Apparitions of Risen Jesus

This is a computer-generated transcription that has been included to make the homily searchable.  It has not been verified by the author. 

These challenging times that we’re living right now, where there’s a lot of confusion, there’s a lot of division, it’s always important to come back to Sacred Scripture, the word of God, which gives us light. And so today, on this feast of the Ascension; well, we can contrast this with the world. The world sees in Jesus, a founder of a religion, like a lot of other founders, someone who for a brief time, gave a beautiful, wise teaching, help people, began to form His disciples. And then very young He died, and then His disciples tried, as best they could, to build an organization, this Church and carry on. And as I say, there’s been a lot of inspiring figures in history who have had something similar. They’ve inspired people, inspired disciples who, after their death, try to carry on what they did. And so that’s a human way, without faith, of seeing Jesus. And the problem is when that human spirit, human perspective, infects the Church, and it’s a special danger for the pastors of the Church, because they can kind of have easily that attitude. Well, Jesus taught these things and did these things 2000 years ago, and then He put us in charge, and now it’s up to us to handle things, to do things, and until He finally comes again. But the gospel, and the Gospel, especially today in this feast, shows us something very different. Right away after His death, very soon after His death, He rises. And not just He rises, but He begins appearing. And that’s what the readings were talking about today, for 40 days to His disciples. It said, and this is from the passage we heard today, “to the apostles, Jesus presented Himself alive after His passion.” So, after His death, “by many proofs, appearing to them during 40 days.” And so, this is not just a case of someone who thinks, well, you know, there was someone that I knew who inspired me, and I think I maybe had a dream about him, or I think  maybe so and so maybe had some sort of a vision. This is Jesus right away, appearing not just to one, but to groups of them. And in fact, it even says that at one point 500 of them, over and over, and even to the point where He ate with them, and they even touched Him. And so, because you know it’s one thing to have a dream or think, or did I imagine that, but think if there’s 12 of you who have the exact same dream during the day, that’s becomes, unless you’re all crazy, that becomes, I mean, even if you’re all crazy, your dreams are probably different. But the fact that this group of people, all experience the apparitions of the risen Jesus. And so, He comes back during this whole period to fortify their faith. And then it goes on to say, “and he spoke to them of the kingdom of God.” So, He’s fortifying their faith, but He’s also teaching them. So, His teaching did not finish during His earthly life, but His teaching continues afterwards. After His death, He continues teaching them after His death, because after His death, He is risen. And then it goes on to say, “and while staying with them, He charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father,” which He said, “you heard from me, For John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” So, what’s He doing now, He’s not just teaching them, now He’s guiding them. He’s giving them concrete instructions. So, He’s not just giving them kind of some general, vague ideas. He’s giving them very concrete instructions. And so, remember who is doing this because in the Gospel, it happens so fast, we can lose sight, I mean, we cannot realize the great difference. This is Jesus after His death, who is continuing to teach and give them guidance and instructions, directions. And then afterwards, it says, “so when they had come together, they asked Him, ‘Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’” So this is right before His ascension. “And He said to them, it is not for you to know the times or seasons which the Father has fixed by His own authority, but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be My witnesses.” So, witnesses to what? And Saint Peter gives us a very – says very clearly – because this happened, this is Saint Peter speaking just a few days later, just a few days after the Ascension, when they’re trying to they feel they need to choose a replacement for Judas Iscariot. So St Peter says, “so one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day He was taken up from us, one of these men must become with us.” Become with us what? Are they going to say, they must become with us, a leader with us, a teacher with us, administrators of the Church, community organizers with us? What St Peter says is none of that. He says, “a witness.” But then he says something else, very specific. He says, “a witness to,” what? – “to His resurrection.” “A witness to His resurrection.” Not just to what He taught, not just what He said, not just what He did, but to His resurrection. That is, we have seen Him, we who doubted, we who doubted in His passion. But