Well, after a busy Sacred Triduum and a day just hibernating after spending Easter Sunday evening and Easter Monday in peaceful quiet and relaxing calm with the Carthusians monks in the currently showing movie, Into Great Silence which I heartily encourage your seeing although it is swift three hours long , let us get back on track. God bless those men who live an austere life but one that surely brings them closer to the love and understanding of the Risen Lord Jesus.In today's readings beginning with Luke's accounting of St. Peter's speaking to the Jewish people, affirming that the man that was crucified was indeed made the Christ by God the Father. Stunned by these words, the people naturally inquired: "What are we to do?" Surely this might be the question we could be asking even after we have celebrated Easter Sunday. What are we to do now? Peter is very clear, to the point and without any equivocation: "Repent ... and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."
Someone spoke with me yesterday, Monday, about his feelings earlier in the morning. He related how his feelings after reading some of the psalms was such that he actually felt himself in a quandry. He was faced with encountering what we often call metanoia. His participation in the Sacred Triduum liturgies had been the ordinary but it was Easter Sunday's readings and Monday mornings post mortem evaluation of his "new life" guaranteed by the risen Christ, had squarely placed him before God with the need to change his life. Yet, it was so painful because he did not know what he would do now once he changed. No metanoia is easy. Ask anyone who has had to address drug or alcohol addiction. To reach the top of any ladder requires a climb.
However, the Risen Christ has promised us that he is no longer our teacher but our brother. ("... but go to my brothers). When Mary Magdalene met him in the cemetery, the Risen Christ told her not to stop hugging him for a reason. He was not longer the teacher, the one who had given them the guidelines for good living. Now he was different. She, and all of us, have to let go of what she knew of him before Good Friday and Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday so that she and we can have the fulness of what he had become ... the Risen Christ who stands with us in whatever challenges we are confronting. This is the joy of Easter we are celebrating. Easter Sunday does not automatically and instantly remove that we may have found as a way of living or behaving or thinking that puts distance between ourselves and the Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.
