Bulletin column from April 17

Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish:

Praised be Jesus Christ! Christ is Risen, He is Risen Indeed! Easter has at last come, and it should be a great source of comfort to us that this is so. The Resurrection of Christ from the dead is a dramatic display of God’s power, fidelity, and love. By it, a pathway to God is opened up that defies any earthly limitation or constraint, provided that one is willing to accept its truth.

To put it another way: for the believer, Easter comes regardless of how expensive gasoline is, regardless of who has died, regardless of who is president, regardless of who is pope, even if we are at war, even if the ice caps are melting, even if booster shots wear off, and even if the Packers choke in the playoffs. It may indeed be the case that all of these things bring their own degree of pain, but Easter means that all of the pain has limits. Easter is the boundary that they cannot cross because a believer will ultimately triumph over them all, joined to Christ who triumphed over it all.

This is a lot to take in to be sure, especially in our secular world that suffers from being constrained to believe only what our senses and our data can tell us. Even before we fell under the illusion that data can save us, even in the ancient world, the truth of Easter sunk in slowly. All four Gospel accounts of the Resurrection make it clear that no one understood it right away, even when it was the case that Christ himself was standing right in front of them. As fallen creatures our first reaction is to conclude that such things cannot happen, and that the Resurrection is too good to be true. Our fallen tendency is to gravitate towards fear rather than towards hope and trust.

In the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, the Lord himself chides his closest followers for their incredulity surrounding his appearance back from the dead. These are men and women who spent a stretch of years with him, witnessed his miracles, heard his teachings, and who therefore had so many reasons not to doubt the truth of Easter. Yet, doubt it they all did at first. If it is the case that we keep finding ourselves falling into fear, frustration, or despair over the world and life because we do not grasp the power of Easter, then at least it is the case that we are no different than the Apostles.

All of this is a major reason why Easter is celebrated every single year, over and over again. The Church’s feasts and rituals bring us into direct contact with the essence of the saving events that they celebrate. We need the regular celebration of the Resurrection of Christ so that its truth and implications can sink deep, deep down into our hearts and change us in the process. God knows that our faith takes time to grow and that it takes the passage of years to deepen. He knows that our first, fallen instinct is to doubt that he knows what we are going through, or to doubt that he cares about us if our pain is not stopped as quickly as we want it to be. Easter comes anew every year to remind us that our way out of all that is difficult cannot be on a pathway of our own making, and that it cannot look like any earthly reality. God had to create an entirely new pathway to eternal life and invite us to walk on it with him. For a believer who trusts in God’s mercy, it is a pathway that cannot be blocked or closed to us. It is a pathway that leads us through death itself into a new realm of eternal existence. It is a pathway by which humanity can always walk forward, no matter how great the obstacles facing the world may seem. We need Easter and we praise God that this year, in the face of all that is hard, it has come again. A Blessed Easter to all!