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God’s Time and Our Time


 

One of the ways the Church helps us come closer to God is through the seasons that we celebrate throughout the liturgical year. We have completed the forty days of Lent and now for the last eight days we have been celebrating Easter. The complete Easter Season lasts fifty days, including the Solemnity of the Ascension of our Lord, and continues until the Solemnity of Pentecost.

Our relationship with time can get all mixed up. We become victims of clocks and calendars and schedules. Many people have said that during this year of struggle with the Covid-19 pandemic, they feel stuck in monotony, in a feeling that time is unchanging, that there is no future, just a dull, repetitive, even threatening present. God in his eternity certainly does not look on us that way, and the Church helps us through liturgical celebrations to see ourselves through God’s eyes of eternal love.

If you look at a calendar, you will see eight different days printed there. But the Church says, “This is the day the Lord has made.” The great day of Easter, the Lord’s Resurrection, continues in a sacred NOW that is ours to relish, to enjoy, as if time has stopped for us and we can enter into the eternity of God. For these past eight days, the Preface of the Mass has said, “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, at all times to acclaim you, O Lord, but ON THIS DAY above all to laud you yet more gloriously, when Christ our Passover has been sacrificed.” We are given these eight days of Easter to let the grace and hope of the Lord’s Resurrection sink into us.

This time that God has given us means that we can slow down to rest in Jesus, in his glory, in his mercy. To rest in Christ is our special joy during these fifty days of the Easter season. Indeed, we have the words of Jesus himself in the Gospel of Matthew: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Our Gospel today is very appropriate for the occasion. It recounts two events, eight days apart. Jesus came to visit his disciples on the first day of his Resurrection. But Thomas was not there, and Thomas doubted. So Jesus came again and called Thomas to faith eight days later.

Jesus can use this Second Sunday of Easter, or really any time, to be with us, to call us to faith, to make His Resurrection a living, vivid experience for us. We, too, can say each day, each moment, with Thomas, “My Lord and my God.”
 

 

Gospel Homily for the Second Sunday of Easter (Jn 20:19-31) by Fr. David Wessels, SJ

 

 

 

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