2nd Sunday Easter - Year C

Easter, the central feast of the year, is unique in many respects.  It is the only feast that lasts for 50 days in the church calendar.  St. Athansius called the seven weeks from Easter to Pentecost “the great Sunday”.  The first inclination of the church’s instinct to extend this feast comes in the way we celebrate the Octave of Easter, the first 8 days of the 50.  The celebration of Mass on each of those days takes place almost as if we were still on Easter Sunday itself.

What did the Easter experience mean for those earliest Christians and what it continues to mean for us, here and now?  Jesus lives; fear not! The early Christians experienced and appropriated the freedom from fear achieved by Jesus-risen.  This fact is admirably illustrated in the radical transformation that overcame them.  The frightened became fearless preachers of good news and ministers of God’s forgiveness for sinners.  What made the difference in their lives?  Jesus, who died and rose to life and who in that saving act, conquered the power of fear. Unfortunately, however, fear continues to be the great human leveller.  Everybody is fearful of something: fear of failure, fear of hurting or being hurt, fear of loss, fear of not knowing love, fear of pain, fear that what I believe in and hope in may not be so.  But the message and the truth of Easter is “Fear not!”.  These are empowering words. Freedom from fear is the achievement of the resurrection and the experience into which each of us has been welcomed by the victorious Christ.

Jesus is risen, explained the late, great Karl Rahner and the world with him.  Because of this everything is different and we are too.  Death is no longer a final stopping place but a passage to life that does not end.  Because Jesus lives, death should no longer strike fear into our hearts.  “There is nothing to fear”, says the risen Jesus in today’s 2nd reading from Revelation (1:9-13, 17-19).  Aware that fear and peace cannot commingle in the human heart, “Peace”, says the Risen Jesus in today’s Gospel.

And yet, despite all these assurances and despite the fact that the imperative “Fear not!” and other similar admonitions against fear are repeated literally hundreds of times in the scriptures, we continue to allow fear to have the upper hand.  Why?  Could it be that we have yet to welcome Jesus-risen, the embodiment of forgiveness, into our lives?