Easter Hope

It’s Good Friday. It feels like Good Friday. After several weeks without our usual social interactions and without our gathering for the celebration of Sunday Masses and the other sacraments, it has felt like Good Friday now for quite some time.

After Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem that we recall on Palm Sunday, a very different sense came over Jerusalem as Jesus was arrested, tortured, mocked, stripped and crucified. Back in February, Lent started out for most of us as it always does, with the distribution of ashes, the call to conversion and the beginning of our Lenten disciplines. Now, with all that has taken place in the rapid spread of the coronavirus COVID-19, Lent has a very different tone. Yes, we live in serious times!

This weekend we enter into the Sacred Triduum, the solemn three days of Jesus’ passion, death, and Resurrection. While we are not able to gather for these beautiful liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil, and the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, I pray that with practically everything else shut down, many more people will give God this time like never before.

As we are drawn into what is known as the “Paschal Mystery,” that is the suffering, death and Resurrection of Jesus this year, in this time when the entire world is experiencing this pandemic, we cannot help but hear God’s word and receive the merits of Jesus’ suffering, death and Resurrection in a profoundly new way. This coronavirus COVID-19 situation, right now during Holy Week, is causing us to rethink everything, it seems. We are concerned about our health, our finances, our jobs, our other family members, our co-workers, our friends, and more. It seems like almost everything has been taken away from us, or greatly limited.

Yet there is one thing no one can take away from us. It is our faith! In the midst of all this uncertainty, the one thing we need most we have at our immediate access. It is the gift of faith that we first received in baptism. While our faith has often taken a back seat to our other priorities, it is now becoming front and center. Will you let your faith take care of you like never before?

This faith is not simply “wishful thinking” a kind of, “Oh, it will all get better soon.” No, faith is our capacity to trust God without knowing what the outcome will be. In this way our faith honors the Lord, as we say, “Jesus, I place my trust in you.” Our faith must be grounded in the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Right now, as we celebrate Easter this weekend, Jesus is asking us if we believe in his tender love for us, personally. If you do, will you live like you believe it? After all, it is our faith that saves us!     

With faith we are thus able to hope in all that our Lord has promised. Hope is a sign of our faith. Hope bears witness to our faith in God. Hope in the Resurrection of Jesus means that I am accepting and receiving what he accomplished by his passion, death and Resurrection for my own soul. This hope, then, is our witness of Easter to the world. The more we hope in the Lord, the more it proclaims to the world: “I believe in the love God has for me!” Our hope in the Lord proclaims Psalm 27 to the world: “The Lord is my light and my salvation.”     

The challenges of the coronavirus COVID-19 will be with us for some time to come. But this weekend we must not pass from living for ourselves to living for honor and the glory of God, and with true concern for another. The sign that Christ has been raised up will be our refusal to go back to our old ways of sin and self-centeredness. The clearest sign that Jesus is risen will be that we are converted and changed, that we no longer live for ourselves but now we live for our Lord! Hope in God is one of the most obvious signs of Easter, and that hope should be what we witness to the world, not just in the Easter Season, but as a permanent sign of our faith. Especially when anxiety levels are increasing, may our hope be firm!     

Please know of my prayers and concern for each of you this Easter. May the Lord’s victory over sin and death that we notice when we look into the empty tomb of Jesus, convince us that we are precious in God’s eyes and that he wants us to share in his Kingdom that will have no end.     Happy Easter to all of you!