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It’s Holy Week. For Christians, this is the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, with Maundy Thursday and Good Friday tucked in.
In the Scripture readings for the week following Easter (Lk 24:13–32), we encounter two of Jesus’ disciples on the road to Emmaus in the wake of the crucifixion. They are downcast and confused. “We had hoped,” they tell the stranger who joins them. They had hoped that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was the fulfillment of the Scriptures, that there was now a bright future calling them out of the darkness. Instead, they feel greater confusion, greater loss.
Perhaps today many of us find ourselves in a similarly disconsoling place, reeling from the school shooting last week in Nashville in which seven people died, three of them nine-year-old school kids. There were the destructive tornadoes last week in Arkansas, Tennessee, Illinois, and other places during which lives were lost, homes destroyed. The week before it was a powerful tornado in Mississippi in which there was loss of life and property.
In our country we also face a host of other challenges – economic insecurity, supply chain issues, immigration, climate change and more. If their immediate impact is not as obvious, their long-term effects are also a specter staring at us.
To the disciples of Jesus and Christians, Good Friday was a dark day. But come Sunday, Jesus was alive and it was Easter and there was a renewed hope.
Ours is not a cheap faith, it cost Jesus his life. And Easter not only brings joy and hope, but it calls us to love our neighbors, to reach out to the hurting in our community, and to seek unity. We as Christians must work to tear down the walls that seek to divide us and no longer think in terms of “them” and “those” but only “us.” After all, we are our brother’s keeper.
The truth is we all all in the same boat and called to work together so that there will not be walls, color, or even politics that separate us. We must learn to live together on this earth and not allow violence, destruction, and politics to separate us.
Faith in the risen Christ must lead Christians into deeper solidarity with those who suffer. Scripture makes it clear that Jesus identified himself with the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed, a theme present throughout the Old Testament as well. Jesus also calls Christians to pray for those who persecute them.
After the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognized the risen Christ, they realized that their very reality had changed in their communion with Jesus: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
May we place our hope again in the risen Christ this Easter and recognize him where he may be found. May we never proclaim an empty optimism that turns away from the suffering of others. Instead, we pray that our communities will become signs of peace, love and forgiveness, and instruments of God’s justice here on earth. May we be one as God is one.
Perhaps, this opinion sounds like a Bible lesson, but without Easter, we have no hope. And, without Good Friday, we have no Easter. Easter is more than colored eggs and a bunny rabbit. It is love and hope.