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Rejoice!
The Lord has risen and we have Jesus back!
Published April 10, 2009
Dear Friends,
The Lord has risen! He has appeared to Simon Peter! (cf. Luke 24: 34)
To open my column for this Easter edition of The Michigan Catholic, I have borrowed the words the disciples used to greet one another on the days of Jesus' resurrection: "The Lord is risen! He has appeared to Simon Peter."
For us followers of Jesus – we who love Him so completely and with such ardor – this is indeed good news, the best of news, because the Father did not leave Him to fall into nothingness. Jesus was proved right. He was vindicated. The spirit that the Lord commended with boundless trust into the Father's hands when He breathed His last on the cross was not allowed to evaporate into the air. God the Father in faithful love for His only begotten Son has in infinite measure given Him back all that the Son entrusted to the His safe keeping. Jesus has His life back. Alleluia!
And we have Jesus back. Not only is He alive, never to die again, but He is with us again, He is ours again. The Lord, who is the very purpose for our living, the one who is more precious to us than our own life's blood, He, the only cause of our real happiness, will never go away, can never be lost to us. He is more powerful than death, which, until Easter, seemed to be the implacable force before which even love itself had to give way and submit to separation once and for all.
One of the implications of the fact that Jesus was not left to rot in the grave but is alive again in the flesh and living with us is that there is no moment of our life in which He is not present. In His victory over the death He endured on Calvary He is victorious over every experience of dying in every human life.
In the resurrection of Jesus, God the Father shows us the great power, the almighty power, of His love. In the crucifixion the Devil did his worst. He, the very father of death, conspired to kill the living God. What could be more heinous than the murder of Life Himself? But in the death of Life, life for us has been made invincible, indestructible.
The Holy Spirit has incorporated us into the risen Christ through baptism. For us members of Christ, His victory means that every experience of death's blighting touch in our personal lives is, if we open that hour of trial to the presence of Christ, a place for life to flourish and death to be vanquished. Yes, the moment of hearing that the cancer is terminal, that the wreck was fatal, that our loved one has expired, that the baby will be stillborn, that it's "just a matter of time" – all of this bad news, tragic as it is, will not end in death. Christ is risen! He has conquered death – all death, every part of death that touches you and me. Christ is victorious over the grave – every part of any grave that would try to claim to be the pit for the burial of our hopes for happiness.
So, be at peace.
As a second part of my remarks, I want to offer a reflection on the last half of the Gospel phrase I quoted at the beginning of the column: "He (Christ) has appeared to Simon Peter." This phrase reminds us that belief in the Lord's resurrection and sharing in His victory over death are not the property of any one isolated individual. The Lord's followers acknowledged that, while the grace of Easter was given to them all, it belonged in a particular way to Simon Peter, the chief of the apostles. Peter did not have this grace as something he merited. Far from it, for Peter even tried to dissuade Jesus from going up to Jerusalem and had finally denied Him in the hour of His passion. Peter held in trust the grace of Christ's Passover out of death into life. He was the steward of this good news. And the mission of Peter, together with the other apostles, was to share this good news with the world.
In my role of filling the place of an apostle for the Church in the archdiocese, my greatest joy and most important service is to witness, like Peter and in communion with Peter, that Jesus Christ is truly risen. In these first weeks of my ministry as the archbishop of Detroit, I have tried to keep this always in mind. Amid all the briefings and reports, with all of the tasks to be completed and issues to be considered, my resolve is to keep my focus on the fact that Christ is risen and that my first call is to share this Good News. In fact, I have even fashioned for myself a "personal mission statement" to that effect: "To share Christ in and through the Church."
The most important way I complete this mission is the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist. Here, most fully, I lead the Church in the archdiocese in proclaiming that Jesus, "by dying destroyed our death, and by rising restored our life."
I pray that your celebration of the Lord's Passover from death to life at Mass on Easter will fill you with great joy in the Holy Spirit and bring you all the graces you need in order to live according to the Good News of the Resurrection. I especially offer these good wishes to the many of you who are burdened with trials at this time. Be assured that you will be in my prayers throughout the 50 days of the Easter season. And I offer my heartfelt congratulations to the newly baptized and to those received into full communion at the paschal vigil – and I include in these congratulations your sponsors, your families and your catechists. I thank all of you for your warm welcome of me and my priestly service as your archbishop. And finally, I invite you to join me thanking God that He has called and consecrated me to be the instrument of the saving mystery of the risen Christ, our only Savior.
To conclude, let me quote from St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), the Carmelite martyr of Auschwitz. She eloquently expresses this truth about how we disciples of Jesus live in the glory of His resurrection even amid the sorrows of this life – and, of course, her words are all the more powerful in the light of her heroic death in the gas chamber: "To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one's feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth, and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father's right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly to sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels: this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth."
God bless you always and everywhere,
†Archbishop Allen Vigneron
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