Saturday, April 19, 2014

He Saw and Believed


By Rev. Joe McCloskey, SJ

This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.  He commissioned us to preach to the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead.  Acts 10:40-42

Therefore, let us celebrate the feast, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.  1 Corinthians 5:8

When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.  Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed.  John 20:6-8

Piety
Jesus is truly risen.  He lives in the joy of our companions on a blossoming, spring day.  He lives in the song of the colorful birds of our life.  He is the richness of a helping hand.  He is the wonder of the newborn babe.  He is the fulfillment of everything that is wonderful about life.  He has given us the fullness of his cross as the most magnificent expression of the mercy and the love of God.  Jesus who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow is everything beautiful about being alive.  Jesus is the aliveness of ever now that touches the eternal newness of God.  Christ in his resurrection sits at the right hand of God and he is the best part of ourselves already in heaven in his love for us that draws us ever to our destiny in God through him.  Jesus gives us the best of ourselves in his resurrection that makes our love his when we love one another.  When we have lost something and found it again.  Jesus is the forever being found of the God of our hearts.  There is no tomorrow in the forever of the Jesus of the Resurrection.  His love is forever a part of us in the completing of all the "incompletes" of our lives.

Study
Our study is the looking beyond of the created moments of our lives to see what is pointed at in the fullness of God’s love for us in each moment.  Our study rushes us to the empty tomb of his burial to find the risen Lord waiting for us in each new moment of our lives.  We climb the cross of Christ to see our world through the eyes of his Resurrection.  There is no moment now that does not hold the fulfillment of every desire.  We neatly unwrap the folds of what we have buried in the hopes of the resurrection.  Our study gives us what the Apostles were witnessing to in their accounts of the risen Christ.  We believe because they have given us the vision of what we are waiting for in our hopes of our own resurrections.  We study each encounter of Christ to get beyond the disguise of his being in each other in the goodness our study reveals.

Action
We must live the resurrection.  Our lives must reveal the fullness of our hopes in Christ.  He will not berate us for our faults.  We must do the same for each other.  He will comfort us by his presence in our lives.  We must be beacons of hope for each other by our comfortableness with each other.  All the joy of the resurrection we must share that our world might know in the love we have for one another the source of our happiness in Christ.  He died not knowing what we now know in his coming back to us in his happiness that our lives have a forever meaning in his resurrection.  Christ has risen.  We will rise that his joy in his resurrection might be ours.

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