Looking back at the weekly messages of Father Paul Counce, first published in The Carpenter, our weekly Parish Bulletin
Published: March 28, 2021
This weekend’s celebration of Palm Sunday kicks off Holy Week, a special time which ends with the Paschal Triduum and the greatest feast of the Church, that of Easter. I don’t suppose that this is big news to you, of course: not too many people who read The Carpenter are likely to be ignorant of it! After all, we are believers who affirm with all our heart, soul, mind and strength our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and so rejoice in His victory over the grave. There is no joy like our joy as we affirm that death could not hold Him!
Yet I recall a point made on a retreat I took long ago, one that impressed me a great deal. Jesus indeed came back from the dead, but He did not just resume living as He was before. He came back to life, but not to the “same old” life. His body was not just resuscitated or re-animated. He wasn’t “restored” to the situation He’d experienced before. He didn’t return to a previous state or condition, nor did He “take up where He left off.”
No, the Resurrection marked for Jesus the beginning of a new and completely different – and superior – life. The Bible first stresses this newness by emphasizing the characteristics of His “glorified body.” His appearance quite apparently changed: even His closest friends, such as the first witness to His Resurrection, St. Mary Magdalene, could find Him unrecognizable at first (see Jn 20:14), notwithstanding the enduring marks of His Passion in His hands, feet and side (Jn 20:27). No more was He constrained by time and space, as He passed through locked doors and effortlessly appears to His disciples (Jn 20:19 & 26, for example), and ultimately was miraculously “taken up to heaven in their sight” (Acts 1:9).
Yet the real novelty is found in Jesus’ ongoing new life within the nascent Christian community. Not only was His physical life changed; so too was the entire life of His faithful followers. They found new depth to their spiritual lives, new boldness and effectiveness in their preaching, and even wondrous powers of healing. Keep reading the Acts of the Apostles and already in its first chapters you’ll notice this.
This is the best lesson for us, I think. Christ’s Paschal Mystery – His Passion, Death and Resurrection – ought make a difference in our life as well. If the day after Easter we are the same as we were heading into Holy Week, we did not accept the grace offered. We instead will have missed the effects of the improvement which God wills for His faithful. Our efforts are directed not just to learning about what Jesus did, or about what happened to Him. They need to be focused on being changed for the better ourselves.
So in this Holy Week, as much as possible please, abandon yourself to the transformative power of the Resurrection. Rise to a new kind of life, especially a new spiritual life too! Decide to be different, and to be better, as we let the Lord lead and guide us onward.
In the Lord of New Life,
Father Paul Counce
