Author: DVO

It can be tough to accept the truth and beauty that “God loves us” when surrounded by war, death, tragedy, and the difficulty of life. I know from what God has revealed in my life that a balance occurs after these periods of darkness. Dark periods where you lose a sibling and, just weeks later, lose your only remaining parent, but then recall the miraculous cure of your only daughter; her battle with a rare disease that caused many miscarriages until, through answered prayer, she met a young doctor who found the cause of her miscarriages which led to the birth of her beautiful son and daughter. Balance. It’s certainly not an answer many can accept to the mystery of pain, darkness, and difficulty in life. It is, however, the hope of faith. The God who created everything, whose ways are so far beyond our understanding, chooses to grace us if we are open to receiving it, wisps of wisdom to know how much he loves us. I grieve for those who are trapped in the darkness of tragedy. But with the assurance of His unconditional love, which I witnessed during my difficult times, I lift up all those enduring dark times and pray the Lord will provide the understanding needed to see and embrace the light of His love that illuminates the pathway to a new hope.

It’s easy to miss the deeper meanings of many texts in John’s Gospel if we’re unaware of the multiple meanings of keywords and phrases. So much of what Jesus says has both an earthly and a heavenly level of interpretation. When Jesus speaks, the Gospel characters often first misinterpret his words by assuming an ordinary/physical sense, while Jesus is trying to convey a more profound truth on a religious and spiritual level. When Jesus says, “You must be born from above,” Nicodemus initially thinks Jesus means being “born again” (physical rebirth), while Jesus really means being “born anew” (reborn spiritually). We may think this refers to the sacrament of baptism, and indeed it does. But it means more. To be “born from above” means to accept the grace of baptism as the source of a whole new way of living in the world. Indeed, it isn’t a one-time event but an ongoing, lifelong process of embracing a way of life that both loves the world and everyone in it and rejects all that is at odds with the Spirit of Christ. So we are being born from above daily, day in and day out, for as long as we live. The words of Jesus throughout this Easter season will continue to prod us to look beyond our physical lives on this earth and recognize our spiritual destiny, our eternal life with God, as the source of our eternal joy and gladness.

In many ways, we, individually and collectively as a society, struggle with doubt about God. Why does God always seem so hidden? Why doesn’t He reveal Himself in concrete ways we can see so that there can be no doubt about His existence? Jesuit priest and theologian Karl Rahner wrote that “We just don’t have the eyes to see God because our eyes aren’t attuned to that kind of reality.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that we struggle with doubt because we can’t picture God’s existence, imagine God’s reality, or feel God’s presence in our normal ways. At a certain point, our minds, imaginations, and hearts simply run out of gas, out of room, out of feeling, and leave us dry, unable to nail down the reality of God the way we’re used to nailing down most everything else. The reality of God is elusive to our conscious minds and hearts because we can’t picture, imagine, or feel God in the usual way we do these things. The world is not God and we can’t walk around the landscape of spirit in the same way as we stroll around in this world. God and the other world are spirit and we are being invited into a reality whose hugeness is beyond conception, whose silence is beyond language, and whose reality is beyond the physical and all that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and feel in the normal way. God is life, light, love, energy, vastness, and simplicity beyond our categories. God has a different metaphysics. In a world where the physical defines everything, it can be difficult to believe in anything else. But even as our thoughts and feelings about God can seem empty, we are as people of faith, in our more important decisions and values, riveting ourselves ever more firmly to God and the other world. Such are the dynamics of faith. Sometimes what feels like doubt and atheism is the beginning of real belief and real growth.

