"the vindication of Easter Sunday"

" We live in difficult times. We've only to watch the news on any given evening. If there's an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God who is Lord of this universe, his presence isn't very evident on the evening news... It's fair and reflective to wonder: Where is the Resurrection in all of this? Why is God seemingly so inactive? Where is the vindication of Easter Sunday?

These are important questions, even if they aren't particularly deep or new. They were the question used to taunt Jesus on the cross: If you're the Son of God, come down off that cross! If you're God, prove it! Act now! For centuries they prayed for a messiah, a superman, to come and display a power and a glory that would simply overpower evil, but what they got was a helpless baby lying in the straw. And when that baby grew up they wanted him to overthrow the Roman empire, but instead he let himself be crucified.

What the Resurrection teaches is that God doesn't forcibly intervene to stop pain and death. Instead he redeems the pain and vindicates the death. The Resurrection of Jesus reveals that there's a deep moral structure to the universe, that the contours of the universe are love and goodness and truth. This structure, anchored at its center by ultimate love and power, is non-negotiable. You live life its way or it simply won't come out right.

More importantly, the reverse is also true: If you respect the structure and live life its way, what's good and true and loving will eventually triumph, despite everything, like a giant moral immune system that brings the body back to health. God lets the universe right itself the way a body does when it is attacked by a virus. We don't have to escape pain and death to achieve victory, we've only to remain faithful, good, and true inside of them. God's day will come."

                                 -  from the meditation for Holy Saturday, from Daybreaks, by Fr. Ron Rolheiser