then we have seen Him risen from the dead over and over. And Thomas even put his hand in His wounds because of his doubts. And so, St Peter is saying, we need somebody else who can be a witness, that is, who has seen Him risen from the dead, to be a witness to this resurrection, as someone who has experienced Him after His death; has experienced Him alive and in His apparition after His death. Because how could they be a witness to His resurrection? St Peter doesn’t just mean somebody who saw, who came by and told that the tomb was empty, he means someone who saw Jesus after His death, after His resurrection. What if there had been no apparitions? What if Jesus, after His resurrection had not appeared? He could have died and then just gone straight to heaven. The tomb would have been closed, and maybe at some point, if they opened the tomb, it would have been empty. But what would have happened then? He already told them that He was going to rise from the dead, so they should have believed Him. That we already see, that they were really doubting. Even when people said they saw, even when the women said they saw Him risen, they were doubting. So, without the apparitions, who knows what their faith would have been. So that’s why St Paul, and this is in First Corinthians 15. St Paul says, “For I delivered to you as a first importance that I also received.” And so, St Paul is going to speak to tell us in a very summarized form, very briefly, what is most important, what is the first importance? And so here’s what he said. It’s just, it’s just a couple of lines. He says that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures.”  So that’s what he says, first of all, His death, burial and resurrection. But he doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t just say, Christ died. Christ was buried and Christ raised, was risen. Then what does he go on to say as a first importance? He says that “He appeared to Cephas”. Cephas is Peter, so he’s talking about an apparition as a first importance. And then he says, “Then He appeared to the 12.” So, He left another apparition to the 12. “Then He appeared to more than 500 at one time, most of whom are still alive, but some have fallen asleep,” that you could still talk to most of them. So that’s another apparition. Then he says, “Then he appeared to James.” So he’s listing another apparition. “Then to all the apostles.” So, it’s another apparition. Then he says, “last of all, “as to one untimely born, He appeared also to me, much.” Much later, years later.., St Paul said that He appeared also to me. So, when St Paul is listing, what is the first importance? Most, most of what he’s saying, most of what he’s saying are apparitions. Let me repeat that. When St Paul is listing in Sacred Scripture, what is of most importance? He summarizes it. And in that short summary, most of it is apparitions. The majority of it is like a list of apparitions. And so, it’s not that. So what Scripture shows us, it’s not that, just that Jesus taught and worked miracles and healed and suffered, but He did what no one else has done, no one else has done. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. He raised some other people from the dead, but they were risen just to die later on. They didn’t rise to a glorified life, but Jesus came back, risen in glory, what no one else has done and. And to help people understand that, to help fortify the faith, He appeared over and over and over. So, notice that Jesus Christ., I mean, if anyone had done a good job forming people, that’s Jesus Christ, right? I mean, he’s pretty good at that, right? If anyone was a good teacher, it’s Jesus Christ. But even after all that, He felt it was necessary to give them apparitions. And the reason I say that is because apparitions are often seen as something weird, a kind of, some crazy thing that some people are interested in, and. And some people say they saw apparitions, and most of them are crazy people. And so, they’re often dismissed as unimportant. And St Paul, when he’s telling of what is most important – and again, this is not just anybody, this is in Sacred Scripture. The list we have in Sacred Scripture by St Paul himself, of what is of most important, and most of it is apparitions. And so are apparitions unimportant to the Church? Not according to Sacred Scripture. Apparitions are of first importance. And so and it doesn’t end at Pentecost. It says that “after Jesus rose, then He sends the Holy Spirit, who begins guiding the apostles.”  