The Red Egg

 

Bellarmine University 

Our Lady of the Woods Chapel

Easter Sunday

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/033124.cfm 

 

Happy Easter, Bellarmine.  Christ is risen today, Allelulia. 

The Easter eggs came out two weeks early in our house this year.  My wife, Kate, brought them out of the basement to get ready for our egg hunt.  Our four kids started to play with them before the Easter bunny could fill them.  Max, one of our four-year old triplets, pulled out this egg here and brought it to me early on Saturday morning (while I was still in bed). 

 I’m not sure if you can see this well, but this yellow and orange egg has three crosses on it: the cross of Christ and those of the two thieves.  Max said to me, “look Dad!” pointing to Christ’s cross, “Jesus died here.” Then he popped the egg open and said, “it’s empty inside.”  But then he looked a little closer and said, “there’s the sun in there!”  Sun spelled s-u-n.  I must confess, when I look into this egg, I do not see a sun.  It looks like a pretty typical Easter egg with one little raised bump and two depressions on either side of it.  To the eyes of this four-year-old, it is the sun.  

Of course, this encounter with Max seemed like a really natural Easter homily to me, moving from the death of Jesus on Good Friday, to the empty tomb on Easter Sunday, and finally to the slowly dawning revelation of Jesus’ resurrection on the part of Mary Magdalene and the other disciples, much like the appearance of the sun inside an Easter egg.  

In today’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb of the LORD, saw that the stone was removed and that Jesus was gone, but she didn’t understand.  The wrappings of death which had bound Jesus’ body were removed, and neatly folded up, which suggested that Jesus had returned to life, since anyone who would have stolen his body would not have bothered to take these steps   Mary had the evidence in front of her eyes, but she comes to the wrong conclusion.    She sees the evidence of Christ’s resurrection, but she does not understand what she is seeing.  

In our culture, we often say that “seeing is believing,” yet sometimes the reverse is true.  There are times when we have to believe before we can see and understand. How many times have we, like Mary Magdalene, seen something and not understood what it means? 

After Mary, Peter and John, who is called the Beloved Disciple, run to the empty tomb.  The Gospel tells us John, “saw and believed.”

  I’m going to quote to you a small selection of an Easter homily from Monsignor Alfred Horrigan, the founder of Bellarmine here:

“Why did John believe, when for other people, this act of faith seemed to be so difficult at this early time? The explanation seems to be in the great love that John had for his beloved master….  John had a love that was able to reach beyond the natural evidence and accept the central reality of the resurrection of Jesus.  

Hourigan continued to say that love is not blind, but  is “in fact the most clearsighted of all things.  Love give a person a capacity to see what nobody else can see.  A lover can see in his beloved virtues and potential for growwth which are simply hidden to the eyes of this world. And this was the kind of love—tender, deep and personal—that John had for Jesus, enabling him to be the first to come to believe in the resurrection.  On this Easter Sunday we are challenged to stir up in our hearts a love that wil l give us a comparable clearsightedness.”   

Mary Magdalene got to that place of seeing with the eyes of love, and understanding. In the verses following this passage, Mary stays at the empty tomb, and the Risen LORD appears to her.    After seeing him, she rushes off to tell the disciples, “I have seen the LORD.”  She is, in fact, the Apostle to the Apostles.  

 Tradition tells us that Mary Magdalen is responsible for the very first Easter egg.  If you see an icon of her, she is often depicted holding a red egg in her fingers. 

The legend goes that Mary Magdalene travelled to Rome after Christ’s resurrection and confronted Emperor Tiberius in his court.  She had brought an egg with her, perhaps as a symbol of the empty tomb and of new life in Christ.  Mary held out the egg to Caesar and proclaimed to him, “Christ is Risen!”  

The emperor mocked her and said that there was about as much chance of a human being returning to life from the dead as there was of the egg in her hand turning red.

At that moment, the egg promptly turned red.

On this Easter, may we come to proclaim with Mary Magdalene, “I have seen the Lord!”  and “Christ is Risen!”  Like my son Max, may we look inside of an Easter egg and see with clear-sighted innocence and what he saw inside.  A small child can give us the eyes of love, to see that death is not the end of the human story, and that the emptiness of the tomb is the only beginning of a new life.