“Resurrected in the morning on the first day after the Sabbath, he appeared first to Mary of Magdala, from whom he had cast out seven demons. This one announced him to his followers, who were mourning and weeping. But they, hearing that he was alive and had been seen by her, did not want to believe.”
Resurrection accounts are peppered with unbelief. No one believes in the resurrection right away. Everyone needs to cross the ford of doubt, fear, and uncertainty. In Mark’s Gospel account, perhaps the disciples’ reasoning will have been one of those superficial arguments, pregnant with prejudice: “It will be the ravings of a woman.” But she is not the only one not to be believed. Even the disciples of Emmaus are not taken seriously. No one wants to believe in the Resurrection. Grief always has more convincing arguments than joy. Evil makes more news than good. One tooth that hurts attracts more attention than thirty healthy teeth. “Finally, he appeared to the eleven as they were at table, and rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who had seen him resurrected.” It is this hardness of heart that perhaps we should shake off. It is learning to open in us the hypothesis that perhaps things are not exactly as our anguish suggests. There is a great education that Easter should inaugurate in us. It lets the light slowly get our gaze accustomed to seeing again. Our dark-trained gazes that so many times can ill withstand the light. To proclaim the Gospel is not to say something but to let what happened on that Resurrection Day reach us. We are asked to witness our lives transfigured by the Resurrection. The world does not ask us for words; it asks us to show by our existence what we believe. That is why every true Christian is nothing but a martyr, that is, a witness. It is the witness, our profession of faith.
