Third Sunday of Easter - April 19, 2015

Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter

April 19, 2015

Shroud of Turin

 

            Anyone who has ever worked with little kids knows that the best way to learn is through the five senses. If you want a little kid to learn about something, have a show-and-tell – let the kids pass it around, touch it, smell it, see it up-close-and-personal.

It’s a natural human tendency, I think, to want to see and touch before we believe. And God, Who created us, knows this. He established His religion, the Catholic Faith, with very physical signs to communicate His invisible grace. Water poured over our souls actually causes the dirt on our souls to be cleansed. Oil on our forehead strengthens, not our bodies, but our souls to become confirmed in the Faith. Bread and wine become the very Flesh and Blood of God.

So, in order to help the Apostles to believe, He demonstrates His Resurrection in very physical ways. In the Gospels, we read that Jesus invites the Twelve to touch Him, to feel His hands and feet, to prove that He truly has been risen. He even goes further – He eats a piece of fish in their presence, not because He was hungry, but to show them that He is physically raised from the dead, and not just a ghost. Ghosts don’t have hands and feet to touch; ghosts can’t eat a piece of fish.

            But what about us? Do we have any evidence of the Resurrection? In a sense, yes. I’d like to mention one interesting artifact that the Church possesses, which has always astounded scientists and helped to bolster faith: the Shroud of Turin.

            In the city of Turin, Italy, there is a long cloth, about fourteen feet long, which most people – including myself - believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus. On the cloth is an interesting image – there is an image of a human body…an image that was not made by human hands.

            The image depicts a man who had been crucified, and the image is unexplainable – no one knows how the image got there. It’s not paint, it’s not dye. Scientists have studied the Shroud of Turin, and it seems that the image was made when some intense radiation hit the cloth. The Italian national science organization just recently finished some tests on the cloth, and they found that the light would have to be thirty-four trillion watts bright to cause such an image. Consider – those light bulbs up top are only 150 watts – no human agent could have produced 34 trillion watts.

            The cloth is two thousand years old – no one knew about radiation back then to produce the image! Even more amazing, the image is actually a negative. When the first photograph of the Shroud was taken in 1898, it was discovered that the image on the cloth was actually a photographic negative – so when you look at the image, it’s actually a reverse of Jesus’ face. This was impossible to make using any technology from the ancient world.

            Science can’t explain the mysterious image on the Shroud of Turin. To those who believe, though, the image is of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. I personally believe that the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus, and the image was made by the truly awesome Resurrection of the Son of God from the dead.

            Now, to be clear, our faith in the resurrection isn’t based on whether the Shroud of Turin is actually the burial cloth of Jesus, or whether it’s an expert hoax. But I think the science points to its legitimacy; and these sort of tangible reminders of the mysteries of our Faith help us to believe, since we human beings so often need to see before we believe!