Throughout the Paschal Season of Lent and Easter, we are reminded that our lives are joined to the Paschal Mystery of Jesus. Our baptism intimately links his passion, death, and resurrection to our lives. The entirety of our lives are a series of Paschal Mysteries. Our struggles, our sufferings, our hardships take on a whole new meaning as they are linked to Jesus’ Paschal Mystery. The story of Jesus in Holy Week reminds us that the only way to the Resurrection is through suffering and death.
On Easter Sunday, when the resurrected Jesus emerged from the tomb, he emerged transformed into something new. His glorified body was no longer subject to hunger, pain and climate. He is able to transcend the chronology of human time (e.g. hours, days, months, years) into the metaphysical time of eternity. Just as the resurrected Jesus emerged from the tomb utterly changed, so, too, Easter teaches us that having passed through our own series of passions and deaths, and resurrections, we, too will be utterly transformed.
The hardships of our lives transform us as we learn something new from them, and find ourselves changed and even more resilient because of them. Even as we find ourselves increasingly impaired in doing tasks that once had been so easy to do, we, nonetheless, continue to grow in remarkable ways. In his second letter to the Corinthians, St Paul writes “So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.” (2 Cor 4:16-18, NRSV) St Paul reminds us that as our physical activity becomes extremely limited, we continue to be transformed. It is at the moment of our death in which we will find our greatest transformation taking place.
Two questions to ask ourselves during this Octave of Easter are, “In what way(s) has the Paschal Mystery(ies) of my own life transformed me this Easter?” “How has my life been utterly changed?”
