Under normal circumstances, right after this Mass my wife
Kathy and I would be getting the house ready for our family to come over and
celebrate a traditional Polish Easter dinner.
Under normal circumstances, most of you would have been
preparing to host friends and family, or to go out for Easter brunch, or to
visit with friends and relatives.
Under normal circumstances, I would be speaking to a
church filled with people, with standing room only, with old and young, couples
and singles, Moms and Dads, and kids and family from out of town, most of whom
would be dressed up for this great holiday.
But these are anything but normal circumstances. Our
experiences over the last month are anything but “normal”, anything but what we
expected, anything but what we are used to and anything but comfortable.
In a recent interview, Pope Francis said that this is a “time
of great uncertainty” – and that may seem like an understatement, but think
about how disruptive and disconcerting uncertainty is. We don’t know when this
will end, or how it will end, or where we will come out on the other side.
But here is the good news that we celebrate today – that our
God is NOT a God of “normal circumstances”!
Because under normal circumstances, our lives of
selfishness and self-centeredness that began in the Garden would have continued
without ever having a Savior to rescue us from sin and death.
Under normal circumstances the Israelites would have
continued to be oppressed by the Egyptians and would never have passed dry shod
through the Red Sea to freedom.
Under normal circumstances, a radical preacher who “went
about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil” would have been
crucified and nobody witnessing his humiliating death on a lonely hillside,
with his followers absent, would have predicted that this would be the most
remembered death in history.
No, our God is not a God of normal circumstances but rather
a God of extraordinary awe and wonder.
St. Paul reminds us we have no need to
fear because we have already died with Christ and been raised up with him in
our baptism – that what we celebrate today and every Sunday is precisely our awe
and wonder as we participate in the Paschal Mystery of Christ – raised up from
the dead, focused on “what is above”, people of a new existence in our Lord
Jesus.
Ours is an Easter faith. We don’t deny or turn away from
the evils that surround us: the wars that have killed some 100 million people;
the poverty that grips more than half of the human race; the hunger that kills
millions every year and ruins the lives of millions more; the discrimination
that divides the human family into warring tribes, the virus that is killing so
many. We don’t deny these miseries, but we do refuse to surrender to their
power because of our faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
What we are saying when we celebrate the Resurrection is that
God is ultimately still in charge of this universe, despite any indications to
the contrary; that at the end of the day violence, injustice, and sin will be
silenced and overcome; that graciousness and gentleness, as manifested in
Jesus, are ultimately what lies at the root of all reality; and that death,
like Jesus’, is redemptive precisely because in the face of helplessness before
the worst brutality the world could perpetrate, we can still hear the words of
our God of extraordinary awe and wonder: ” Be not afraid”.
Suffering will be vindicated; death will be overcome; a
new life will arise: that is the Easter message of the paschal mystery. And so
there is no room for despair: our Easter faith tells us that God will “raise us
up and renew our lives.” As our Gospel Acclamation proclaimed, “Let
us feast with joy in the Lord.” Just as Christ passed through death to
resurrection, so too will the world pass through its suffering to the glory of
a new life.
The resurrection of Jesus enables us to let our God of
extraordinary awe and wonder reign in our ordinary lives in ways that
demonstrate we are part of a new creation—not complete, but we are evidence that the kingdom
is built up wherever communities allow the spirit of the risen Lord to have its
way.
Easter is our celebration of the belief that our God is
not a God of normal circumstances, but a God of extraordinary awe and wonder. And so, as St. Augustine reminds us, we are an
Easter people, and Alleluia is our song!
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