A Homily for Easter (OK, yes, I know I’m late posting it)
Easter – Mass During the Day
In life, all of us have many small hopes. Most of these are legitimate and good hopes, however they are also poor and incomplete. Most of us hope for a long life; to see what the future will bring in 50 years. We hope for a good and well-paying job, which is also personally fulfilling. If we are young, we hope to have enough money to buy a computer, or starting around age 16, to buy a car so that we can be free from asking our parents for rides everywhere. We hope that our children grow up healthy, do well in school and are always well behaved. Most of us also hope to win the really big lottery. Others hope that their favorite sports team will win the pennant.
Whatever it is that we hope for, it seems that we all hope. Yes, human beings are born to hope. Now what happens to these small hopes that all of us have? Well either we do not fulfill them and we feel disappointed, or once we do achieve them we find that they do not truly satisfy our capacity for hope and we find ourselves feeling incomplete and maybe empty. So we develop new hopes, but they are just as ephemeral as the hopes we have already fulfilled. So are we doomed to always feel disappointed, maybe even hopeless? If we set the eyes of our hope only on the things of this world, then yes, we will know only a life of disappointment, of hopelessness. What can fully satisfy our entire capacity for hope? In answering, let me tell you a story.
Shortly have the French Revolution, which did its best to sweep both God and the Church away, and replace them with Reason and the Human Person as the pinnacle of all that is, one revolutionary, named Reveillere, tried to start a new “religion” that would enshrine the secular, humanistic ideals and values of the Revolution. However, he did not find many converts to his new religion, and he complained to another famous revolutionary, Barras, about his lack of converts while the disciples of Jesus Christ were so faithful to their Master, who, in the view of Reveillere, only imposed on them privations. Barras chuckled at his friend and said, “Well, as for me, I do not wonder, and I can give you a piece of good advice on how you can be more successful.” Reveillere was eager to hear Barras’ advice, so Barras said, “Have yourself killed on Friday, let them bury you on Saturday, try your best to rise on Sunday morning; and take my word for it, people will immediately believe in your new religion.” Reveillere did not follow this advice, and he and his religion are quite forgotten.
Only God can fully satisfy our capacity for hope; both in this world in which we live and work, and in eternal life in which we will see Him as He is and will love Him with all our being. We know that God does not disappoint us because He is God and His name is Faithful. As testimony to God being both the source and the fulfillment of all hope, we have Jesus Christ who humbled Himself, taking on our human nature. The importance of Jesus is not merely His Incarnation, nor even His profound teaching. The importance of Jesus is what we celebrated these past few days – His Passion, Death and Resurrection. The joy of Easter is the knowledge that Jesus has conquered sin and death, and had opened the gates of heaven for all who believe in Him.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines hope as “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (#1817). The great and beautiful truth of Christianity is that no one is excluded from Christian hope. God wants all to be saved; He calls all people to the bliss of heaven.
This is where we come in. In today’s first reading we hear St. Peter proclaim, “We are witnesses….” St. Peter was not speaking just for himself and for the other Apostles. No, he was speaking for all of us who call ourselves Christian. In his first letter, St. Peter says, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope” (1 Peter 3:15). Of course the reason for our hope is the Resurrection of Christ Jesus, and His Resurrection, which we celebrate today, is a call to be a light to the world.
“Our task as Christians is to proclaim the kingship of Christ, announcing it through what we say and do. Our Lord wants men and women of his own in all walks of life. Some he calls away from society, asking them to give up involvement in the world, so that they remind the rest of us by their example that God exists. To others he entrusts the priestly ministry. But he wants the vast majority to stay right where they are, in all earthly occupations in which they work: the factory, the laboratory, the farm, the trades, the streets of the big cities and the trails of the mountains” (St. Josemaria Escriva, Christ is Passing By, #105).
The biography of Pope John Paul II by George Weigel is entitled, Witness to Hope, and certainly the Servant of God, Pope John Paul II, was that, not only in all the beautiful words he spoke and wrote, but also especially in the way he lived. Despite being shot, and then infirmed with illnesses of old age, Pope John Paul II trusted in Christ and desired heaven.
This Easter let all of us re-commit ourselves to being witnesses of hope to the world. Let there not be an office, marketplace, home, park, or public square where the hope of Christ is not known. “Fill everything with the spirit of Jesus, placing Christ at the center of everything” (Eph 1:10). PROCLAIM CHRIST JESUS, VICTOR! LIVE JESUS, RISEN FROM THE DEAD!
