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EASTER SUNDAY 2022
Acts 10: 34, 37-43 + Psalm 118 + Colossians 3: 1-4 + Luke 24: 1-12
Holy Spirit Catholic Church: Sunday, April 17, 2022
We are like those apostles who receive the news from Mary Magdalen and Joanna and Mary that Jesus is not dead, but alive.
We are like Peter and the other apostles who hear the stupendous announcement that the tomb cannot hold Jesus, but that he has been raised.
We reply with the apostles: Nonsense!
Nonsense—death is the end, the last word.
Because we live in a world where death seems to rule, not life:
Wars and disasters;
Abortion and Capital Punishment;
Gun violence on in a subway in New York City or at a shopping mall in South Carolina.
Fear and insecurity confront us daily, eating away at our faith that Christ is Risen.
Fear slowly erodes our hope that life has the last word.
The victory over fear comes from our Communion with God and each other.
This holy unity is the gift of every celebration of the Eucharist,
as we encounter the Risen Lord, victorious over death.
Peter did not believe at first that Jesus was risen.
But gradually he became a witness to new life of Risen Christ.
But how did that transformation happen?
He testifies: “We ate and drank with Him.”
By eating and drinking with the Risen Lord, Peter is transformed from being shackled by fear to being free!!
It’s why the Eucharist is the source and summit of our faith,
the very heartbeat of our faith, the lifeblood of our faith, food for the journey.
We eat and drink with the Risen Lord and are united with him.
The One victorious over death becomes one with us at this holy meal.
For the Vaccine for fear is Communion with God.
For the Vaccine for fear is Communion with one another.
Communion with God and each other protects us from fear,
which is slowly killing us, slowly draining us of our ability to love
and give ourselves away in love
In a world more interconnected that any time in history,
we find so many ways to isolate, to divide, to exclude.
Holy Communion brings us back together by the power of the Risen Christ.
Here around the two tables of Word and Sacrament we are healed of our forgetfulness and remember to whom we belong, who has made us out of love and for love,
who has given us life and longs to share with us divine life.
For Christ is RISEN! He has destroyed the power of death and given us NEW LIFE!!
Little Chloe will experience this new life today in the waters of baptism.
By baptism, she will no longer be the daughter of Brandon and Joy
but also a daughter of God.
She will become, by baptism, a sister to Christ Jesus and a temple of the Holy Spirit—
she will experience by this Sacrament Resurrected Life!
Since we know that the Risen Jesus is the source of this new life,
why do we keep looking for the living one among the dead?
Believing this to be true, why do we still seek him in those places of death,
when he lives?
We want freedom, and we enslave ourselves to money and that’s never enough.
We want peace, yet we make guns and tanks and weapons of every kind.
We want life, and then we smoke and drink and work ourselves to death for the good life, which never comes before we are broken and too tired to care.
We want justice, and we are trapped in a never-ending cycle of revenge.
Yet in this Easter celebration, the Lord of Life invites us into new life with him.
The Risen Jesus invites us to find Him among the living,
where the signs of life are abundant.
Signs such as service, kindness, and forgiveness.
Signs such as healing love and the gentleness of peace.
Wherever we see such signs, we find Christ alive.
Wherever we become such signs, the Risen Lord lives and works in us and through us.
The victory of Christ is ours!
We share in Risen Life with him now.
Heaven is not some place beyond the sky.
Heaven can be found now in Christ Risen.
As we are joined to Him, united to Him, we experience new life and fear flees!
In union with the Risen Body of Christ, our hope is renewed,
our love strengthened, and our faith in the eternal goodness of God restored.
Fr. Joseph A. Jacobi