Beginning the Easter Season: First steps into a Life of Hope

Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!!! All good wishes for a wonderful Easter Season!!

For the next 50 days, we have time to attend to what Jesus' death and resurrection changed. In light of these events we live in a different world than existed before they occurred, and we ourselves, by virtue of our Baptism into Christ's death, are new creations as well. We have been embraced by God and live as God's daughters and sons, heirs of the inheritance he grants us. While all this makes beautiful poetry, it is also all true in the profound ways the very best poetry is true. Objective reality was transformed with Jesus' passion and death; something astounding, universal, even cosmic in scope, happened in these events which had to do with our own salvation and the recreation of all of reality. One of Paul's shorthand phrases for this transformation was "the death of death," something I hope to be able to look at a bit more as these 50 days unfold. Especially, I would like to look at the way we have become an integral part of God's story, the story of his will to bestow himself on and dwell with the whole of creation. 

At this point, it is probably good to recall that the early Church struggled to make sense of the cross, and that faith in Jesus' resurrection took some time to take hold --- though amongst the disciples, that period is greatly abbreviated. Surprisingly, no single theology of the cross is held as official even today, and variations --- many quite destructive --- exist throughout the Church. Many of these mistakenly affirm that God was reconciled to us in various ways rather than the other way around. Only in time did the Church come to terms with the scandalous death of Jesus and embrace him as risen, and so, they came to see him as the Christ who paradoxically reveals God's power in weakness. Only in time did she come to understand how different the world now was for those who had been baptized into Jesus' death, and even more time was required before she began to understand the cross in light of an unfinished and evolving universe. This last shift in understanding, though responding to new scientific knowledge of the world in which we live, is entirely consistent with Paul's and Mark's theologies of the cross. The Church offers us a dedicated period to come to understand and embrace all of this meaning; the time from Easter Sunday through Pentecost is, at least partly, geared to this.

Today is a day of celebration. It is a day we begin to allow hope to take greater hold of our hearts. Lent is over, the Triduum has reached a joyful climax, the season of Easter has begun and once again we sing alleluia at our liturgies. Jesus is revealed as Israel's Messiah and the sanest man who has ever lived. Though it will take time to fully understand and embrace all this means, through the Church's liturgies and the readings we have heard, we do sense that we now live in a world where both death and life have a different character and meaning than they did before Christ's passion and resurrection. On this day we call Easter, darkness has given way to light, and senselessness to meaning -- even though we may not really be able to explain to ourselves or others exactly why or how. On this day we proclaim that Christ is risen and begin our first steps into a life rooted in hope! Sinful death could not hold Jesus nor can it hold us as a result. Alleluia! Alleluia! Christ is Risen! Indeed he is risen!! Alleluia, alleluia!!