This week's readings Week of Apr. 20 - 26 Sunday, April 20, 2003 Reading I: Acts 10:34a, 37-43 Reading II: Col 3:1-4 or 1 Cor 5:6b-8 Gospel: Jn 20:1-9 Monday, April 21, 2003 Reading I: Acts 2:14, 22-33 Gospel: Mt 28:8-15 Tuesday, April 22, 2003 Reading I: Acts 2:36-41 Gospel: Jn 20:11-18 Wednesday, April 23, 2003 Reading I: Acts 3:1-10 Gospel: Lk 24:13-35 Thursday, April 24, 2003 Reading I: Acts 3:11-26 Gospel: Lk 24:35-48 Friday, April 25, 2003 Reading I: Acts 4:1-12 Gospel: Jn 21:1-14 Saturday, April 26, 2003 Reading I: Acts 4:13-21 Gospel: Mk 16:9-15 Pope's Prayer Intentions April General Intention Live according to the spirit: That those who hold positions of responsibility in the Church may be an example of a life responsive to the guidance of the Spirit. April Mission Intention The universal call to holiness: That clergy, religious, and laity who work in missionary lands, may bear witness to the universal call to holiness.

'On the first day
of the week . . .'

		Word of God  Word of Life  Fr. John G. Stillmank

Don't you just get goose-bumps listening to the story?

On the first day of the week, the women came to the tomb in the darkness of the early morning. They had seen Jesus brutally tortured and executed. They were coming to anoint his body, no doubt overwhelmed with unbelievable sadness.

"Preaching as related in Acts, Peter gives the story of Jesus in a nutshell, and then delivers the most important line: 'He commissioned us to preach to the people.'"

According to John's Gospel they got there and saw the stone removed. They ran off to tell Peter and "the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them." Because the women didn't understand what Jesus had taught about the resurrection, they thought someone had taken the body of Jesus and put it somewhere they didn't know. So that's how they told Peter and the other disciple.

Then Peter and the other disciple ran - they didn't walk - to the tomb. The other disciple got there first because he ran faster. Was he a younger man, a faster runner? More eager to see what had happened?

He peeks in to see the burial cloths, but doesn't go inside. He waits for Peter, who goes into the tomb and sees the burial cloths - the cloth that had covered his head was rolled up in a separate place.

Readings for Easter Sunday (April 20, 2003) Acts 10:34a, 37-43 Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23 Colossians 3:1-4 or 1 Corinthians 5:6b-8 John 20:1-9

Then the other disciple goes in, "and he saw and believed." Remember, we are told, they didn't understand yet that the Scriptures about Jesus told that "he had to rise from the dead."

What a powerful way to relate the resurrection of Jesus! No one saw it happen. No one was there when he rose from the dead. But the details have become such a part of the Christian consciousness: the tomb, the stone removed, the women, then Peter and the other disciple, the burial cloths.

It is the one episode of the life of Jesus where he is not present.

At his birth, at the miracles and preaching, at the Last Supper, at his trial and execution, Jesus is present. After he died, they placed his body into the tomb and left to await the end of the Sabbath - and Jesus is in the tomb. And then his friends return as they planned, and Jesus is gone. In the story which relates that he rose from the dead, Jesus is not there.

Is that what gives us goose-bumps? Jesus, alive, but not seen? Or is it knowing what he will demand of us?

His followers are coming to believe that Jesus is alive. They must have gone home in wonder on that first Easter morning. Then Jesus appeared to them, we read in other passages. He opens the Scriptures to them, eats with them, shows them his wounds, tells them he is not a ghost but alive!

That is the whole crux of the Gospel and the power of Jesus, that death could not hold him - nor can it hold us. Preaching as related in Acts, Peter gives the story of Jesus in a nutshell, and then delivers the most important line: "He commissioned us to preach to the people" - those who were chosen by God to be his witnesses.

So here we are, on another Easter - the first day of the week. The commission has not ended, even though all the apostles have long been dead and many generations have come and gone between apostolic times and our times. The commission remains for the Church, "to preach to the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead."

Thus it is, Peter reminds us, "that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name." The commission that we received on the first day of the week is ours still, and so our words and our lives must testify to Jesus, no longer dead, but alive forever.

Fr. John G. Stillmank is Moderator of the Curia for the Diocese of Madison and pastor of St. Andrew Parish, Verona, and St. William Parish, Paoli.