After the challenge and
betrayal of Holy Thursday, the suffering and death of Good Friday, how am I to
reconcile the joy of Easter? Taken
separately, I cannot. The Church never
meant that I should. That is why we
celebrate them as though they were one event, which we call Triduum, or three days.
God loved us into
existence. That existence is not without
its challenges, pain, sorrow, and joy.
The only constant is the love that created us in the first place. This existence is absolutely unstable except
for that one constant: God’s love for
us. We are not meant to embrace or even stabilize the
unstable. We are asked to move through
it while embracing what is constant.
Jesus’ agony at Gethsemane was his life at its most unstable – his
disciples did not understand what he was about; he was being betrayed by one of
them, he was about to be arrested and executed, and from the human point of
view, he would have to suffer these things without the comfort of human
companionship. But he embraced God’s
will, surrendering himself to the unstable for the sake of maintaining the
constant.
Then it was revealed that
the constant was stronger even than death.
It is only after the instability of life and death that Easter joy is
possible. The victory of God’s love for
us, transcending even death, is the fulfillment of our hopes, the reason for
confronting and passing through the unstable to reach the constant.
--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Pastor, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church,
Mill Valley, California
Image source: Chinese artist He Qui, He is Risen
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