By Paddie Denton
So I know
I am supposed to write for all of you, but I'm writing this one for someone in
particular first and I hope it happens to be useful to more than just him. I don't know where any of you are at right
now, I don't know how your Lent was, and I don't know if you feel alive in faith or
flatter than a shrove Tuesday pancake. The person I am writing this for is
deffo a pancake, and I can say this as the person is me, so excuse my occasional bluntness but sometimes, it's needed, sometimes I need to hear truth.
Yeah
He just died for YOUR sins, try and be grateful
Marks Gospel
originally barely went into the resurrection, just an angel stating He is risen,
it’s not that the resurrection is unimportant and the encounter with the risen
Christ is unimportant, but its how important the crucifixion is. “It is
fullfilled”. All sin of humanity across time is washed away through the
precious blood. Christ sacrificed himself as the lamb to make a covenant with
us, one that was entirely for us to know mercy forgiveness and being one with
God. And to do this he died in the most inhuman way possible, most barbaric, we
need to be grateful. This knowledge should fuel our praise and worship of God,
even when the thought off it causes agony.
HE is
RESURRECTED, tell ya face that
Maybe this one doesn't apply to
people with resting face, but other than that why aren't we smiling? Yeah, life is difficult, my last 12 months would keep a therapist entertained
for 12 more. But Jesus didn't
die to make our lives easy, an eternal field of spring flowers and Easter rabbits skipping and singing (which, just to be clear is in no way my idea of
happiness but could be yours). His resurrection is more reason to praise,
and be joyful because despite what it is you may be going through we now have
hope, Christ conquered death so there is no darkness to fear.
'“It's like in the great
stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger
they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the
world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end,
it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.”'
Samwise Gamgee (The Lord of the Rings)
Be
more like Thomas and not like the rest of those scaredy apostles
Okay so Thomas wasn’t there when
Jesus appeared to all his fellow apostles who were too scared to leave the room,
but that must mean... he wasn't too scared leave the room! He at least wasn't scared to go out into the
world and risk still being known as a follower of Jesus, even when he had become the man who was just crucified for treason. In the same way, we should not be scared to be associated with
Jesus, who has died for us.
Be
more like those Apostles and less like that doubty Thomas
Okay so Thomas, our hero then may of
messed it up, just a little. I mean its fair enough the idea of resurrection is
unbelievable, but Thomas had seen what Jesus had done (*cough* Lazarus) and Jesus had told him he was coming back, why was he surprised? Now doubts aren't bad, but we should allow our doubts to be overcome by faith. In fact without
doubt we can't have faith, and Thomas demonstrated this perfectly.
Eat
all the Chocolate - let's celebrate
Rumour has it Easter is a
celebration (we even get to eat meat tomorrow guys). So enjoy it, we have 50 days of the season - that's 10 more than Lent! Now tell me what
the Church priorities more: guilt and living potentially or partying, cause
there just ain't no party like a Catholic party.
'The Resurrection
is more than a party – it’s the source of eternal life'
Pope Francis
Well, maybe not all the chocolate... did Lent teach you anything?
Just to be clear I meant the
previous point, but, if we don't learn from Lent then what was the point of it? So if you gave up chocolate what did you learn if you go
and pig out on chocolate? This may seem like nothing but what if you giving up
some habitual sin, anger, porn, gossip, swearing, gluttony etc. stay free of it. Now that it's Easter, do we start back again? Do we get to take a holiday on the commitments to
prayer we made? And do we give less now? I think we should give more. I mean we are celebrating being saved now, let's do something to show it.
Time
to delight in Mercy
There is
so much mercy over the Easter season (its Divine Mercy Sunday this week) and
confession reminds me so much of Easter. As in Lent we enter the sacrament
remorseful caring the weight of our life before we encounter Christ's full love and his death on the cross. Then we are absolved and can skip out of the confessional, just as we now get to dance for joy coming out
of Lent into Easter. Let's remember to take joy every time we receive this mercy.
Exult
in our happy faults
The Exsultlet is a beautiful prayer
sung at the start of the vigil mass, in it there is the line
'O
happy fault that earned so great so glorious a redeemer'
the happy
fault being the original fall that meant Christ had to come to save us. It
teaches us what it means to be an Easter people and it's what I have been trying to
remind myself: rejoice, you may have messed up, you may feel like giving up, you
may not feel like God is in your life, but rejoice for in this brokenness, Christ can step in and bring hope, healing, mercy and redemption. You may be broken
and rejected but so was Christ on the cross, and that was glorious.
'The
stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;'
Psalm 118:23
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