What a wonderful Easter we had. Our kids, our oldest grandchild and our great-grandchild were here with their spouses. Rosie cooked a spectacular leg of lamb, everyone brought something for the dinner, and we enjoyed each other and celebrated the day together.
We got to church in the morning and celebrated the day of the Resurrection. I’ve always been astonished at the large turnout on Easter. I think mostly it is people coming back for a second look. Maybe I’ll hear something this time that catches my spirit. Easter is such a mysterious holiday. We all yearn for resurrection, but we don’t really know very much about it. An article in Time this week talks about heaven and how we all look at it, but the article is simply a encapsulation of the views that we have all had of the afterlife since the beginning of time. None of us really know anything at all about it.
The spectacular news about Jesus’ resurrection is the intensity of the surprise of the women at the tomb, and later the apostles themselves. They were all genuinely changed by this event, and that is probably the best proof that we have that Jesus rose from the dead and came back to them. When he appeared to the disciples in the room that they had locked in fear, they were astonished. He gave them his Peace and the Holy Spirit, and then his commission: to go and forgive sins. That is it in all simplicity. This is the risen Christ with his continuing mission for the world: the forgiveness of sin.
I have found that guilt and forgiveness are the biggest part of ministry. I have spent hours counseling people who simply couldn’t give up their guilt for whatever it was that they had done. I have seen others who were so consumed by their guilt that it changed them into difficult, cranky people who had a hard time getting along with anyone. No wonder Jesus sent his disciples into the world to forgive sins.
When I did my ministry at Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, I had a group of men, all of whom had killed someone. Over the years that we were together, I heard their stories. Often the killings were perfectly understandable. One of my inmates killed a man who was in the process of killing his best friend. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” he said. Forgiveness wasn’t what he was after. He wanted understanding and he wanted out of jail. He got the understanding of the group and eventually he got his freedom, also. But most of them wanted forgiveness for what they had done. They understood that their prison sentence was just, even if the experience in prison was worse than anything that they could have imagined. Over the years, I helped several of them to come to terms with how God saw them and what forgiveness meant.
One man in my group had come to prison at the age of seventy-five. He had been a brown-bag drunk in his little town, had fallen in love with a local bag woman, who then threw him over for another woman that she knew. His puritan spirit was outraged by this. He went back to his room, got the gun that he always kept under his bed and went and killed both of them. He then ran away to the west coast where sheriffs’ deputies found him and brought him back for his trial. He would listen to me when I talked about forgiveness, but I could always see him shaking his head. He would come to me after the group and say “that doesn’t apply to me padre, there are two people in the cemetery because of what I did. God will never forgive that”. I’ll never forget the moment when he finally “got” it. There was a light that came from his face and he relaxed beyond belief. He was in his late eighties when he died, but the last few of his years were elegant ones. They would bring him from his hospital room in a wheelchair across the yard for group. When he was in the yard, other inmates would crowd around him. They saw what he had been given and they wanted it also. I know that this is what Jesus had in mind when he sent his disciples out into the world with their simple mission. Simple? Hardly. It is the most important thing in the world.
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