March 27 - Homily for Today - Easter Sunday

+ Rejoice! The Lord is risen, just as he said! And he has appeared to Simon! 

Today the Church resounds with joy as we celebrate the central fact of our existence as Church: the rising from the dead of Jesus Christ our Lord, our King and our Savior! Jesus has accomplished what no other human being could ever accomplish, and he did it FOR us: He died FOR us! He rose from the dead by the working of the Holy Spirit at the command of God the Father, FOR us! – so that we WITH HIM might give the Father the glory that is His due – by the lives we lead IN HIM, and THROUGH HIM!

JESUS DIED FOR US! He saw his bitter Passion all the way through to the end so that all of the Passion that we are invited to participate in may be meritorious for us! – most especially our last bit that we must endure: physical death. But because Jesus died, he took the sting out of our death, and so we have nothing to fear when our turn comes and we like Jesus will close our eyes in the sleep of peace! 

But this death also merited for us the FORGIVENESS OF OUR SINS – and it was our sins which cause in us certain and unrelenting spiritual death: the chief among them being the sin of our first parents. Because of them, we are not free to live completely sinless lives and sometimes we do sin; but Jesus death blotted out the capital offense and all our offenses once and for all time, and so should we sin now, we now have the wonderful Sacrament of Forgiveness to remove our personal sins after baptism.

JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD – FOR US – to a newness of life, the fullness of life that only God could imagine and bring into existence. Just as Jesus was not just resuscitated, taking up again the exact same bodily existence and life that he had three days prior; so now he lives a new and everlasting kind of spiritually enhanced existence which includes his former body, but now transformed, transfigured, in glory – and this he offers to those who want it, those who ask for it, and those who live the rest of their lives like they do in fact want it! This is an astounding fact!

And he did all of these things so that we, WITH HIM, might give his Father - who planned and carried out the whole wonderful love story - the thanks and honor and worship and adoration and glory that most certainly is his due – by the lives we lead, filled with his risen Spirit, and thus IN HIM and THROUGH HIM make an enormous difference both for ourselves and for those people with whom we share this absolutely fantastic story of divine intervention and redeemed mankind!

Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed; [and now everything is different for everyone]; let us then feast with joy in the Lord – and then let us go forth, as the women at the tomb did, and tell everyone about it!