When Easter Became Real for Me

For most of my life, Easter was something I believed because I knew I was supposed to.

I knew the story. Jesus suffered and died on the cross in order to save us. Three days later he rose from the dead. Every Sunday at Mass I prayed the Agnus Dei and called Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. But even as a child I remember looking at the world and wondering what could possibly be so wrong that Jesus would have to be crucified to make things right with God?

That question stayed with me for years. Like many people, I received the faith through trust. My parents taught me. My teachers taught me. The Church taught me. These were the seedlings of a life-long faith. But faith rarely remains exactly as it was when we first received it. Like anything living, it changes.

As I grew older and began taking my faith more seriously, the question that had quietly followed me since childhood would return now and again. In some ways I treated it the way a child in a troubled home senses that something is wrong but, for the sake of peace, chooses not to look too closely. So the question sat quietly in the back corner of my faith for years.

Eventually something changed. New questions arose but I began to recognize them as my faith maturing and taking root in my life. My faith was strong enough to hold them. And each question became an invitation to understand God more deeply.

It was then that I began to encounter voices within the Christian tradition that helped me see redemption in a new light. One of those voices was the Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus. Scotus suggested that the Incarnation was not an afterthought. From the beginning, God had been moving toward humanity in love, and Christ was always part of that plan.

Scotus did not deny redemption, but he believed something even deeper was revealed in the Incarnation. Even without sin, God would still have become human in order to draw near and share divine life with creation.

That insight began to reshape the way I saw God. Instead of imagining a God who needed to be appeased before forgiving the world, I saw that God had been reaching toward us from the very beginning of time. I recognized how Jesus’ life and ministry were always pointing us to the Father. Always teaching us who God was.  As Jesus said himself, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (Jn 14:9)

Now when I look at the life of Jesus, I see the heart of God revealed. Again and again in the Gospels people encounter mercy. Jesus moves toward suffering rather than away from it. He heals the sick, forgives freely, restores dignity to those pushed aside, and welcomes those who others reject.

In Jesus we see a love that refuses to turn away from a wounded world. That love eventually leads him to the cross. Not because suffering appeased God, but because Jesus remained faithful to love in a world that often rejects it. He proclaimed the reign of God, challenged injustice, and loved without limits. The powers of his time were threatened by his message and eliminated him.

But the story did not end there.

The God whom Jesus revealed brought life to where the world had delivered death. The resurrection became less of a doctrine than a mystery that continues to unfold.

I believe in the resurrection because they saw him. On the road to Emmaus. On the shore at breakfast. In wounds Thomas could touch. In blinding light on the Damascus Road. And especially in the courage that his frightened followers found to carry the Gospel into the known world.

But I believe for another reason as well. There have been moments in my own life when the distance between the visible world and the spiritual world have felt very thin. Moments when grace was unmistakably present. Moments when hope quietly returned when I had almost given up looking for it.

Those moments do not prove Easter. But they make Easter believable. In the end, Easter is not something we explain as much as something we encounter.

Easter awakens the same quiet realization in many of us. Love is stronger than hatred. Mercy is stronger than judgment. Life is stronger than death.

I once thought of Easter as a memorial to something that happened long ago. Now I see it differently. Easter is a promise still unfolding. The God who has always been moving toward humanity in love continues to move toward us today.

So, joyfully I say to you:

Christ is risen.

Alleluia.