After 40 days of Lent preparing, after celebrating all of Holy Week including the final three days of the Triduum, we come today to this day, Easter Sunday.
And it’s good that on this day, the Churches are generally packed because what we remember on this day is really the foundation of our faith. For today we remember and proclaim Jesus’ Ressurrection.
The other days, especially during the Christmas Season, then the days during Lent and Holy Week are important. But it all comes down to this day.
And we’re told in the Gospel Readings that we hear today and during the whole of the Octave of Easter which now follows, that the Disciples themselves had difficulty believing it. Yet there was Jesus, risen from the dead, assuring us that even Death does not have the Final Word.
Why did it have to be so complicated? Why did it have to take so long? If you were here for the Easter Vigil, last night, you would have heard Reading after beautiful Reading, how long it took from the Fall soon after Creation, through the calling of Abraham, the Exodus, the Prophets up until the time of Jesus. And yet it seemed to have to be this way -- and we remember it in a way that every kid who’s ever put a cloth over his head to act as a shepherd in a Christian play would remember it – so that we would both believe and remember it all of our lives.
We don’t necessarily need the hope of the Resurrection every day, but there are times when we do need it. And so it is good that we learn to remember it in the way that we hear it proclaimed today. It was confusing, it was dramatic, and the first disciples eventually came to believe it, experience it to be true. Our faith lives may be the same at times as well.
But let us give thanks to God and our parents/grandparents or whoever gave us our faith that we’ve received it. Because with it we can now pass through anything, console anyone and look toward a future that does not end in death or failure but ends with God.
So let us give thanks for that and let us bring this message that not even the Death is the End to those who need this hope now. God is with us, God is always with us, and may we never fear what is in front of us, because in the end, we will be with a God who loves us, forever.
Happy Easter to you all!
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