Happy Easter! Felices Pascuas! Joyeuses Paques! Buona Pasqua! Frohe Ostern!
The word “Easter” comes from “Eastre,” the name of a Saxon goddess of the dawn or spring. Easter symbolizes life. Jesus is alive!
Easter brings back for me childhood memories. We used to color eggs with designs or go egg hunting. The egg can symbolize hope and life. And just as the small chick struggles to break out from its narrow world in the shell into a much bigger world, so too we believe that in the mystery of our own dying, we will break out of our own earthly “skin,” so to speak, into a newly transformed heavenly life.
These memories of childhood remind me of David Heller’s paperback Dear God : Children’s Letters to God. For example,
Dear God, My dad thinks he is you. Please straighten him out. Youngsters can be so funny.
The Easter message is simple. Jesus Christ lives. Because He lives, we live. The triune God abides in us; and we abide in the triune God by virtue of our baptism.
Jesus’s resurrection is a new day for each of us. Every morning, we have a chance to start over. Perhaps when we went to bed the night before, we carried burdens: things undone or put off, bad things said, good things unsaid. In the morning all is opportunity.
Who among us is content with who we are? Who among us doesn’t know a heart to heal, a relationship to mend, a lost soul to find?
Let this be the day to start again, to rediscover God’s extraordinary grace transforming our ordinary lives.
The word of God today offers the kerygma, the proclamation of the good news. Peter speaks about all that God has done for us through Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was baptized by John, anointed with the Spirit, and went about Judea and Galilee working signs and wonders, proclaiming that the kingdom of God was beginning to break into our lives. Eventually Jesus was crucified but then burst forth out of the tomb and was lifted up to his heavenly Father so that He could draw all of us to himself into a new transfigured heavenly life.
He is indeed, Peter shouts, a God of mercy and forgiveness. And that’s why Pope Francis emphasizes that the church is a field hospital, here to heal wounds.
Paul, in his letter to the Christian community in Colossae, Turkey, challenges us to seek God in our everyday lives so that we may appear with him in glory at the end-time.
And in the Gospel, we hear the story of the resurrection of Jesus. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb, finds it empty; she summons Peter and John. They discovered that Jesus is not among the dead. He is risen. He is alive. He has passed from this earthly life through the mystery of death into a new, transfigured heavenly reality. This heavenly reality can be ours as well. That is the Easter message!
Some of you may have seen the 9-11 Memorial in New York, or the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. I’ve often thought, How many hopes lie buried here. People who were full of life, with so many dreams. Suddenly they were dead.
And then I thought about Easter. The disciples of Jesus, huddled in the upper room in Jerusalem, could have said the same thing: “How many hopes lie buried.” The disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus could have said the same. Yet, just hours after, Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the disciples in Jerusalem, and to the Emmaus travelers. Jesus was not simply a spirit or ghost; nor was he simply resuscitated. Otherwise, they would have recognized him immediately.
Yes, it was a bodily resurrection; the earthly and crucified Jesus was the same person as the resurrected Jesus. But God transfigured or transformed him into a new kind of spiritual embodiment. Jesus said to the disciples, “I live, and because I live, we also live.”
How? We born in the flesh, reborn in the Spirit. Water is poured upon us in the rite of baptism, and in these waters the Spirit of God is poured out and a new life is ours.
The triune God lives within us, and we live within the triune God. As we grow into adolescence, the bishop anoints our forehead with oil in the sign of the cross—and God confirms and pours out more fully the gifts of the Spirit so that we might follow Jesus more closely. And at this Eucharist, where Christ sacramentally presences himself to us in the signs of bread and wine, where he mystically reenacts his redemptive, salvific activity and becomes one with us in Communion, the living Christ feeds us with his life so we can continue our journey. And if we should stumble, the living Christ lifts us up in the rite of penance where we celebrate God’s mercy.
Yes, through the sacraments, privileged encounters with God, we experience the living Christ. In the exchange of wedding promises, God strengthens the love between husband and wife. In the anointing of the sick, God heals our wounds. All the sacraments are signs of God’s care for us as we journey to our heavenly dwelling place.
Eternal life in relationship with God and one another—that is our ultimate purpose. In the mystery of our own dying, we believe we will make an evolutionary leap into a new reality as Jesus already has. Easter is about getting our priorities straight, about asking, “How can we be more loving, more generous, more tenderhearted, more thoughtful, more helpful?” Easter is about a heart to heal, a relationship to mend, a lost soul to find. It’s a fresh start.
Yes, this is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice. Alleluia. Alleluia.
