Author: Kerry

Our Lord’s Easter appearances focus our attention on His risen presence as the fulfillment of God’s work of Salvation, that the risen Christ is the source and location of all our peace and beatitude: “Jesus came and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.”

“Jesus came and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.” Peace, after all, is the name of His kingdom: He is the Prince of Peace.

The story of our faith is the story of salvation; that we, who were lost in the darkness of a false and idolatrous world, and condemned by our own disobedience, might have light to bring us out into a new day, and new life to overcome our approaching doom.

In her masterful 19th century metrical rendering of the ancient Irish hymn ‘St. Patrick’s breastplate’, Cecil Alexander recounts our Lord’s Resurrection with this remarkable line: “His bursting from the spicèd tomb.” The verse captures, with a profound clarity and depth, the sense and significance of this day…

All things here, in this silent hour, are reduced to their simplest, and their most profound, for all things are here described only by hope and faith and charity…

Come and see, see how gracious is His love for us, and see too, how willful and wretched is our disobedience, our selfish disinterest in love; and be changed by the vision. Be loved.

“This is my body, given, this is my blood shed, for you.” In this way He fulfills the Father’s goodness, and reveals the meaning of His Passion: it is not merely a murderous scheme, perpetrated upon the innocent, patiently suffered; it is His free gift of himself, precisely in spite of the violence, because of His love for us.