Finding the Risen Christ

Dear Friends,

This year, Holy Week found the Jewish calendar coinciding with ours, with Muslim Ramadan not far behind. A significant convergence of the special holy days of the People of the Book. Yet, news outlets recently reported that, in the United States, less than 50% of the American public would be gathering to mark these important spiritual feasts.

Some will say COVID-19 has blown us off course. Others point out that there was a growing decline in religious observance long before that. Lack of interest? Lack of belief? Individualism? We can speculate all we want.

Let me ask the Catholic/Christian readership of this blog: Do you wish to keep Holy Week and Easter at the heart of your faith and practice? I’d love to have you write some comments at the end of this blog that I share in future blogs. If you need to prime the pump, here are a few thoughts to build on.

Before the Resurrection of Jesus, the operative word beneath the narrative of these holydays was “closed”: closed minds and closed hearts did not recognize Jesus for who He was, the closed door kept Him out, the closed tomb said all was over. Only with the Resurrection of Jesus did people open their minds and hearts, their arms and their future to the seemingly impossible. Christ, who was truly dead as Good Friday ended, was truly alive on the third day. How do we become open to this remarkable reality of God in our midst today?

Jesus was the same yet different, transformed through death to new life. How do we come to be open to His presence today? 

His presence today not in some distant future. As the farmer and New Testament Greek scholar, Clarence Jordan, told us “on the morning of the Resurrection, God put life in the present tense, not in the future. He gave us not a promise, but a presence, not so much an assurance that we shall live someday but that He is risen today.”

The Risen One is with us as we plow ahead, tired of the miseries, the isolation, the suffering of this last year. Do we feel the pull of it? To capture the meaning of this phrase “feel the pull of it,” go back to last week’s blog to grasp the meaning of Easter – not intellectually understood but held in our hearts as true and real.

Can we touch Him today, risen as He is? How do we touch Him? Mary Magdalen wanted to touch Him as He was before He died, but she couldn’t. Thomas was invited to touch His wounds but found that he didn’t need to in order to believe. Do we want to touch the Risen Christ? How do we do that?

On Good Friday, as they were dying, Jesus turned to Dismas, the good thief, to accept him. Jesus wanted Dismas. Jesus wanted then, and even now, excluded people. Today, in our land, they are Asian Americans, black, brown and red people, gay and transgendered people. We say we are one with the Risen Christ. Do we accept the excluded?

Easter is a threshold feast. We need to step into it and step over it to find the Risen Christ on our side of history. May I hold your hand as we step across to Christ and his people awaiting us?

~Sister Joan Sobala

Feeling the Pull of Easter

Dear Friends,

There’s a story about Easter I have been carrying in my heart for years. I used it only once in a blog. That was 2015, so I’m due to tell it again, so you can hear it and experience it’s meaning.

A German seminary professor of theology was fond of vacationing on the moors of England. On one such trip, he walked along a path still thick with morning mist. The professor came upon a group of cherry-cheeked boys and girls, gazing upward. One child was working the string of a kite.

“You can’t see it,” the professor said, announcing the obvious. “How do you know it’s there?”

With the exasperation that children have for clueless adults, a little voice piped up: “We know because we feel the pull of it.”

Back in Germany, refreshed from his holiday, the professor took up the task of shaping the theological thought of the seminarians in his class. Seminarians, by their nature, loved to challenge their teachers. His class excelled in this way.

On one particular day, the topic under discussion was how to convey the deep abiding truths of Christianity in homilies for the great feasts.

“Take Easter,” one earnest student began. “What do we say? How do we make people know it’s real?”

Remembering the children with the kite on the moors, the professor replied very simply: “We know because we feel the pull of it.”

On this “day which has no sunset,” as the 12th century abbot Guerric of Igny, describes it, do you feel the pull of Easter?

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Lingering in Faith this Holy Week

Dear Friends, 

All year long, we read about/study/drink in Jesus’ public life. 

Lent prepares us for the bleakness, the darkness of the passion, 

and yes, beyond that, a new day, glowing in the heart of Christ. 

 

We believe that the promise of life is stronger than death, 

but we linger in faith in the events of Holy Week. 

 

The day comes in Jesus’ public ministry that he sets his face toward Jerusalem, his destiny. 

He encounters believers and skeptics along the way. 

His disciples jockey for power. 

 

He finally enters Jerusalem, 

applauded and honored. 

 

The next day, Jesus spares the barren fig tree,  

but he himself will not be spared. 

 

Later in the week, on the night before he dies, 

Jesus eats the Passover meal with his disciples. 

He knows how God fed the Israelites as they fled from bondage to freedom.  

Jesus’ disciples, too, will pass with Him from bondage to freedom. 

 

In His passion, in the agony in the garden, Jesus yields control of His life.  

Disciples and friends will not/cannot watch with him. 

He is accused, mistreated, rejected, jeered at. 

 

Jesus is utterly vulnerable and on the way of the cross, reveals his physical weakness,  

a tenderness for others. 

 
Falling, falling, falling, He lean on another. 

 

He is lifted high,  

with no disciples at his side 

and he dies. 

 

Though it is day, night descends. Darkness covers the earth. 

He dies. 

 

“We shall never lose Christ. 

If we do not follow Him, He will follow us… 

Not too closely lest he take away our freedom… 

But near enough to wash our feet when we are ready… 

Close enough to give us bread and wine in our weariness.” (John Bell) 

 

May the God who holds Jesus close on the cross and in the grave  

hold us close as we strive to fathom and welcome the depth of Jesus’ gift to us all: 

Death, but not forever. 

Darkness, but not forever. 

Light and life with Christ, our Brother and Lord, forever. 

 

May the God of mercy,  

who is well acquainted with grief, bless us with faith that our God lives. 

And with God, we shall live. 

 

~Sister Joan Sobala