Life in Christ – Before , During and Ever…
Psalm 27, a prayer of confidence, offered at two critical points in our lives. First, when we are baptized into Christ, we proclaim, “The Lord (YHWH) is our Light and our salvation; whom should we fear? The Lord (YHWH) is our Strength and our Courage; of whom should we be afraid? Second, as we prepare to leave this world, Psalm 27 is frequently prayed at the deathbed of one on his or her way home to God.
When the psalm is prayed liturgically at a baptism or a funeral, the Easter Candle, so prevalent during the fifty days of Easter, burns brightly in the sanctuary. It is a reminder to us of Christ, our Light, the invocation sung at the Easter Vigil as the Paschal fire is lit. Once the Easter candle is lit, then, gradually throughout the Church, the community receives a light from the Easter Candle so that soon the darkened Church is lit by the Lumen Christi, the Light of Christ.
Psalm 27, a baptismal and funeral and Paschal psalm, is appropriate everyday of our life in Christ. The Lord (YHWH) is with us and in us 24-7-365 every moment of our life. On Easter, we ask for the Grace to believe this and to act upon it in our everyday lives.
During the course of our lives, we all experience our share of good days as well as bad. It is very easy to be brave and say thanx to God on good days, yet we often forget to do so. However, it is difficult to be hopeful in those liminal moments of our lives, that we all have. These moments are the moments when we experience pain, when we feel betrayal, denial, rejection, as well as sickness, accident, old age and loss. It happened to Jesus and to us.
The experience of these liminal (also called, limit moments) is transformed by the Paschal Mystery Which we celebrate today. Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God and the pattern of all creation, reveals through His death and Resurrection that the Paschal Mystery is integral to all creation (not just humanity, the pinnacle of creation). The Paschal Mystery is the Lord’s (YHWH’s) way of bringing new life to us in ways unimaginable. As St Paul tells us in Roman 4. 16, “God creates life where there was death and no life.”
We pray for the Grace to say yes to the Paschal Mystery revealed to us in the death and Resurrection of the Lord, which we all share through baptism into Christ. This Grace (also known as the Holy Spirit) emboldens us to live an alternate worldview, one in which the God of Life is capable of transforming all reality into something good, no matter what things appear to be. This is not easy when the going gets tough. One only need to think of Jesus in His dying words, last Sunday, the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God why have You forsaken me?” Sometimes, we feel like saying exactly that. The gift of faith in the Paschal Mystery gives us the strength to counter any of the down language in Psalm 22 (which alternates back and forth between despairing and hopeful language, but ends on a hopeful note) with the confidence of Psalm 27, a trust that enables us to say at the beginning or the end, “I believe that I shall see the good things of God in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage. Be stouthearted and wait for the Lord.” Happy and blessed Easter to all . 032705AD jfq
