Easter Weekday

A reading from
ST LEO THE GREAT 7
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The faith of the infant Church was increased by the Lord’s Ascension and strengthened by the gift of the Spirit; it was to remain unshaken by fetters and imprisonment, exile and hunger, fire and ravening beasts, and the most refined tortures ever devised by brutal persecutors. Even the blessed Apostles, though they had been strengthened by so many miracles and instructed by so much teaching, took fright at the cruel suffering of the Lord’s Passion and could not accept his Resurrection without hesitation.

Yet they made such progress through his Ascension that they now found joy in what had terrified them before. They were able to fix their minds on Christ’s divinity as he sat at the right hand of the Father, since what was presented to their bodily eyes no longer hindered them from turning all their attention to the realization that he had not left his Father when he came down to earth, nor abandoned his disciples when he ascended into heaven.

The truth is that the Son of Man was revealed as Son of God in a more perfect and transcendent way once he had entered into his Father’s glory. He now began to be indescribably more present in his divinity to those from whom he was further removed in his humanity. A more mature faith enabled their minds to stretch upward to the Son in his equality with the Father; it no longer needed contact with Christ’s tangible body, in which as man he is inferior to the Father.

For while his glorified body retained the same nature, the faith of those who believed in him was now summoned to heights where, as the Father’s equal, the only-begotten Son is reached not by physical handling but by spiritual discernment. This explains why our Lord said to the Church in the person of Mary Magdalene, as she ran forward to cling to him: Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father. In other words, I do not want you to come to me corporeally, to recognize me by what your bodily senses tell you; I want you to wait for something higher.

And when the eyes of his disciples, rapt in wonder, followed their ascending Lord to heaven, there stood beside them two angels, in garments of marvelously shining whiteness, who said to them: Men of Galilee, why are you standing looking up to heaven? This Jesus who has been taken from you will come again in the same way as you have seen him going up to heaven. By these words all the Church’s children have been taught to believe that Jesus Christ will come again visibly in the same flesh in which he ascended, and that there can be no doubt concerning the subjection of all things to him who was served by angels from the moment of his birth.

As it was an angel who announced to the blessed Virgin that Christ would be conceived of the Holy Spirit, so too it was the song of heavenly beings that told the shepherds of his virginal birth; and as the first attestations of his rising from the dead were delivered by messengers from on high, so it was the task of angels to proclaim that he would come in the same flesh to judge the world. All these things were intended to make us realize what tremendous angelic powers are to accompany him when he comes to judge, since such mighty spirits ministered to him even when he came to be judged himself.

7
St Leo the Great, Sermon 74, 3-4 (CCL 138A:457-459); Word in Season III, 1st ed.