A Personal Experience of Easter Sunday

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. We made it.

We've reached the very end of Holy Week.

And what a beautiful journey, a beautiful journey of faith, beautiful pilgrimage,

entering into the most profound mystery of God,

who became a man and gave his life for us on the cross so that he might rise

again and give us new life,

life in grace and life eternal.

And I hope that this was a profound,

beautiful, and edifying experience for each of you to enter into this Holy Week

together with Christ and to triumph with him today.

And I believe that everyone who came to the beautiful liturgies of this whole

week that had taken place here, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil,

experienced a unity with Christ in his suffering, in his passion,

and the resurrection today.

I have never witnessed so many people coming to the church for the Paschal Triduum. It was amazing.

And Resurrection Sunday may seem like an ultimate goal today,

but we must see it in the light of everything that we have experienced.

Only then can we truly understand and enter into the resurrection deeply and realistically.

And for those who couldn't be present, who didn't have a chance or an opportunity

to attend these liturgies,

I hope that somehow you could still enter into the mystery at home with your family individually.

I hope you had a chance to meditate on the readings of Holy Week,

making this time special, unique, and of course different from your regular day of the week.

Because the resurrection is only fully understood through the lens of Christ's passion.

And I want to give you an analogy what it means to experience resurrection in a full way.

Every time I go to Poland in August, I go on a seven-day walking pilgrimage

to Częstochova. And it's a very deep, profound, spiritual and physical experience.

You walk for seven days with a bunch of people who strive for God.

Who sacrifice their free time to go and walk, experience that road to Częstochova.

And it's a difficult trip.

You go walk and sometimes it's an enormous heat.

Sometimes it rains your your

shoes are wet there's there are blisters you actually

discover that under the blister you can

have another blister and it's a

it's a very interesting experience you sleep intense you

wake up early in the morning it's cold sometimes you

know your clothes are wet it's a

very very exhausting experience you eat

whatever is provided for you you you

deal with dehydration and sunburn it's

an incredible difficult experience but at the end of that journey I remember

that someone would always come and pick us up and they would drive in cool air-conditioned

car and arrive at the same destiny,

same place, Częstohova, right?

And the first thing they would ask always is like, so how was it? Was it good?

And I would always feel like, what am I supposed to say?

How could I possibly explain it? My spiritual transformation was so profound

and personal that it was hard to describe it.

But they would ask like, well, did you at least have a good time?

Sure, yeah, I have a good time, you know, and walking limping to the car.

Thanks for asking, yeah.

But that, you know, barely scratches the surface of what I've experienced.

They couldn't understand what it meant to walk those seven days,

to experience those conditions without being on that trip.

And I think it's the same with the Resurrection Sunday. If I were to come only

on the Resurrection Sunday, I wasn't concerned with all that happened leading to this day.

I might feel a particular joy or satisfaction, but if I haven't walked the path,

if I haven't experienced the liturgies or united myself spiritually to Christ's

passion, then I cannot fully enter the mystery of the Resurrection.

Not to the degree Christ wants for me.

I would be in the same place as others, the same church, the same Sunday,

but have a completely different experience.

And from my conversations with some of you, I've seen how many tears were shed

and how many powerful moments of grace you experienced during this week's liturgies.

God has been so gracious and so generous with you.

And I guarantee you that you will be unpacking those graces and living them

out for the rest of your life.

And on that note, I want to share a particular grace that I received during this Holy Week.

It's related to the Jesus's tomb.

Because in today's gospel, we hear about the apostles who went to the empty

tomb and seeing it, believed.

And I wondered, how could an empty tomb be proof of the resurrection?

If someone showed you a tomb and said, look, it's empty. Do you believe?

You might say, believe in what?

Because an empty tomb in itself is just an empty tomb, unless we know the story

that came before it, the suffering,

the death, the burial, the crucifixion.

Without that context, we can't grasp the meaning.

And on Good Friday during the adoration, the veneration of the cross,

I was kneeling before the cross, and I looked over at the tabernacle, which was empty.

And I thought, what if Christ didn't exist?

What if he never came?

What would be the purpose of life? What would we do when we fall or when we sin or face failure?

How could we love others as Christ loves us?

Without Jesus, we wouldn't have baptism.

That means life without grace. What if there were no priests?

We wouldn't have the Eucharist or confession or other sacraments.

Without Christ, this world would not be what it is.

Without Jesus Christ, we wouldn't be able to see the world in a new light.

We would live in a completely different reality.

And in that moment of my prayer, I felt deeply sad, because we have it all.

We have Jesus.

Yet so many still reject Him, or are indifferent, or not treat Him as King, as Lord, as Savior.

And God invited me into that sadness, not to be overwhelmed by it,

but to feel his sadness too, the sadness that many abandoned him.

And it happened in the salvation history. It's not a new thing that people abandoned Jesus.

Even those who knew him personally did.

Most of his apostles didn't show up at the cross. They missed his crucifixion.

But we also know that later they were converted.

They changed. They became saints.

So the situation is never hopeless.

Even if you feel like you didn't experience Holy Week fully this year, it's never too late.

You can always live your faith more deeply from now on and get ready for next year.

Because to truly experience the resurrection, you must pass through suffering first.

And too often in our lives, we love Jesus when everything's going well,

when we are happy, when things are smooth.

But it's harder to love him when we are suffering, fall, or when things don't work out.

But the truth is, if we reject suffering, we can't share in his passion.

We can't enter the suffering of others either. We will always push it away.

That's why the road to the resurrection through suffering has a profound logic in our lives.

When we pass through suffering with Jesus, resurrection awaits us on the other side.

On Good Friday, we sang also the hymn, Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?

And its lyrics powerfully show God's zeal for our souls.

Why would God want us to be there with Him when they crucified Him?

Because He knows what is good for us and what we need.

And he always invites us to experience what his son experienced,

because that's the path to Calvary, and from Calvary to resurrection.

So when we want to know if we truly experienced resurrection in our lives,

I would ask you a couple of questions.

Has something that was blocking your relationship with God died in you?

Will you be different after this resurrection and live differently?

Will you renounce sin and grow in virtue and give more to God?

Maybe be a better spouse, be a better son, be a better daughter.

Be a better priest be a better deacon for six more weeks no you're always a

deacon I have to correct the theology maybe you will be a better friend.

And have you truly risen from the tomb of your sin and death to be with the risen Christ,

and when the answer of any of those questions is yes then the resurrection is

just a beautiful beginning it is the beginning of a new life renewed in jesus

christ so today let us celebrate this gift give thanks to god for this,

beautiful transformation because this is the day that the lord has made let

us rejoice and be glad and hallelujah.

Christ is risen.