Today’s Gospel verse from Mark brings us back to our discussion on the Resurrection of Jesus. Mark reminds us that his followers saw the first appearances of Jesus as being unbelievable by those who reported he had risen. Fr. Rolheiser also reminds us that his crucifixion led to Jesus rising from death. He goes on to say that everything good eventually gets scapegoated and crucified. This perverse dictate, somehow innate within human life, assures that there’s always someone or something that cannot leave well enough alone but must hunt down and lash out at what’s good. What’s good, what’s of God, will always at some point be misunderstood, envied, hated, pursued, falsely accused, and eventually nailed to some cross. All who are in Christ inevitably suffer the same fate as Jesus: death through misunderstanding, ignorance, and jealousy. But there’s a flip side. Resurrection always eventually trumps crucifixion. What’s good ultimately triumphs. Thus, while nothing of God will avoid crucifixion, no one’s body in Christ stays in the tomb for long. God always rolls back the stone, and soon enough, new life bursts forth, and we see why that original life had to be crucified. Resurrection invariably follows crucifixion. Every crucified body will rise again. Our hope takes its root in that, as Bishop Robert Barron notes: “Jesus went all the way down, journeying into pain, despair, alienation, even godforsakenness. Why? In order to reach all of those who had wandered from God. Then, in light of the Resurrection, the first Christians came to know that, even as we run as fast as we can away from the Father, all the way to godforsakenness, we are running into the arms of the Son. The Resurrection shows that Christ can gather back to the Father everyone whom he has embraced through his suffering love.”

Jesus’ disciples experienced a lot of doubt, even on the original Easter Sunday. Fr. Rolheiser writes that they, like us, were mourning crucified dreams. What reversed this? What moved them from despair to new hope? It was not just the fact of the resurrection that changed them, for they doubted, huddled in fear, locked doors, despaired, and tried to go back to their old ways of life even after they had seen the empty tomb. What brought resurrection faith was the in-the-flesh appearance of the resurrected Christ. Through these appearances, Christ built up their faith slowly and gently until they no longer needed these appearances. Where does the resurrected Christ have flesh in our life? The resurrected Christ appears to us in the flesh in those persons who are arsonists of the heart and make our hearts burn within us. What kind of person burns messianic holes within us? Those who speak of mustard seeds, who tell us about the value of what’s hidden, small, and insignificant; those who tell us that pain can bring deep meaning and redemption; those who tell us that, despite all, that reality is gracious, and we can trust and love. These words stir what’s best within us, burn holes in us, stir faith, roll stones back from tombs, and show us the resurrected Christ in the flesh. And that flesh always looks ordinary. The arsonist of the heart invariably looks like someone we know, a familiar somebody, like the resurrected Christ in his appearances from a gardener, to a cook, to a stranger. It is interesting to speculate why the disciples often didn’t recognize Christ after the resurrection. Yet Mary Magdalene, who surely knew him well, took him for a gardener. Later, on the road and the shore, his disciples took him to be a stranger, then a cook. They only recognized him as the Christ in the breaking of the bread. That is why as we journey together, mourning so many of our crucified dreams, we would do well to be attentive to what causes arson in the heart. We should learn to look more closely at each other’s faces during the breaking of the bread.

Jesus is the lamb of God who takes the sin of the world! Fr. Rolheiser writes that Jesus, as the lamb of God, does not take away the world’s sin by somehow carrying it off so that it is no longer present inside the community. He takes it away by transforming it, by changing it, by taking it inside of himself and transmuting it. We see examples of this throughout his entire life, although it is most manifest in the love and forgiveness he shows at the time of his death. In simple language, Jesus took away the sin of the community by taking in hatred and giving back love; by taking in anger and giving out graciousness; by taking in envy and giving back blessing; by taking in bitterness and giving out warmth; by taking in pettiness and giving back compassion; by taking in chaos and giving back peace; and by taking in sin and giving back forgiveness. This is what constitutes the sacrificial part of his love, namely, the excruciatingly pain (ex cruce, from the cross) that he had to undergo in order to take in hatred and give back love. That is our task too, to help take away the sin of the world. We do this whenever we take in hatred, anger, envy, pettiness, and bitterness, hold them, transmute them, and eventually give them back as love, graciousness, blessing, compassion, warmth, and forgiveness.

