It was Easter Sunday morning and Mary Magdalene was in full panic mode. She had come to the place where Jesus was buried and found the tomb empty: “They have taken my Lord from the tomb and we don’t know where they put him.!” Of course, she assumed the worst. Who could blame her? She was part of an oppressed people, under the thumb of Rome, ruled by puppet kings, subject to arbitrary arrest or imprisonment by Roman soldiers. The Jewish people were heavily taxed and received little that was hopeful or helpful from their religious leaders. She had seen Jesus arrested on false charges, scourged, mocked, paraded through the streets carrying a crossbeam, nailed to a cross, and left to die in public.

Jesus had set her free from seven demons (whatever they were), and like so many other men and women who followed Jesus, she was grateful. He had brought hope to so many people,  opened up new ways to relate to God, spoke about sacred things in a language that people could understand, showed real compassion for the sick, offered a vision of a new world, fed those who were hungry for bread, and fed their deeper hunger with the bread of eternal life. It had all come to nothing. Now there was more bad news. Now his body is missing and she could not even honor his memory by properly anointing it.

Of course, as Mary Magdalene and the rest of Christ’s followers would later discover, the story of Jesus did not end with a missing corpse. “They” had not taken his body, whoever “they” were. For these early followers of Jesus, Easter was about much more than one man (who was God) escaping death. This one man came into the world with nothing and left the world with nothing. He was born in someone else’s stable and buried in someone else’s grave. The Romans had treated him like the scum of the earth, nailing him to a cross. But the power of Rome was not everything. There was something stronger and more powerful than the greatest empire the world had known. That is the power of God and the love of God. The Good News of the resurrection caught on like wildfire. A Sprit-filled St Peter, who was once afraid to admit to a slave girl that he even knew Jesus, was out on the streets of Jerusalem giving witness. In an age when travel was rare, Christians went careening around the Mediterranean world, spreading the story of the Resurrection. The good news of Easter burned within St. Paul, who preached Christ crucified and risen regardless of danger and personal cost.

Why did the good news catch on the way it did? Why was it so powerful? Why did it spread so rapidly? A central reason was that people had lived with so much bad news for so long, that they were incredibly hungry for good news. They longed for something on which to base their hope and they longed for a God that had not forgotten them, a God who had now been made visible to them, a  God who loved them enough to die for them. They had looked into an empty black tomb and found new life.

People of every age are hungry for good news, and our age is certainly no exception. We live in a world of economic uncertainty, when social services are hanging by a thread, when crime and violence are ripping through our neighborhood (a reality which is itself but a symptom of a deeper emptiness), when isolation has become a national epidemic, when division and divisiveness have taken over politics; when wars grind on and on; when Mother Nature is rebelling against her poor treatment; when our own families and relationships struggle against a mixed tide of cultural forces; when oppression and injustice still hold people captive; when desperate people flee the violence and poverty of their native lands, when the Word of God has grown faint. We live in a world in need of good news. Yet, who will bring that good news if not us?  Whatever our personal Bad News is, we learn at Easter that God’s Good News is more powerful. Can we allow that good news to infect us and transform us? Can we not do something to bring the light of Christ into the darkness of the empty tombs of our world. Can we not become a person of peace, of gratitude, of hope, of love? Can we not stand for the dignity of every human person—everyone for whom Jesus died and rose? God is counting on us weak and sinful human beings to bring the good news to the world—just as God counted on weak and sinful human beings 2000 years ago. How has Easter changed us and how will we witness that to the world?

On behalf of the Servite Community at Assumption and our parish staff, I wish all of you a blessed Easter.

                                               Fr. Joe