told to us by St Luke in Acts 3:1–10. At the gate of the Temple in Jerusalem, a lame man begging for alms is miraculously cured by St Peter, who asks him to rise up and walk. St John touches the man’s arm and points to heaven, denoting the true source of the miracle.
The stairs at the top of which this encounter is staged are animated with a carefully balanced group of figures, not unlike Raphael’s 1508 fresco in the Vatican of The School of Athens. The facial expression of the lame man and, to a great extent, his pose, are modelled on Raphael’s cartoon of this subject, and the hands of St Peter and the lame man remind us of the hand of God giving life to Adam in Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel ceiling. Some of the witnesses of this miracle express amazement, while others simply go about their business.
At first glance, it may seem strange that such an important subject—the healing of the lame man—is almost dwarfed by apparently secondary figures in the foreground. But they are not secondary at all. There are no accidents or oversights in any of Poussin’s works. The whole scene has been carefully staged. Peter wears blue and yellowish garments, his standard colours in iconography. The young man to Peter’s right, walking up the steps, wears green and red, the colours of St Paul—and his importance in the scene is made emphatic by the overlapping of his figure with that of Peter.
Paul? you’re probably thinking. Here, Poussin has taken some poetic license. He is well-known for his mythological and philosophical interpretations of events he painted. And that is exactly what he has done here. This painting is typical of Poussin’s originality.
Peter had said to the crippled man, “I have neither silver nor gold, but I will give you what I have: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, walk!” (Ac 3:6). With one word, “Walk!”, Peter tells the cripple to do the seemingly impossible, for he had been lame from birth. But it is through the power of the Word himself—the Word who has existed from the beginning “through whom all things came into being” (Jn 1:2)—that this miracle happens.
Now, we don’t actually meet Paul until four chapters later when he witnesses Stephen’s martyrdom (Ac 7:58), and then begins his persecution of Christ’s followers until his famous conversion on the road to Damascus. Poussin would have us imagine that the real action of the Word of God in this picture is not merely the healing of the cripple, but in taking possession of the mind of Saul who is looking at the old man on the right, departing with an appalled expression on his face and representing the mind that is impervious to the Word and remains trapped in darkness.
So, perhaps this painting could better be titled The Conversion of St Paul—a pre-conversion if you like. When Saul began his terrible persecution, he may well have been a very troubled man, fiercely loyal to the God of the Old Covenant, but now worried by the nagging thought that perhaps God may have broken into history again. Who knows?
Poussin adds a final note. In the figure of Paul, we have an allusion to justification by faith, while the balancing figure on the left, giving alms to a poor woman, stands for justification by good deeds. “You must do what the Word tells you and not just listen to it” (Jm 1:22). In a final example of Poussin’s extraordinary originality as a philosopher-painter, the focus is not on the giver of alms, who appears almost nonchalant, but on the recipient who seems to experience a kind of epiphany as she receives, not a material gift, but the Word himself.
Fr Mark De Battista migrated from Malta with his family in 1978. He completed his schooling in the Diocese of Wollongong and offered himself for the priesthood in 1988. He commenced his studies at St Patrick’s College, Manly in 1989 and was ordained priest in 1995, serving in various parishes across the diocese until 2002. From 2003–2007, he served in two assignments in the USA with university chaplaincy in the states of Illinois and Colorado. After some years back in the diocese, he undertook post graduate studies in Rome from 2010–2016 in the field of sacred Scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute (Biblicum), the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Biblical Commission (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). Since his return to the diocese, he has served in various parishes, and from 2018–2021, he was chaplain to the University of Wollongong. From 2018, he has also served in St Patrick’s Parish, Port Kembla, where he is now the parochial administrator. He is currently chaplain to Mass For You At Home broadcast on Network Ten and Foxtel each week.
Monsignor Graham Schmitzer is the retired parish priest of Immaculate Conception Parish in Unanderra, NSW. He was ordained in 1969 and has served in many parishes in the Diocese of Wollongong. He was also chancellor and secretary to Bishop William Murray for 13 years. He grew up in Port Macquarie and was educated by the Sisters of St Joseph of Lochinvar. For two years he worked for the Department of Attorney General and Justice before entering St Columba’s College, Springwood, in 1962. Mgr Graham loves travelling and has visited many of the major art galleries in Europe.
With thanks to the Diocese of Wollongong, who have supplied this reflection from their publication, Triumph – Lenten Program 2023. Reproduced with permission.
