This Sunday I started working with my High School youth group to plan our annual Youth Led Easter Sunrise Service. As we read the Easter story, the theme that came alive for us was "Come and See, Go and Tell." We talked about how the encounter with the resurrected Christ, changes you in a way that allows you to be transformed and share that encounter with others through the way you live. The resurrection isn't merely a personal, spiritual hope, but a life-altering world changing one. It doesn't just change your heart, it changes everything, including the way you live. You are now a part of the resurrection story, and as you go, your life keeps telling the story.I think that the encounter with the resurrected Christ at the tomb changes us so radically because it reveals that destruction and death do not win. It gives us hope that we do not have to live under the law of death, freeing us to go the way of love. Fr. Steve Hassett shared this thought from Ghandi with me, and I think it summarizes the principle of Easter better than I ever could:
"I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction and therefore there must be a higher law than that of destruction. Only under that law would a well-ordered society be intelligible and life worth living. And if that is the law of life, we have to work it out in daily life. Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love. In this crude manner I have worked it out in my life. That does not mean that all my difficulties are solved. Only I have found that this law of love has answered as the law of destruction has never done."
Life persists. Love wins. This is the message we go with. This is the message we tell with our lives.
1 comment:
I love this quote, and this reflection. It's like an embodied image of resurrection. Like too often we think that Easter and the Resurrection does solve everything, but I imagine that even after encountering Christ in the tomb there was still confusion mixed with the joy of the encounter. Matthew says that the women left the tomb with, "fear and great joy" (Matt. 28.8). It's interesting to think that even at the tomb, the Resurrection was not an absolute resolution of all things, but perhaps an opening to something new and like all new things is both exciting and terrifying.
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