The Easter Message
Fr. Sebastian Thottippatt
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| Fr. Sebastian Thottippatt |
Militant groups belonging to ISIS, Al Qaida or Boko Haram continue to wreck havoc on populations fleeing from their onslaught. The Syrian refugee crisis keeps mounting in Europe as thousands continue to knock at doors in the countries of Europe seeking refuge from the misery and death in their home country. Violent clashes based on caste, religion or political affiliations are reported frequently from different parts of India. The curse of terrorism can strike at will anywhere and leave behind pain beyond telling. It is the same old story of man’s cruelty to man that keeps recurring from times immemorial. Christians commemorate on Good Friday the archetype of violence of the fiercest kind meted out to Jesus Christ two millennia ago. Sadly no radical change of any sort has come over humanity as a whole, even after all the developments of science and technology in the recent decades. Intolerance in all forms keeps manifesting itself at all spheres of human life and activity.
In
this scenario of pain and anxiety, Easter comes every year with its message of
peace and wellbeing to all humankind: “Peace be with you!”. It is the greatest
Good News of all times that has been proclaimed in the world. But it came as
most unexpected even for his closest followers who had been told by Christ
himself about his rising from the dead. The cruelty they had witnessed being
inflicted on the Master was too numbing for their minds to leave any room for
hope. Hence the Master Himself had to come to wake them out of their
hopelessness and despair. “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer
all this and thus enter into his glory?” (Lk.24:26). He repeats the same to the
disciples gathered together in the upper room, adding that “Repentance and
forgiveness in his name is to be proclaimed to all the nations, beginning from
Jerusalem.” (Lk.24:47). Easter tells us all in plain terms that life can begin
again and that there is no end of the road for anyone. No one needs to change
to know God‘s love. Suffice to know that love and change will happen.
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| World is bleeding |
It
is human inability to come to terms with one’s brokenness that is responsible
for all the violence that is witnessed in today’s world. One fails to go any
deeper than one’s feelings, ideas, notions and beliefs and expects everyone to
fall in line with them absolutely. It is the failure to realize that a human
person is far more than all these above. He or she is the image of God and the
core of his or her being is God Himself. But to discover that divinity hidden
within, one must get beyond the din that goes on in the mind which is under the
spell of impressions from the past and pressures from all directions. To know
the presence of the Risen Lord, one must allow reality to be what it is and
encounter it with the power of love and forgiveness.
The
core message of Easter is the assurance of love for all unconditionally.
“Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ” as St. Paul says in his
letter to the Romans. The commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans Ch.8: 18-39
made by Eugene Peterson in his book, ‘the message: the New Testament in
contemporary English’ is most relevant here:
I don’t think there is any comparison between the present hard times
and the coming good times. This created world itself can hardly wait for what
is coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back now. God
reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be
released at the same moment. Meanwhile the joyful anticipation deepens.
All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of
pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. We are also feeling the birth
pangs. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting
diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. But the longer we
wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy. [This is what I
call “negativity capability,” or the rubber band pulled back which increases
the momentum forward.]
So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we
lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing
our condition and exposing [the Godself] to the worst by sending [God’s] own
Son, is there anything else [God] wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? . . .
Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and
Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred,
not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing. . . .
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that
nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or
low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and
God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.” (1)
Easter is the message of reconciliation and peace that has been sealed forever. But this realization must begin within our own being first and foremost. We need to find ourselves at home and loved even in all our brokenness and sinfulness. There is no situation in life that cannot be restored, rectified or changed if we have recourse to the divine power within us which is the power of love. The entire universe is inter-connected and inter-dependent. Galaxies and heavenly bodies have been spinning in space for billions of years subject to the law of gravity.
Easter is the message of reconciliation and peace that has been sealed forever. But this realization must begin within our own being first and foremost. We need to find ourselves at home and loved even in all our brokenness and sinfulness. There is no situation in life that cannot be restored, rectified or changed if we have recourse to the divine power within us which is the power of love. The entire universe is inter-connected and inter-dependent. Galaxies and heavenly bodies have been spinning in space for billions of years subject to the law of gravity.
It
is only the human being who entered into space and time just yesterday who
dares to cross this barrier and break into the space of the other. It climaxed
in the crucifixion of Christ. But the words of forgiveness were uttered from
the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”
(Lk.23:34). Do we really understand what we do to one another in the name of
God or religion or any ideology for that matter? Intolerance in today’s world
has surpassed all limits and we are witnessing blood-curdling instances of
people who take law into their own hands dealing out death and destruction on
their path to anyone different from them. Little do He has broken the power of
death and sin forever and for everyone. We only need to enter into they realize
that it goes totally counter to the essence of our nature as human beings.
His
bandwagon and choose to live the risen life refusing to heed the voices of the
ego that keeps striving to assert its identity. Life will constantly dance between
good times and bad, success and failure, praise and blame. But nothing is to be
taken as absolute. Everything passes and truth will shine out in course of time
to reveal to us what reality actually is. If we have faith to accept reality
from the hands of God believing that “God works for the good of those who love
him” (Rom.8:28) we shall find ourselves being empowered by God to share in the
death and resurrection of Christ. That was what St. Paul wanted all his life:
“I want to know him and to experience the power of his resurrection and share
in his sufferings and become like him in his death so that I may attain the
resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10). The meditative words of the
Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr from the United States, seem most suitable to
quote here:
It takes all of us a long time to move from power to weakness, from
glib certitude to vulnerability, from meritocracy to the ocean of grace.
Strangely enough, this is especially true for people raised in religion. In
Paul’s letters, he consistently idealizes not power but powerlessness, not
strength but weakness, not success but the cross. It’s as if he’s saying, “I
glory when I fail and suffer because now I get to be like Jesus—the naked
loser—who turned any notion of God on its head.” Now the losers can win, which
is just about everybody.
The revelation of the death and resurrection of Jesus forever
redefines what success and winning mean, and it is not what any of us wanted or
expected. On the cross, God is revealed as vulnerability itself (the Latin word
vulnus means wound). The path to holiness is so different than any of us
would have wished or imagined; and yet after the fact, we will all recognize
that it was our littleness and wrongness that kept the door to union and love
permanently wedged open every day of our life. In fact, there is no way to
close it.
Easter
is meaningful to any man or woman who acknowledges the glory of divinity within
him or her. One does not need to belong to a particular religious group to
experience this. One has only to rid oneself of the conditionings under which
one has been living and begin to operate from a different energy center. It is
that core within us that sustains us in being. It can never be the mind that is
constantly subject to change in understanding, feelings and emotions. The one
who taps on the power of Easter has truly begun to live. Gerard Manley Hopkins
once said: “Let Him Easter in us.” He meant to say that we ought to allow the
Risen Lord to manifest Himself through our deeds of love and compassion. This
is the miracle of Easter that should become part of our lives and not miracles
that catch the eye of people and draw their attention on to us.
HAPPY EASTER!
