This year, April begins as we are in Holy Week. We are in the midst of a journey that changes us and changes the world. Here we are living out the story of God’s turning the rules of power, privilege, and control upside down. We witness to the fact that Rome and the Jewish leaders wanted no part of the vision of the world that Jesus was introducing. Jesus taught and lived out the inclusion of the poor and dispossessed, release of the captives, sight to the blind. He taught that peacemakers would be blessed, mourners comforted, the merciful receiving mercy themselves, the meek inheriting the earth. He had room at his tables for tax collectors, prostitutes, and outcasts of every kind. His parables spoke of forgiveness, love, inclusiveness, justice, and transformation. These ideas threatened the system of privilege that both the religious leaders of the day and the Roman occupiers of Israel enjoyed. They had to find a way to get rid of this man in order to keep their systems of power and control in place.
The “powers that be” were thrilled to see Jesus taken down, nailed to a cross where he would cause no more trouble in their perfectly controlled world. But as we live out our Holy Week, we attest to the fact that this death of Jesus was not the end of the story. The blood spilled to keep the powers of privilege in place has cried out for justice and hope from that Good Friday to this very day. God brings the scapegoated Jesus back to life to tell a different story. The silenced one is given a voice, and we begin to understand the world in a very different way.
The new way of life is based on mercy, justice, responsibility, and love. The new commandment of Jesus, given to us on Maundy Thursday at that supper in the upper room is clear: “Love one another as I have loved you”. This establishes a new world in which Mother Teresa’s statement rings true: “The reason we have no peace is that we have forgotten that we belong to one another.” We are all more members of this one human family living together on this little planet earth. We are being called to love and forgive one another instead of finding all the reasons to mistrust, hate, and live out our prejudices and misgivings toward one another. We are to look more deeply into our disrespect of others, our demeaning of their humanity and our refusal to understand them as children of God, created in God’s image. Dignity and respect are to be the order of our days in this new world Easter proclaims.
May we seek to understand this perspective that Easter reveals to us. We are to lay down our old habits of dehumanizing and “othering” human beings that do not necessarily agree with us, or bow to our own systems of power. “Love one another.” This is the way we learn slowly but surely to establish a new world, the reign of God, one person at a time. We listen. We learn. We are willing to be changed to work together to establish peace and offer justice for all. This is to begin to know the true joy of Easter … that justice and mercy can live together in a harmony on earth as it is in heaven.