Easter

Happy Easter!

Do you remember in the movie, “The Wizard of Oz”, when the coroner of Munchkin Land inspects the body of the Wicked Witch the East? He pronounces her “very much dead”, as if there was another sort of “dead”. On the morning of the Resurrection of Christ, Jesus was “very much dead” in the minds and the lives of His disciples. Some of His women friends and disciples were headed to His tomb to finish the ritual embalming preparations that were prescribed by Jewish law and that were cut short on Good Friday because of the approaching Passover Feast. They still had the need of giving Him a proper burial. His Apostles and other disciples were holed away grieving the loss of their Messiah and worried that they might be next to be crucified by the evil Pontius Pilate and their angry and suspicious Jewish leaders. They also had to be very doubtful that those hopes and promises that he had always talked about were gone forever via the Cross of Calvary. They had seen His limp and bloodied body wrapped in a burial shroud and placed in a rock hewn tomb. That was it, the end of the story! Jesus was “very much dead”.


Yet Mary and the other women came to the disciples’ hiding place frantic that Jesus was not in the tomb. Peter went to the grave and saw it was empty as well. Then Mary experienced him near the grave. And disciples came back from their trip to Emaus telling the others they had met Jesus as well. He then appeared to them in their hideaway to prove to them that He was in fact very much ALIVE. There He forgives them, offers them peace, and commissions them to spread the Holy Spirit of compassion, peace, and forgiveness to the world.

HE IS STILL ALIVE!!!

It is a temptation to give up when we experience defeat. It is natural to abandon hope when our dreams are dashed. We are inclined to bury our faith when the only thing we hear from the “world” is that it is useless to believe.

What we celebrate on this Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord is that God is never dead. And we, the people of God, can never be defeated. Christ rose from the tomb to both prove that sin, death and Satan never will have the last say in this world, no matter what the coroner says. We are called to day to look our dashed hopes, unfulfilled dreams, addictions and sinful habits, disease and the deaths of family and friends, and all of our terminal prognoses in the face and say, “My God says NO to death and YES to LIFE!”

paz,
Fr. Chuck