The Easter season is a time of adjusting to a new perspective. The worst that can happen to us has been overcome by God taking Jesus from the tomb. This new perspective challenges us to live boldly and to love daringly from the heart.
Why did Jesus have to show up with scars to Thomas? He needed Jesus to be so real that the scars were not glossed over as if they didn’t matter. He needed to see that Jesus was still carrying the marks of life on earth. We need those scars to be there, too.
The miracle of Easter has exploded on this day. The heart of the child of God knows it is this loving God who leads us out of all our exiles, whatever they look like, including this pandemic. It is the child of God who will proclaim: He is risen, indeed.
We are all part of the parade of Palm Sunday: a seven-day journey that promises to set us free from sin and death and to never to separate us from the love of Christ. What will you do along the way? Let’s join in, and rejoice in the promise that is to come on Easter Sunday.
What God added through Jesus is grace. Undeserved, unmerited, unearned grace. Through His birth, life death and resurrection, God has given back our lives to us, replacing that which was killing us — the law — with the grace and salvation that is only found in the lifted cross.
God has called us to be in relationship with him and with each other, and that relationship is based on a love which the law by itself cannot know or teach. It’s called grace. It’s the Two Universal commandments: to love God, and to love neighbor.
When God takes hold of someone, suddenly something is different. It comes with such authority, it is as if it that which he has planned for you has already been accomplished. You allow his grace to into your life, and it overtakes your life. This is God’s eternal presence living in you, now. This is the message of Easter.
The promise of Easter began with the promise of God when he said “never again,” after the flood and hung His bow in the heavens. It was a promise for life on earth. The second promise — the new covenant for which He let His Son hang on the cross — was for life in eternity; that we may die, never again. Is there any love more extravagant than that?
Dramatic miracles and heavenly visions do not create faith. Faith is something God plants in the human heart, and the light of Jesus illuminates it. But to truly experience it, we must some come down into the valley and work our way to the cross. That is where we see Him, in the face of all humanity.
In a same-day delivery world, we have lost the virtue of patience and the good things that come to us through it. Yet God has proven to us time and again that he has both today and tomorrow well under control, if we will wait on Him and live thankfully in the moment.