For forty days after His Resurrection, from Easter morning till Ascension Day, Christ was with His Disciples. We celebrate the forty days, calling them Eastertide. Through the season we sing Easter hymns, exchange the ancient Easter greeting, “Christ is risen! Alleluia!” and are anciently free from days of fasting and abstinence.
Lent was the time for fasting and penitence; now is the time for joy. In the Gospel appointed for the Third Sunday after Easter, the Lord Jesus says so plainly. Speaking to His disciples at the Last Supper, He tells them “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.”
Happiness and joy aren’t the same thing. We’re happy when we find a steak restaurant where “medium rare” really is medium rare, when we receive a letter from an old friend, telling us we’re loved and missed, when we watch as a mama duck teaches her ducklings how to fly. I’m happy when I find my reading glasses. Life is rich with occasions of happiness and flashes of delight.
Christian Joy is something different. Happiness and delight are discoveries—they come and go—but joy is a deep, underground spring, always there, constantly flowing if rarely perceived. Joy and peace are intimates, profoundly related. If happiness lightens our spirit, our anima, joy graces the soul.
Joy is not a sudden discovery but an abiding gift. St Paul counts it as a high gift of the Holy Ghost. “Your joy,” the Lord Christ says to His disciples, “no man takes away from you.”
He was telling them this, on the night in which He was betrayed, because their joy was about to be snatched from them. Within a few hours, He’d be arrested. They would abandon Him and run away in terror. He’d be beaten and mocked, tortured and killed. His broken body would be buried. His shivering disciples would go into hiding. His words about joy were driven from their minds by iron nails and shrapnel-tipped Roman whips.
Then-Easter.
Forty days of Easter, forty days of being with the One Who was dead and now is alive. During those forty days He taught them and their minds began to understand what He’d been saying to them all along. He healed their guilt, freeing them from their sorrow. He taught them the Faith they thought they already knew, breaking the Bread with them and opening the Scriptures to them. Those forty days of Easter became the foundation of the rest of their lives.
They can be the foundation of the rest of ours, too. No less than them, we’re His disciples. We sometimes are as clueless as they were to the meaning of His words. Like them, we sometimes run away and hide for fear.
The most abiding gift of those forty days of Easter was joy. The disciples came to see, some maybe gradually, some maybe all at once, but all with a certainty, that their Lord, Jesus, the Victor over death, had not only overcome death and hell Himself, but He’d destroyed its power over them, too—over all who would ever be His disciples. You and I and “as many as have been baptized into Christ” are free. Not only free from death, but called to joy.
The Joy of Christians is Jesus Christ Himself. Not a sentimental, saccharine joy that gushes about how meek and mild He must be, and so we’ve got to be milquetoasts, too. Joy is no effeminate or adolescent virtue. It’s the virtue of those who’ve been squeezed through the wringer, put out to dry, and who’ve found grace in the breath of the breeze in which they were hung. Joy comes from knowing with a certainty that we belong to God, He’s doing with us what He wants and nothing else matters. That is “the peace of God which passeth understanding,” the pax God holds for all, and the joy which is the Spirit’s high gift.
That’s a feast of forty days, joy a lifetime can’t adequately celebrate.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
No comments:
Post a Comment