Easter message from Bishop John C. Wester

Intermountain Catholic

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It is a special joy and privilege for me to wish you all a blessed and peace-filled Easter. We have prayed together throughout Lent and especially during these most recent days of Holy Week when we journeyed with Christ through the liturgies of his passion, death and resurrection. I now look forward to celebrating Christ’s victory over death and sin with all of you throughout the next 50 days of the Easter Season, during which "Alleluia" will be our song of gratitude to our loving God, who raised Jesus from the dead.

There is an important theme in Luke’s Gospel, read during the Easter Vigil this year, which deserves special attention. In his Gospel, Luke changes the angel’s greeting from other synoptic renderings to underscore the angel’s message that the passion, death and resurrection were all predicted by Jesus of Nazareth as events he would undergo. For Luke, it is important to remember that the Christ who rose from the dead is none other than the Jesus who walked the streets of Galilee. In other words, the risen Christ is not other than the earthly Jesus but rather a transformed earthly Jesus. We are not speaking of resuscitation as in the case of Lazarus, but of a completely new way of life. Jesus is raised into a new way of being, a glorious new life, but it is Jesus himself, born of Mary, who is experiencing this transformation.

Luke makes an important point. For if we divorce the risen Christ from the earthly Christ, then the former is way beyond us and the latter is only a dim memory. Jesus of Nazareth, crucified in weakness, was gloriously raised in body and soul to live forever at the right hand of the Father. He led the way for all of us, redeeming us by the shedding of his blood and opening the way for us to be transformed, one day, as we enter the fullness of the Kingdom in Heaven.

The important thing to see here is that you and I are redeemed because God receives our humanity in the Christ he took to himself. One day, we, like Jesus, will all be raised from the dead and live in unapproachable light. God loves us so much that he sent his Son to make all this possible, loving us while we were still sinners and although we remain sinners in this part of the journey. The implication of this is staggering. You and I, with all our faults and sins, are loved by God and given the opportunity of eternal life. This is the stuff of saints. Saints, then, are not angels, or robots, or some "super humans." They are sinners just like us. Jesus redeemed us as we are, not as perfect beings.

Yet, I sometimes think that we never see the possibility of ourselves becoming saints. It is always the person sitting next to me, or Mother Teresa, or a monk or sister living in a monastery. Easter is a huge shot in the arm for all of us because Christ died and rose for all of us! Therefore, each of us is a special, loved and important human being called to holiness and yes, sainthood. One rabbi put it this way: "When you die, God is not going to ask you why you weren’t Moses. He is going to ask you why you weren’t yourself, the saint God created you to be!"

Easter is a time to reflect on what the Resurrection means in our lives. For starters, it means we have real worth because, created in God’s image and likeness, Christ died out of love for each and every one of us. What we accomplish, how much money we have, what we own, how much power or influence we have, how successful we are – these things mean nothing to Christ. He loves us into sanctity every moment of our lives and asks only that we love him in return. Of course, we have to put that love into action, into love of our neighbor, and that is the stuff of sainthood! But Luke’s point is well taken: Jesus of Nazareth, who was raised from the dead into glory, is calling each of us to do the same! God does not create saints "ready made for heaven." Rather, he invites us into an ever deeper relationship with him through his Son and in the Spirit, a relationship that can be seen as a process leading to fullness of life in Heaven. This is good news at both ends of the process. We have hope because each of us matters, despite our weakness and sinfulness, and we have joy because we are destined for eternal life. As St. Ignatius put it in his "first principle" of the Spiritual Exercises: "The goal of our life is to be with God forever." How wonderful to have a God who first gives us the goal and then gives us the means to achieve it through Christ Jesus our Lord!

It is in this spirit, then, that I wish you all a Happy Easter. You are all special, unrepeatable and deeply loved persons who are making your way to unity with the Resurrected Christ in Heaven. It is a true honor to be a part of this local Church on the way with you, my fellow saints in the making!