FIRST of all, Happy Easter to everyone!

“This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.” Easter is indeed a very happy occasion, in fact, the happiest, because that’s when we celebrate the resurrection of our Christ.

If we follow by what our Christian faith teaches, then Easter tells us that Christ is alive, not dead. His death was meant to conquer our sin and death. He died for us so we can rise with him. This is termed as the “happy exchange.” There can be no better piece of news than this. Alleluia, alleluia!

This is the best thing that can happen to us, and it’s good that we learn to embed this truth deeply in our life, allowing it to inspire and shape our thoughts and desires, and even our feelings, and especially our words and deeds. This is not triumphalism. This is the Christian realism that we should try our best to develop.

We need to have the spirit of Easter in us. We have to avoid living our life outside of the Easter spirit because that is not meant for us. That would expose us to all sorts of dangerous possibilities, filling us with fears, doubts and uncertainties.

This Easter spirit indisputably tells us we have every reason to hope in spite of our weaknesses, temptations, even our failures and sins. Christ has conquered sin and death, and we can echo what St. Paul once said: “Where sin has abounded, grace has abounded even more.” (Rom 5,19)

This truth has to be a fundamental conviction of ours, not to be a source of pride and presumption that would lead us to abuse the goodness of God, but rather to put us in the objective reality of how God looks and considers us.

Yes, we are objects of God’s infinite love. It sounds like an exaggeration, but that’s the truth after seeing all that Christ did for us. The Son of God became man, assumed our sinfulness without committing sin, died to them to dash our sins into nothing, then rise to free us from our sin and give us what really is meant for us—eternal life with God whose image and likeness we are.

Indeed, we can express the amazement articulated in the Bible: “What is man that you are mindful of him? Or the son of man that you visit him?” (Ps 8,4) Indeed, we can repeat what the Easter vigil hymn says:

“This is the night when Christians everywhere, washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement, are restored to grace and grow together in holiness. This is the night when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death and rose triumphant from the grave.”

We may still continue to be harassed by our weaknesses and the temptations around, we may still commit mistakes and fall into sin, but let’s never forget that Christ offers us the way to get out of our alienation from God.

He offers the way to restore our dignity as children of God. He is the “way, the truth and the life.” Christ should be for us a model not only of a perfect and sinless man, but also of fallen, wounded man who is still called to love God.

Remember what we read in the Letter to the Hebrews: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.” (5,2)

We should view our sinfulness with the mind of Christ from his birth to his death and resurrection. Let’s never view our sinfulness from the purely human angle. That would only lead us to endless anguish, fear and even despair.

God never stops loving us. He never stops forgiving us. Christ who said we should forgive others not only 7 times, but 70 times 7, meaning always, will always forgive us.

The parable of the lost coin, the lost sheep and the prodigal son more than proves this. The sweetest word our Lord can receive from us is when we say, “We are sorry. Forgive us.”

Let’s never be afraid of God, just because we have committed sin. In fact, we can even presume, as verified many times in the gospel, that he would look at us with special attention and care whenever we commit sin.

Our weakness and sins should be the reason, the stimulus to go to God, rather than away from him. Yes, let’s have the Easter attitude toward our sinfulness. ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )