During the past few years a friend of mine has worked to compile daily accounts of attacks on Christians all over the world. It is hard to read these accounts of varying brutality that occur practically every day. Most of the attacks are carried out by fanatical Moslems. Christians are beaten, raped, robbed, tortured, and murdered mainly because they are Christian.
On another occasion during Easter season members of the Islamic State murdered four nuns of the Missionaries of Charity working in an elder care facility in Aden, Yemen. A few years ago, on the day after Easter, Taliban suicide bombers murdered over 65 Christian worshippers in Pakistan and wounded over 300. The only crime of those people, like so many thousands of others brutally persecuted in recent years, was that they were Christians.
What is so bad about Christianity? Why do extremists, both secular and religious, hate it so much? Maybe I should ask, why do they fear it so much?
Even after the Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday, his subsequent Ascension forty days later, and the incredible events of Pentecost, St. Peter did not fully understand the implications of the Resurrection. Only after a personal vision convinced him that Jesus died and rose for all, did Peter see the light. He said,
“Now I really understand that God is not a respecter of persons, but in every nation he who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him."
I have come to believe with Peter that God is not a respecter of persons, and that anyone who does right is acceptable to God. Still, I like being a Christian, especially a Catholic. I like the half hour of peace that attendance at daily Mass provides. I like the fact that I am not permitted or exhorted to kill innocent people, or even be angry at the guilty. But most of all, I like a religion that believes in and holds out hope for resurrection, for a life after death.
I like to think that the worshippers bombed in Sri Lanka or Egypt or the four nuns murdered in Yemen are living a new life, and that they are not just rotting bodies being picked apart by vultures. Some may think otherwise but what good does that do them? It also strikes me that in reading accounts of the lives of the persecuted, they, like tens of thousands of other Christians who have also been brutally persecuted, had already given up their lives in the service of others. Like Jesus, they went about doing good and healing.
For Christians Easter, coming as it usually does at the outset of Spring, will always be a sign of new life.
The word "Easter" comes from a Germanic goddess of spring. Latin peoples used the word pasqua from the Jewish pasch or passover. When the Germanic peoples were converted, the Church wisely associated the word for Springtime with the feast of the Risen Lord. All around us new life is springing from the dead of winter. As the last traces of snow disappear, the flowers miraculously push their way up through their winter tomb.
Happy Easter!
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Happy Easter!
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