Go, witness your Easter faith

You will read this column the week after Easter.  We all will have gone through Holy Week, which began with Palm Sunday, also called Passion Sunday.  This is because Jesus went so quickly from being hailed as the new Messiah to being denounced by the religious leaders of his people and sentenced to torture and death by the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate.  From Messiah (which he was) to criminal, to crucified, in five short days.  

The inspired commentary on this that we read in the Epistle to the Hebrews says: “In the days when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;  and became the source of eternal salvation” (Heb 5:7-9).  The obedience Jesus learned was to trust in God who promised him, and through him us, an eternal life after this one with the father, his son and the Spirit of love that binds them and will bind us to them and each other forever.  That was what Holy Week was all about.
 

“Every time we celebrate Mass we remember the Passion, death and resurrection
of Jesus. Every time we look at the cross we should remember
the same.” Father John Carville

The good news, for Jesus and for us, is that Holy Week didn’t end on Good Friday.  Jesus didn’t stay dead.  He had to die so that he could rise and show us the ultimate reason for hope in this life.  Death is terrifying.  It is entirely foreign to our experience of life.  We know that it happens to everyone: to our grandparents, parents, siblings, relatives and friends but no one has ever, nor could ever, tell us what it is like.  

We all go to sleep, naturally or through trauma or anesthesia but we expect to wake up.  If we are lucky enough to die in bed without too much suffering, what will it be like when the doctor tells us that soon we will never wake up again, not in this life?  Well, the First Letter of St. John tells us that “we will be like him”  (1 Jn 3:2).  In St. John’s Gospel we read that after the resurrection, Jesus appeared to the apostles in the upper room and showed the doubting Thomas his body with its wounds from the crucifixion.  That passage notes that the doors were “locked” when Jesus appeared, so the Jesus, who we will be like, will not be exactly like the human being we experience ourselves to be.  Our faith in our triune God has many surprises.  This will surely be one.  

The promise of that kind of resurrection already fulfilled in Jesus Christ is the reason for our Easter joy.  There are more things, however, that the Passion, death and resurrection of Jesus have to teach us, things that give us hope in this life with its beauty and its pain.  

For instance, did you ever wonder why Jesus had to die so young and so painfully?  Could it be because some of us meet similar kinds of death?  Our newspapers have been filled with recent murders, some of them deliberately cruel.  That is not God’s doing, it is the will of demented human beings.  Maybe God, in sending us his son to die for us so cruelly, wanted us to know that he is always with us.  As we all face death of whatever kind,  God wants us to be like the good thief on the cross next to Jesus, praying with Jesus, “Into your hands I commend my Spirit.”  Then, that day we too will be with Jesus in paradise.

On Holy Thursday, the night his Passion began with his arrest, Jesus celebrated the Jewish Passover meal with his disciples.  He tells them he has longed to celebrate this meal with them and then changes, slightly but significantly, the liturgy of that celebration.  When it comes time to bless the bread he adds, “This (bread) is my body which will be offered for you.”  And at the end of the meal, he takes the last cup of wine and says, “This is the cup of my blood which will be poured out for you and for all for the forgiveness of sins.”  And then he gives them the command, “Do this in memory of me.”

Jesus took elements of the Jewish Passover sacrificial meal and made them sacramental elements of his body and blood to be sacrificed on the cross the following Friday.  It is this body and blood that the disciples saw in Christ’s appearances after the resurrection.  Jesus found a special way to be with us in this life until we die and rise and be with him, the father, son and Holy Spirit forever.  Therefore, we as Catholics believe that Jesus is with us, “body and blood, soul and divinity” when we receive the Eucharist in Communion at every Mass in which we participate, in Communion services with previously consecrated hosts and when Communion is brought to the sick and dying.  

As Pope Francis often teaches in his homilies and writings, the Eucharist is food for the journey of life.  It gives us hope when we are distraught and strength when we are weak.  Every Sunday is in a way a little Easter because we celebrate it with Mass.  It is a gift we cannot ignore.  That is why the church obliges us to attend Sunday Mass when we can possibly make it (or, in times of COVID-19, safely attend).  Of course, daily Mass is not only optional but also a wonderful way of thanking God for our life here and his promise of eternal life with the Trinity.  Eucharist is a Greek word for thanks.  

As we remember Jesus’ Passion, death and resurrection in the Mass we must also remember that sacraments are more than just thankful worship.  Every sacrament is also a commitment to Jesus’ way of life.  Some of the most important words of the Mass are the very last ones the priest says.  When all Masses were celebrated in Latin in our Roman Rite, those words were very brief:  “Ite, missa est!”  “GO, IT (the Eucharist) HAS BEEN SENT!” While it could refer to bringing the consecrated Eucharist to the sick, it also was a sort of code for Jesus’ great commission to his disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, and of the son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt 28: 19-20).  

Every time we celebrate Mass we remember the Passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.  Every time we look at the cross we should remember the same.  This is the culmination of the whole Gospel.  We have to take it seriously and spread the message. Like the Jews who were told about the great commandment of love of God in the Old Testament, so too us now: “Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today. Drill them into your children.  Speak of them at home and abroad, whether you are busy or at rest” (Dt 6: 6-7).    

Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnny [email protected].