There is a sign in Theo & Stacy’s Greek Restaurant in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that says, “People who believe the dead never come back to life should be here at quitting time.”
Let me tell you an Easter story:
A long time ago a Frenchman incurred the displeasure of the emperor Napoleon.
He was put into a dungeon. He was forsaken by his friends and forgotten by everyone in the outside world. In loneliness and near despair, he took a stone and scratched on the wall of his cell, "Nobody cares."
One day a green shoot came up through the cracks in the stones on the floor of the dungeon.
It began to reach up toward the light in the tiny window at the top of the cell.
The prisoner kept part of the water brought to him each day by the jailer and poured it on the blade of green.
It grew until at last it became a plant with a beautiful blue flower.
As the petals opened in full blossom, the solitary captive crossed out the words previously written on the wall and above them scratched, "God cares."
Christ himself is like that plant and that flower, reaching out to us in the darkest recesses of our souls.
Who will roll away the stone from those places where death and decay has us locked in or trapped?
Easter becomes an opportunity to imagine God would be present in our lives to roll away the stone from the graves in the darkest recesses of our souls.
The water of the Spirit should always be flowing in our lives.
Yet, only where there are graves is there resurrection.
Resurrection is the experience of dying to the old life and finding new life, a better life. Recovering addicts know this perhaps better than anyone. Many of us in our diocese have been doing Catholic jail ministry for decades.
As the Rev. Carl Malin says, “The best gift you can give to addicts is a sense of God's love through your own genuine love and concern for them. An addict will sense moralism and condescension and dismiss you as a source of help. Likewise, however, an addict will sense genuine love, when given, and be open to letting you into his or her life. Victory comes as we admit to our own powerlessness over an illness that is greater than we are. We stop our useless attempts to control, and ask for help from those who know more about it than we do. Having admitted defeat, we are now in a position of asking for help from God and some of His friends. Out of defeat, victory; from death (of self-centeredness), life, hope, Resurrection.”
There is now unleashed a divine salvific energy into the world. As John O’Brien says, “To be an authentic Christian one must become part of that unleashed energy; the Christ life must become one's own.” His conquering of death and rising to New Resurrected Life flows potentially in us which is the key to the joy that awaits all who follow in Christ's footsteps.
"Ubi caritas gaudet, ibi est festivitas—Where charity rejoices, there is festivity."
Charity is the "infused supernatural virtue by which a person loves God above all things, and loves others for God's sake."
In the race for Easter graces--John is younger, which represents purity of intention. He “saw and believed.” He not only outruns Peter, but he surpasses him in coming to faith regarding the Resurrection. Because both saw exactly the same thing, faith must not be merely a matter of evidence. Ultimately, Peter will also believe, but in this story he responds slowly.
The Desert Fathers spoke of a first resurrection of the soul that happens when we have overcome the passions and aligned our will to love God above all things; a second resurrection of the body is to follow when God judges the living and the dead when Christ returns. If things work out right, we go to our death already resurrected.
When the majority of us were baptized we were too young to remember it or even appreciate it.
This is why we will now have the renewal of our baptismal vows as this is what our Resurrected life is—Having God’s grace in us so we can love God above all things, reject evil, and love others for God's sake. Amen.
