Easter Weekday

A reading from
ST LEO THE GREAT 6
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After the blessed and glorious Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, when the divine power in three days raised the true Temple of God…on this very day, dearly beloved, the number of the forty holy days is completed. While the Lord draws out the time of his bodily presence, our faith in his Resurrection is being strengthened by the necessary signs. The Death of Christ had greatly disturbed the hearts of the disciples. When the holy women, as the Gospel story has told us, proclaimed that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb, the sepulcher was empty, and that angels were witnesses of the living Lord, their words seemed to the Apostles and other disciples as pure nonsense.

The Spirit of Truth would by no means have permitted this wavering in human weakness to enter the hearts of his preachers, if their trembling anxiety and questioning delay were not to have established the foundations of our faith. Consequently, it was our doubts, our danger, that was being considered in the Apostles. We, in the guise of the Apostles, were being instructed against the slanders of the wicked and the proofs of earthly wisdom. Let us give thanks for necessary slowness of the Holy Fathers. They doubted so that we need not doubt.

These days, dearly beloved, between the Resurrection of the Lord and his Ascension provided the opportunity to confirm great mysteries, to reveal great secrets. In these days the Holy Spirit was poured into all the Apostles by the breath of the Lord; and to blessed Peter above all the others, after the keys of the kingdom, the care of the Lord’s sheep is entrusted. Through all this time which
went by between the Resurrection of the Lord and his Ascension, the providence of God took thought for this: that they should recognize the Lord Jesus Christ as truly risen, who was truly born, truly suffered, and truly died.

The result was that not only were they not afflicted with sadness but were filled with great joy when the Lord went into the heights of heaven. Truly it was a great and indescribable source of rejoicing when, in the sight of the heavenly multitudes, the nature of our human race ascended over the dignity of all heavenly creatures, to pass the angelic orders and to be raised beyond the heights of archangels. In its ascension it did not stop at any other height until this same nature was received at the seat of the eternal Father, to be associated on the throne of the glory of that One to whose nature it was joined in the Son.

Since the Ascension of Christ is our elevation, and since, where the glory of the Head has preceded its, there hope for the body is also invited, let us exult, dearly beloved, with worthy joy and be glad with a holy thanksgiving.

Today we are established not only as possessors of Paradise, but we have even penetrated the heights of the heavens in Christ, prepared more fully for it through the indescribable grace of Christ which we had lost through the ill will of the devil. Those whom the violent enemy threw down from the happiness of our first dwelling, the Son of God has placed, incorporated within himself, at the right hand of the Father, the Son of God who lives and reigns with God the Father Almighty and with the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen.

6
St Leo the Great, Sermon 73; FoC 93 (1996) tr. Freeland & Conway.