And then there’s also already, Scripture speaks of also apparitions of angels, the presence of angels. And then we know there are many apparitions of saints, especially we know of our Blessed Mother. And so, this continues in the New Testament, like when Peter, or when Peter is, has to make a big, important decision about how to react towards Gentiles. There’s a series of apparitions and visions that he gets, and that Cornelius gets. Or St Paul, as Saint Paul just mentioned, the conversion of Saint Paul takes place not by just him discovering some great preacher or teacher, but it happens by an apparition, a direct intervention of Jesus Christ, who sees him. And St Paul, at one point, talks about being taken up into second heaven, to the third heaven rather, and says that he received the gospel directly from God. And St John, later on in the Apocalypse, will tell us about apparitions and visions that he has. And so, what this shows is that Jesus is not just like an ordinary founder of a religion, but He is unique, and that’s what no one else can do, because he remains living, even after dying, He is living. In fact, He’s living more than ever before. And so, Scripture shows us right away, the continuity between Jesus death, His earthly life and death, and then He doesn’t disappear and say, I’ll come back in 1000s of years at the end of time. No, He says, I will be with you always. So, He dies, but right away He rises to be with this Church. And in the reading we had today of St Paul to the Ephesians, St Paul says that “the Father gave Jesus as head over all things to the Church, which is His body.” So, who is the head of the Church? The head of the Church is Jesus Christ. When the head continues attached to the body what. What would happen to a body if it was detached from the head? That’s not a good situation to be in, right? And so, the body of Jesus, which is His Church continues attached to its head, and the head continues to direct the body in various ways. One important way is the hierarchy of the Church,. St Peter and his successors, and the bishops and then the priests and deacons. And that right now as the messages said, there’s a lot of signs of a crisis, but that’s not the only way that the Lord can guide His Church. And the readings we have today show another way. He can appear through His apparitions, and through this, He can speak directly, He can act directly. So not because the hierarchy is one of the ordinary means or one of the most important means that He uses to guide His Church. But He has other ways also of guiding it. And so, these are not, these extraordinary means are not as unusual as we might think, means, like apparitions, visions, locutions, prophetic messages. So, my point is, and I think it’s very clear in the Gospel that these extraordinary interventions are not something – they’re extraordinary, but they’re not something weird or alien for the Church, and they’re not something that are not part of its tradition. It’s very traditional. These are actions of Jesus Christ, which are the source of our sacred tradition. They’re essential to the Church’s mission. So, apparitions and these interventions of God are essential to the Church. And I’m not saying something new to you, but I think that the Church needs – sometimes to be renewed, that sense, that it because it comes from faith, that openness to these manifestations of God. And so the point I’m trying to make is that because you know that our little Mission has been called, and not just a couple years ago or a year ago, but from the very, even before our Mission began, we had the sense that the Lord was wanting to help His Church, and especially help the pastors of the Church be more open to Him speaking prophetically, to the prophetic charism in the Church today, to Him manifesting through these extraordinary graces. And probably be  -well, I think, because He knew that the Church in this great trial, in this great crisis would need that. And so, we see here, Sacred Scripture helps us to see that this is part of the Church, this is at the very root of the Church. The risen Jesus, with His Holy Spirit, who continues to guide and teach His Church. Jesus did appoint men and their successors to be shepherds in the Church, but that doesn’t mean that he just left the Church. He continues to be present as the head to the Church throughout its’ history. And then we have greater examples. I mean, some classic examples that have often mentioned is like our Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. Or when, when the Lord wanted the Church to make a consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart, it was through apparitions, the children of Fatima. Or like when we know this, but He wanted to give special graces of Divine Mercy, He appeared and spoke, gave prophetic messages, locutions to Saint Faustina. And so, I think what these readings show very clearly is how much these types of graces are an essential part of what St Paul would say, of first importance for the Church. Is the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe unimportant for the evangelization of Americas?  Was the apparition of Our Blessed Mother at Fatima unimportant for world proof? Or are the messages of Divine Mercy unimportant for the trials that the Church is going through today? No, these are extremely important, more important than so much of the other stuff, of so much human stuff that is published and said in the Church. So, to conclude, with our Blessed Mother, who is the greatest example of faith, we remember that Jesus, the head, is with us, always. Jesus, we trust in you. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, Amen.

KEYWORDS / PHRASES:
Acts 1:1-11
Ephesians 1:17-23
1 Corinthians 15:1-9