We are told that on the day of the resurrection, two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus, their faces downcast. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that every body of Christ inevitably suffers the same fate as Jesus: death through misunderstanding, ignorance, and jealousy. Everything good eventually gets scapegoated and crucified. While nothing that’s of God will avoid crucifixion, no body of Christ stays in the tomb for long. God always rolls back the stone, and soon enough, new life bursts forth, and we see why that original life had to be crucified. Resurrection invariably follows crucifixion. Every crucified body will rise again. Our hope takes its root in that. Jerusalem was the dream, the hope, and the religious center from which all is to begin and where ultimately, all is to culminate. And the disciples are “walking away” from this place, away from their dream, towards Emmaus (Emmaus was a Roman Spa), a place of human comfort. They never get to Emmaus. Jesus appears to them on the road, reshapes their hope in the light of their disillusionment, and turns them back towards Jerusalem. That is one of the essential messages of Easter: Whenever we are discouraged in our faith, whenever our hopes seem to be crucified, we need to go back to Jerusalem, that is, back to the dream and the road of discipleship that we had embarked upon before things went wrong.  

Mary Magdalene also teaches us the great cost of such a Christ-centered life. Rachel Bulman writes that when our hearts are centered on Jesus, the things that formerly held such value in this world quickly lose their luster in the weight of his gaze. We will desire to be poured out, embarrassed for him, scorned for him, and give it all away in service to him. This life of self-donation inevitably leads us to the cross. In our reflection verse from the Gospel of John, the risen Lord asks Mary why she is weeping, and at that moment, she thinks that he is the gardener. The great irony of this is that Jesus is the gardener. He is the great gardener returning to the earth to put what was disordered in the first garden in the proper order. He sows the seeds of redemption into the heart of Mary Magdalene, telling her not to cling to him but to go and tell everyone that he has returned. In many ways, she is the blueprint for the making of great evangelizers, for an evangelist must live in such a way that the Gospel is preached no matter the cost. Living a life of complete self-donation and total Christ-centeredness will cost us all that the world has to offer but will inevitably lead us over and over again to the same garden of the Resurrection.

Paula Huston reflects on today’s verse and brings us back to what was occurring after the death and resurrection of Jesus. People had questions as many do to this very day. Did the angel roll back the stone and sit on it, or was he inside the tomb when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arrived? Were there, in fact, two angels? And how did the women respond to the news that Jesus had been raised from the dead? With joy? Terror? Bewilderment? Did they rush off to tell the other disciples, or were they struck dumb? If our belief in the resurrection is based on whether or not the details of the empty tomb scene line up precisely in the four Gospel accounts, then we’ve got a problem. Yet Christianity itself depends on whether or not this story is true. And two thousand years later, we cannot return to that historical period and interview the witnesses. What we can know, however, is whether Christ lives on today. Do we experience Him in His Word and the Holy Eucharist? Do we hear Him speaking into the depths of our souls? Do we see Him at work through the deeds of those who have devoted their lives to Him? Is he slowly changing us from one kind of person into another? Here, in our own lives, is where we either find proof of the resurrection or we don’t. If we passionately desire Christ’s presence, He will come. If we genuinely desire to know Him, He will open our eyes to the invisible divine reality that grounds our physical existence.

The Gospel of John provides an account of the resurrection of Jesus. Bishop Robert Barron writes that John describes the early morning on the first day of the week. It was still dark, just as it was at the beginning of time before God said, “Let there be light.” But a light was about to shine, and a new creation was about to appear. The stone had been rolled away. That stone, blocking the entrance to the tomb of Jesus, stands for the finality of death. When someone we love dies, it is as though a great stone is rolled across them, permanently blocking our access to them. And this is why we weep at death, not just in grief but in a kind of existential frustration. Undoubtedly, the first disciples must have thought a grave robber had been at work. But the incredible Johannine irony is that the greatest grave robber had been at work. God had opened the grave of His Son, just as the prophet Ezekiel said, “I will open your graves and have you rise from them.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser reminds us that one of the tasks of Easter is to rekindle the creed within ourselves. In essence, we are saying that God is ultimately still in charge of this universe, despite any indications to the contrary. Immediately upon experiencing the resurrected Jesus, the earliest Christians spontaneously voiced a one-line creed: “Jesus is Lord!” That does, in fact, say it all. When we strain to hear the voices of Good Friday; when we affirm that Jesus has been raised from the dead; when we shout to the heavens that Jesus is Lord of this world, we are saying everything else within our faith as well. To celebrate Easter is to affirm that all of this is true. Amen, amen!