For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead.

Nor had their faith been strengthened and activated by the Holy Spirit.

In fifty short days the Holy Spirit will come, and we will hear Peter confronting a Jerusalem full of pilgrims with the message from today’s first reading. We will hear Peter take the people through an exposition of the scriptures and their fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

The people will hear Peter speak in every known language. Thousands will come to conversion.

A few years later Paul will venture out. The people of Colossae in the Lycus Valley in Asia Minor, not far from Ephesus, will read:

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
When Christ your life appears,
then you too will appear with him in glory.

The congregation at Colossae died with Christ in baptism. They were immersed in the waters of baptism, and thus buried with Jesus. They are told to remember this fact, and await the coming of the Lord.

It sounds like an ideal time, a time of great hope and new revelation.

Of course we forget that Stephen and then James will die in Jerusalem, that bandits prey upon travelers, that the congregation at Colossae will get so caught up in minutia that they will place Christ on the back burner, that society is ruled by the iron fist of Rome, and that Rome is immersed in a culture of violence, war, self-serving pleasure, and a faith in stone idols that offer no hope beyond the do-it-if-it-feels-good present.

It comes down to faith.

Faith!

The people who heard Peter were not eyewitnesses. Paul himself only saw and heard Jesus in a spectacularly blinding light on the road to Damascus.

Yet, the work and the Word is being passed on. Generation by generation, the Word is handed on. In a hundred years from the Resurrection there were no eyewitnesses left. But the message continues to this very day.

Jesus Christ came to earth, the Son of God, true God and true man. He came to save sinners and to redeem humanity. He came with the sole intention of doing the Father’s will. He came knowing that he would voluntarily place himself in the hands of the Chief priests and the Sanhedrin, and into the hands of Pilate. He knew that He would have to allow the soldiers to mock Him, whip and beat Him, and place a crown of thorns on His head. He knew that He would have to allow them to drive Him up the road to Calvary, nail Him to the cross, mock Him again, and that He would cry out in abandonment. He knew that He would have to allow himself to die for sinners, for you and me. No one did it to Him, not the Jews and not the Romans.

Jesus allowed it and accepted it. He did it all for us, for generation upon generation of people who know only the testimony of those original eyewitnesses, the testimony of Mary, Simon Peter, John, the Apostles, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the five-hundred.

All you and I know, we know by faith.

I have been blessed to be called Christian. I have been especially blessed to live long enough to have tasted the flesh of Christ and to have drunk His blood, and to do so in true faith and allegiance to Jesus Christ and His Holy Church.

We come here by faith.

Faith!

When we greet each other today we will say to you, ‘Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, alleluia.’ And you will respond, ‘He has risen indeed, alleluia.’

If this is said as a pleasantry or as a tradition, it is better left unsaid.

I tell you, in the proclamation of the Holy Gospel, that it is true: Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, alleluia! He is risen indeed alleluia!

The cross and death have lead to this. A dead man on a cross, later buried in a tomb is just a sad and horrific death. The God-man Jesus Christ, dead on the cross, buried in the tomb, and risen forevermore is our hope.

Proclaim it with faith. He is risen indeed alleluia!