“How was your Easter?”

How many times have you said that recently? Usually, it leads to a lively conversation about family gatherings, etc.

I wonder how many of us think of asking about what our experience and awareness of the resurrection… the reason we celebrate Easter with family.

I admit that I never really thought of asking Mary about her Easter. But I can’t imagine asking her how the family enjoyed the Passover meal!

What we do and don’t know about Mary’s Easter

What we know about Mary’s Easter

Not much! She stood at the foot of the cross.

At Jesus’ request, John took her into his home, and she became his mother and he her son.

So we know that she was alive when Jesus rose from the dead.

Beyond that, we can only speculate.

What don’t we know?

What was it like for her from 3 o’clock Friday until the hours of what we call Easter Sunday?

With a mother’s sensitivity, did she sense he was alive before the disciples came running with the news?

How did she learn of Jesus’ resurrection? Did Jesus pay her a special visit?

What happened when she first saw him? Did Jesus tell her not to touch him … or give her the tightest of hugs?

We don’t know. But Pope John Paul II reminds us. “Could any narrative record the moment of the son’s resurrection in the heart of his mother?”

Our experience of the Resurrection – the greatest news we never talk about!

The most important question for us is to think about the question asked of the women at the tomb. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

Pope Francis, with his usual succinctness, reminds us…

We cannot celebrate Easter

– if we continue to be dead;

– if we remain prisoners of the past;

– if in our lives we lack the courage to let ourselves be forgiven by God who forgives everything;

– if we fail to change, to break with the works of evil, to decide for Jesus and his love.

– If we continue to reduce faith to a talisman, making God a lovely memory from times past,

– instead of encountering him today as the living God who desires to change us and to change our world.

A Christianity that seeks the Lord among the ruins of the past and encloses him in the tomb of habit is a Christianity without Easter.

Yet the Lord is risen! Let us not tarry among the tombs, but run to find him, the Living One! Nor may we be afraid to seek him also in the faces of our brothers and sisters, in the stories of those who hope and dream, in the pain of those who we suffer: God is there!

He continues…

How beautiful is a Church that can run this way through the streets of our world! Without fear, without schemes and stratagems, but solely with the desire to lead everyone to the joy of the Gospel.

That is what we are called to do: to experience the risen Christ and to share the experience with others; to roll away the stone from the tomb where we may have enclosed the Lord, in order to spread his joy in the world.

He prays…

Let us make Jesus, the Living One, rise again from all those tombs in which we have sealed him. Let us set him free from the narrow cells in which we have so often imprisoned him.

Let us awaken from our peaceful slumber and let him disturb and inconvenience us.

Let us bring him into our everyday lives:

– through gestures of peace in these days marked by the horrors of war,

– through acts of reconciliation amid broken relationships,

– acts of compassion towards those in need,

– acts of justice amid situations of inequality and of truth in the midst of lies.

– And above all, through works of love and fraternity.

How do I think and talk of Jesus’ resurrection today?

Originally posted on Vincentian Mindwalk