Ave Maria!
Easter Sunday—12 April AD 2009
[Ordinary of the Mass]
[ Mass Text-Latin]
[Mass Text-English]Happy Easter!
Thanks to all who attended, contributed to, helped with, and participated in the celebration of Holy Week and Easter. All of these things are essential to our parish, and to the preservation of our Catholic Faith.
The Mass today is the climax of this week that we call Holy Week, extending from Palm Sunday until Easter. And if you have attended some of these Masses, you understand that we have been commemorating our Lord's last week on earth: The triumphal entry into Jerusalem—His Last Supper, establishing the Blessed Sacrament, the Mass and the Priesthood—His crucifixion and death—and finally, today, His glorious resurrection from the dead.
We know too that the suffering our Lord endured was to redeem us from our own sins and from the original sin of Adam. His resurrection is fundamentally a demonstration that He conquered sin and death. So this feast has the tone of celebrating an heroic victory.
We ought to recognize, though, that this feast of Easter—while it is the greatest feast of our Lord—is also our own feast. Certainly, we have cause to celebrate, since we are the beneficiaries of our Lord's triumph.
Let me suggest to you, thought, that we ought not look at Easter as an event that occurs today and will be over and done with tomorrow, as though our salvation were now assured. That would be to miss its fundamental meaning. In fact, there ought to be an element of Holy Week and Easter in most everything we do in the spiritual life.
When we offer Mass, we not only re-live the Last Supper, but we also re-enact the sacrifice of Calvary, and our Lord's resurrection from the dead.
When we pray, our prayer ought not to take our redemption and hoped for salvation for granted. There ought to be an element of Good Friday in every prayer; doing penance, asking forgiveness for sin, and begging God for the graces to remain strong in the faith. And then, too, there ought to be an element of Easter in our prayer as well; rejoicing with God for His goodness, praising Him for His glory, and thanking Him for all that He has done for us.
Likewise we ought not to think of Lent as a thing that is over and done with, now that Easter has rolled around. Hopefully, all of us gained some spiritual graces from this Lent we have just experienced. For different people it may have been different things. Some gained a bit of self control through fasting. Others developed a little more regular prayer life. Some got in to the habit of saying the Rosary each day. Some picked up the practice of spiritual reading. Maybe a few improved some failing they saw in themselves; a quick temper, or the desire to gossip, or whatever. A few got in the habit of coming to Mass a day or two during the week.
The point is that we need to retain these practices and build on them. We may not fast as much, and we may not keep quite the same schedule as we did for Lent, but we don't want to give up the good habits that we worked so hard to form during Lent. Never forget that in the spiritual life we must always be moving forward, otherwise we will fall backward.
Remember, this is our feast as well as our Lord's—a feast of our own victory over sin and death—a victory that we can secure only by being Christ like. Saint Paul puts it pretty eloquently: “If you have risen with Christ, seek the things that are above ... not the things of this earth.” “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed ... let us keep festival with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” We need to “purge out the old leaven of malice and wickedness,” and live our lives as one continuous Holy Week and Easter.
“This is the day that the Lord has made: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Happy Easter!
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