The Eyes of Faith: Easter (April 20, 2025)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

I once performed a funeral with a minister from another, more progressive Christian denomination. The homily she gave, she told us at the beginning, was not prescriptive, but entirely descriptive. She wasn’t telling us what to believe based on Scripture, tradition, or reason; she was telling us how she responded to the death of a loved one. She spoke honestly, even courageously, about her own grief. But what was missing was the one thing we need most: not just reflection, but resurrection. What we need in moments of loss isn’t commentary, but promise. Not just memory, but the hope of resurrection. Many today long for hope but feel let down by a hollowed-out Christianity—a version stripped of miracle and mystery. The problem with this is that if you remove the supernatural, there is no hope of resurrection, just silence at the grave. And yet, it’s precisely the fact that our Lord rose from the dead that is the beating heart of the Gospel: without the resurrection, there is no Christianity worth believing. One theologian recently remarked that it is the claim of the resurrection at the heart of our faith that makes it so compelling and the facts surrounding that claim—especially the appearance of Christ to multitudes after the resurrection—that provides remarkable proof that can’t simply be dismissed or explained away. When we embrace the resurrection, we begin to see with the eyes of faith which changes our view of the world; if we reject the resurrection, the world looks dramatically different, much darker and full of despair.

To see without the eyes of faith is to miss reality itself. It’s to take things at face value, to remove all mystery from the world, to reduce the world to mechanistic cause and effects and thermodynamics. This is the way the Apostles saw before the Resurrection: constantly misunderstanding Jesus and not expecting the resurrection. And it’s hard to be too hard on them: resurrection is not the usual order of things. In our reading this morning, Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb with grief in her eyes. She doesn’t see resurrection—she sees a grave robbery. Another example of failing to see with the eyes of faith is St. Thomas the Apostle, who, upon hearing the news of the resurrection, stated he wouldn’t believe the reports until he saw Jesus for himself and actually touched his wounds. Is it any wonder, then, that so much in our world feels hollow and hopeless? Without faith, we are left with resignation—not resurrection. When we see without the eyes of faith, all is lost and futile because there is no possibility of the miraculous, all hope is snuffed out, and death gets the last word.

But the eyes of faith change everything so that nothing is the same. When Jesus appears to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, it was only after he gave them the Eucharist that they could see who he really was: God gave them faith, and that faith changed how they viewed the world. When St. Peter and St. John heard the tomb was empty, they had to see what happened and so they ran—not walked—to the tomb, signifying a quickness to believe God’s promises. Note also how the St. Peter enters into the tomb all the way: an act requiring some fortitude to follow Christ even into the tomb. In the tomb, Peter sees the signs of death: the linen clothes that had been used to embalm Christ’s body; but the eyes of faith transform those symbols of death into symbols of the resurrection. Everything that falls into the gaze of faith becomes transfigured.

Faith doesn’t make life easy. Easter isn’t a detour around suffering—it’s a light that passes through it. Easter is not the inauguration of the prosperity Gospel. “In this world you will have many troubles” is as true now as it was when our Lord said it 2,000 years ago. Easter doesn’t remove the pangs of sorrow we feel after losing a loved one; it doesn’t mean our struggle against sin goes away; it doesn’t mean that we will get to skip death. What Easter does do is radically transform how we engage with these things: we face our losses knowing that those relationships will one day be restored and with the expectation that our separations will give way to reunions; suffering becomes not pointless, but the opportunity for redemption; our struggle with sin isn’t hopeless. It becomes the soil for sanctification. And even death is no longer final—it’s the seed of the resurrection. This is why Paul claims that if the resurrection isn’t true, we are the most pitiable of men; but hope does not disappoint us when the object of our hope is the eternal, changeless God who created all things and went all the way to the Cross out of his love for us. And so, for now, we carry crosses into Monday mornings, into hospital rooms, into strained relationships; but we also carry the hope that tombs still open.

Resurrection Day is a celebration that death is destroyed and that Christ has won. But it’s also a call to live in hope, to see the world through the eyes of faith: sin and death do not get the last word. We can face whatever may come because we know that nothing we face can be stronger than God. Even the terrible, horrible, awful things aren’t unredeemable. They’re the crucible from which God brings redemption. And so, on this Easter, even amidst the wreckage of our world, we stand at the tomb with hope. Because he is risen. It is here, at this Altar, as it was in Emmaus, that Christ continues to be made known to us. The eyes of faith are trained by the breaking of the bread. Therefore, we can repeat, with Julian of Norwich: All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.