Alleluia! Easter is upon us! Christ is risen, Death has been vanquished, and Hell has been harrowed!
Writing a blog post around Easter has been fairly intimidating. What’s there to say beyond the Gospels? In all honesty I cannot tell you, and I don’t think there’s any definite answer. In a week, Christians around the world have encountered the darkest depths of grief and the highest pinnacles of joy and, encircling these and everything in between and beyond, the great embrace of love.
I have decided to talk about something that looms above much of Holy Week, above the good and the bad, something that really stuck out to me as we read bit by bit, day by day the story of Christ’s final days. That something is fear.
Fear gazes from behind the crowds as Christ enters Jerusalem. Fear sits at the Last Supper, observing the institution of the Eucharist and the moment Judas commits to his role. Fear meets with Christ in Gethsemane, accompanies his disciples throughout the Passion, and in spite of all, Fear persists among us today.
Sometime before Holy Week, the rest of my Teach Bhríde household and I played the hymn “Be Not Afraid” at Mass. The refrain is this: “Be not afraid. I go before you always. Come, follow me, and I will give you rest.” The hymn is based on verses from Isaiah 43 and Luke 6.
The first verse of “Be Not Afraid” draws inspiration from the verses in Isaiah, featuring lines describing challenges and struggles one will face and the consolation and protection that comes from God. “You shall cross the barren desert, but you shall not die of thirst. You shall wander far in safety though you do not know the way. You shall speak your words in foreign lands and all will understand.” It’s this last part that strikes me because learning languages is historically not my strongest suit. But I’m supposed to speak to people I can’t communicate with? And we’re supposed to understand each other? OK, great.
There’s a saying my eighth grade teacher used to say, and I admit I used to think it was so cheesy, and maybe it is, but it is fairly profound. The saying goes something like “Preach the Gospel at all times; use words when necessary” and is often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.
What if the call to speak words in foreign lands, the call to be understood by people in places not my home, really actually refers to actions rather than words? What if we are to understand acts as communicating one’s identity as a Christian? We know of fourteen works of mercy that are fairly unique to the Catholic Church: seven corporal as given to us by Christ himself and seven spiritual as presented by the Catechism.
But it can be hard to commit to works of mercy. It can be scary. We can be afraid. Just this last week, Fear kept the Eleven from carrying out the seventh corporal work (from the Book of Tobit rather than the Gospel of Matthew, by the way, just for you fact-checkers out there) of burying the dead. It fell upon someone who was less afraid, someone whose material wealth and societal status kept him from being afraid.
The disciples didn’t stop then, and we can’t stop now. Easter is a time for rebirth, for renewal, for—dare I say it—resurrection. Maybe we’ve failed in the past to act with love and mercy, with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Maybe we’ve failed as Christians. Now is a time for us to start and restart our Christian journeys. We won’t be perfect Christians immediately, but we have to start with the decision to try. Try, try, try. Sometimes, it is all we can do. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the cornerstone was most certainly laid in one.
Christ may not be among us himself, just now, but he is here in the faces and the needs of the poorest among us, and until and after he comes again, it is our responsibility as Christians, as Catholics, to take up our callings, our missions, our vocations, our beliefs, our faith, and do whatever we can for the least among us. Let us live the Gospel in every land and in every time by acts of love that all will understand.
