Resurrection to Joy
I welcome the resurrection of Christ
…to bring me out of every darkness and into Joy.
Resurrection has two meanings in the Oxford dictionary. The first literally means “when dead people come back to life.” This is what Christians around the world have celebrated for thousands of years on Easter: “Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again.” It is the heart of the whole Christian religion.
For believers in God, the second definition of the word “resurrection” in the Oxford dictionary is equally notable: “a new beginning for something that is old, or that had disappeared or become weak.” This is what God in Christ calls us to do everyday of our lives, in both big and small ways. It is why remembering Christ’s resurrection at Easter, and at every Mass, is so vital to our having a happy, peaceful, and fulfilling life.
Sadly, we often don’t want to be resurrected from the old, weak things that are pulling our lives and spirits down. We see this very clearly in the exodus story of the Jewish people in Exodus chapter 14. The Hebrew people complain to Moses, “What have you done to us!...We told you in Egypt, ‘let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’. It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” The Jewish people in this passage clearly preferred their slavery to a life of freedom in the Promise Land. We are no different today! How many of us would prefer to stay stuck in an addiction, or a terrible job, or a bad relationship, than to take the risk, move through the wilderness of our fears, and cross over into a new life? Yet, God, through Moses, refused to let the Hebrew people stay stuck in their slavery. Moses says, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today.”
God still refuses to let us stay stuck in whatever is holding us down today. Through the resurrection of Christ, God has already delivered us from any dark place. But, like the Hebrew people, we have to go through the scary wilderness of the unknown to get to resurrection glory. In 1 Corinthians 5, St. Paul tells us, “Do you not know that a little yeast leavens all the dough? Clear out the old yeast, so that you may become a fresh batch of dough.”
It sounds so simple! However, as we saw in the exodus story of the Hebrew people, moving through the wilderness of change often seems insurmountable. That is why St. Paul tells us in Colossians 3, “Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” We won’t be able to move to a better place in our lives relying on the level of thinking and behaviors that put us in the dark place to begin with. Rather, we have to “think of what is above” in order to move to a new life of peace and happiness. When we focus our attention above, we will “see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish.” We don’t do the work of resurrecting ourselves out of whatever is ailing us; Christ does it for us. In fact, Easter shows us that the resurrection has already happened. We just need to believe, and receive the new life that Christ has already prepared for us. And so we pray:
“Dear God, I am willing to trust you and go through the wilderness of change. I am willing to receive a more peaceful, happy life by looking for daily miracles of resurrection in everything that I think and do. I welcome the resurrection of Christ into my life to bring me out of every darkness and into Joy. Amen.”