EASTER MESSAGE 2004

Day by day there is news of death --- in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Haiti and the Holy Land, on the very streets of our city, and in our neighborhoods. We tire of the news, becoming numb to the reality of death all around us.

Yet it is death that we celebrate at Easter, the death of the One who bore the weight of our sin and was brought to new life through the power of love. The Paschal Mystery cannot be dissected and placed into separate compartments: First the agony, then the passion, then the death, then the descent, then the Resurrection, and finally the Ascension. Christ's Pasch is a single mystery of the power of love prevailing over evil, the life that conquers death.

"Their story seemed like nonsense." But it was just as the women said: Mary Magdalene, Johanna, and Mary the mother of James. Their words have rolled down the ages. We too, at times, may find it hard to believe their testimony. At the heart of the Easter faith there is this conviction: Death is redemptive when we are with Jesus in his single-hearted love and service of God the Father and of our neighbor. Death brings life when we stand with Jesus in his obedience to the will of the one he called "Father."

And this obedience is nothing more, or less, than loving God and neighbor with our whole heart, soul, strength and mind. This is what it means to put on Christ, to be clothed in Christ, to have died with him so to rise with him. This is the love that brings life even from death.

We are surrounded by threats, by alarm, by those who broker anger, hatred and resentment, much as Jesus was. He, too, lived in a world gripped by fear and death. The peoples whose faces we see daily on the nightly news and in the morning newspaper live in lands not far from his homeland, indeed many in his own homeland. In a time and place threatened by hatred and violence, he was unwavering in his commitment to a love that knows no bounds, a love that would reach unto death and into hell to save those caught in the grip of death and darkness.

Over these past months, some in the Church have grown weary, becoming more and more disenchanted and deeply disappointed. For some the anguish is quite real. But it is in the midst of weariness and anguish that we can find the rich reserves of hope. For it is not only when things go our way, when life seems to be carefree, that we are to be the people whose song is "alleluia." It is just as much in our anguish and disappointment that we are to become a counter-sign by staking our life and our hope on the One Love who frees us from the grip of death.

We ponder Christ's Pasch as a single mystery. Even at Easter, we behold the Anguished One in Gethsemane's garden. He who did not know sin took upon himself the sin of the world. Sin is alienation from God. The sin of the world, then, is utter and complete alienation from God. He whose intimacy with God the Father is absolutely unique suffered the pain of feeling utterly alienated from the Father.

Because sin is so abhorrent to God, the feeling of loss and distance from the Father was echoed only very faintly in the Son's cry from the Cross: "My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?" Yet his fidelity in undergoing the pain of death is Christ's pledge of love to the Father. And in the Resurrection we see the Father's fidelity to Christ, as well as a pledge of God's fidelity to each of us.

To proclaim that the Crucified One lives --- our Easter proclamation --- seems to many today "like nonsense." Because it is to stake our lives on the redemptive power of death, to affirm in the face of all contrary evidence, that death can bring life.

This Easter we commit ourselves once again to action that goes beyond our sense of consolation or feelings of well-being. We redouble our efforts to love when things do not seem to be going our way. Ours is a bold commitment to do the right thing everywhere and at all times as Jesus did, impelled by a love that knows no bounds even and especially when death seems to be all around us.