Easter is God’s amazing grace, God’s amazing love for mortal human beings! From the
silence of the tomb emerges life and light. The violence of sin exposed on the cross on
Good Friday, the sense of abandonment in death, is defeated and the miracle of selfsacrificing love of Christ broke open the tomb. The disciples who felt emptiness and
darkness as they watched their master crucified, now behold the living one who said, ‘I
am the resurrection and life’. Christ is our Easter; his risen presence with us helps us,
all corruption to be laid to rest for the uncorrupted to rise from us! Christ’s work of new
creation has begun. Redeeming love of God, life eternal with God is now revealed in
Christ’s resurrection! The risen Christ is the power with us to overcome all darkness;
his love enables us to carry the cross and go through tomb like experience to
germinate, the fallen seed [our life] to be lifted up to live with renewed hope and
purpose. Christ’s love, mercy and forgiveness offered on the cross continue to raise us
up.
The good news of Christ, his life, mission, attained its true end in his Easter. Without
Easter, the cross would have been a tragedy, something that could have been avoided
if Jesus just negotiated with the High Priest. Paul could have destroyed disciples of
Jesus if he hadn’t encountered the risen Christ. Once known Christ, Paul could say,
nothing can separate me from the love of Christ! Easter reveals that God doesn’t want
man/woman created in the image and likeness of God be forgotten or made nothing.
Jesus says, ‘I am giving you the greatest gift, your own Easter’! In Lent we pray for an
Easter experience in life. German mystic Methild of Magdeburg: God speaks, ‘when
your Easter comes, I shall be around you; I shall be through and through you and I shall
steal your body and give you to your love’. God is saying, I shall restore you to your
true love [me] as you await your Easter!
Risen Christ teaches us to transform our Good Fridays into our little Easters. Easter
faith breaks the power of despair and inspires us to wait in patience with faith for light
to appear! Easter is hidden in every trials we encounter, a potential for love in every
diminishment or weakness! Such an Easter story: ’Shortly after Mariana’s birth, the
doctors told us that she had a severe malformation of the brain and that she would
never be able to walk or talk, wrote Alba, a young Brazilian mother. “My husband and I
felt that God was asking us to love her just as she was, and we threw ourselves, so to
speak, into God’s arms, entrusting our future to him. Mariana lived with us for four
years and simply left a message of love with everyone she met. We never heard her say
the words ‘Mommy’ or ‘Daddy; but in her silence, she spoke through the shining light
that emanated from her eyes. We could not teach her to take her first steps, but she
taught us to take the first steps in loving, in giving ourselves to love. She was a gift of
God’s love for the whole family. We could summarize all that she was in a single
sentence: love is not always explained just with words’. This is the Easter miracle,
giving us power to weave a seamless garment of love with the little crosses we carry!
An Easter Prayer by Sr. Joyce Rupp: ‘God of life and resurrection, come into this Easter
and bless me. Look around the tight, dead spaces of my heart that still refuse to give
you an entrance. Bring your gentle but firm love. Begin to lift the layers of resistance
that hang on deep inside me. Open those parts of my heart where I fight the entrance
of real growth. God of the resurrection, God of the living, untomb and uncover all that
needs to live in me. Open me, for it is only then that I will grow and change, be
transformed. For it is only then that I will know how it is to be in the moment of rising
from the dead’!