Easter 2024

 

Easter 2024

 

Christmas is a time that most of us can, as human persons, identify with…most notably the joy of the birth of a child.  We all know mothers who have given birth to children, and those are causes for great celebration.

 

But Easter and the events leading up to Easter are very foreign to us on a natural level…we need to remember that all that was necessary for Jesus to save us from Hell was for Jesus to die and resurrect.  And because Jesus created space and time, Jesus could have set up the Old Testament prophecies any way He wanted to, so we are faced with this confusing reality that Jesus CHOSE to be TORTURED to death and then resurrect.  as St. Peter reminds us in our first reading today “To Jesus all the prophets bear witness”.  It is clear to us, as we look back through the Old Testament with hindsight, we do see how nearly every line of the Old Testament points not just to Jesus’ death, but to his immense suffering that He would undergo.

 

What are we to take from this?  I think one thing we can say definitively is that Jesus came not only to save us but to show us how to live, and In the Gospels, over and over again, Jesus says some variation of “if you want to live, pick up your cross of suffering and follow Me”

 

Jesus Christ, in CHOOSING to be tortured to death, has made holy our suffering too, and that is the great news of Easter…by Jesus’ Resurrection, He has definitely shown that His triumph over death was through suffering, and so our suffering as well has a sanctifying effect in our life now, in the lives of other people if we offer our sufferings up for them, and, thirdly, our suffering in imitation of Christ also helps us draw closer to Heaven.

 

Jesus Christ SUFFERED death, but was resurrected today.  Amen.  Alleluia!!!