Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Good morning. Today we celebrate the resurrection of the Lord.

Opening Prayer O God, who on this day, through your only begotten Son, have conquered death and unlocked for us the path to eternity. Grant, we pray, that we who keep the solemnity of the Lord’s resurrection may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit, rise up in the light of life through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A Reading from the Acts of the Apostles, 10th chapter, 34th verse, to the 37th and 43rd verse. Peter proceeded to speak and said, you know what has happened all over Judea. Beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit in power.

He went about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses of all this that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree. The man raised on the third day and granted that he be visible not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commissioned us to preach to the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God to judge the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name, the Word of the Lord.

This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad. A Reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, 5th chapter 6 through the 8th verse brothers and sisters, do you not know that a little yeast leavens all the dough? Clear out the old yeast that you may become a fresh batch of dough, inasmuch as you are unleavened. For our Paschal lamb, Christ has been sacrificed.

Therefore let us celebrate the feast not with old yeast the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. The word of the Lord. Hallelujah. Verse Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us then feast with joy in the Lord. A reading from the Holy Gospel According to John 24:1.

On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciples whom Jesus loved and told them, they have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him. So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first. He bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in. When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths, but rolled up in a separate place.

And the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first. And he saw and he believed, but they did not yet understand the Scripture, that he had to rise from the dead. The Gospel of the Lord Satan. Satan. Something happened when this God man came to the end of his life. He was trying to make a point, a major, major truth he wanted to reveal.

And like any of us, when we come to the end of a long journey of trying to accomplish something, we realize it’s about time to leave. You would go back to the core, things you really wanted people to know about who you were and what you came to teach and how important it was and how it would change their life. So our church, Christian church, has taken up a wonderful tradition rooted in the Catholic history of Christianity. And it’s this thing about celebrating three major truths in three days, four days, including Sunday. So it’s really a meditation that goes over Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And I want you to look at those very quickly with me as I can get into then the heart of what I believe God is asking me to share with you on this day.

This is the core of God’s teaching, the core of what he’s asking from us, what he asks us to allow him to do for us. A partnership, a cooperative work. The first thing we learned on Thursday was as Jesus was leaving his disciples, he realized that they had not fully understood yet what he was teaching. And he knew somehow that the time that he was going to go through, meaning his Death and resurrection would confuse people so much about who this man really is. After all, it wasn’t the Romans that killed the Christ. It was religion.

It was the temple. The envy, the jealousy, the rage in the leaders of the temple as they saw someone coming to undermine the very core of what they claimed to be their special gift, their power to reconcile humans with God through an elaborate system of sacrifices. God is a God of justice. He wants justice. So if you’ve done something wrong, you have to pay for it. And so one of the ways you would pay for it is to give something away that you own that’s precious, that’s valuable, and that would balance the world.

And that was where the world was before Christ, a world of justice. And it was essential that we developed that, or we couldn’t have lived in communities, couldn’t have become great nations. So one of the things we realized is that this Jesus said, all right, one of the things I want you to understand most especially is this work that I came to do with you, inviting you into my world, letting you watch me. This kind of strange thing. He might say that I did, that I was always more interested in you watching me do the things I do than explaining what I’m asking you to do. A radical change from the law.

The law always told people what they needed to do without question. They had to follow it or they would be excluded, cursed, punished. But here, Jesus has something very new he wants you to say, I want you to see something in action. And if it’s attractive to you and if it feels truthful, then come and follow me, because you’ve got it. You’ve got the beginnings of this incredible insight that human beings have longed for from the very beginning. Insight into who they are and why they’re here and who is this divine force in the world.

So he wanted them to know he would be with them. Okay, so the Eucharist is established on Thursday. God says is Jesus is saying to his disciples, look, I’m leaving you, but I’m not leaving you orphans. I’m with you. I’m going to give you two things. I’m going to give you my body, which is your nourishment.

Just me, my presence in you. That’s what he’s leading up to, getting them ready for. I’ll be in you. I’ll be living with you. So you have me with you forever. I’m not leaving.

I’m staying. And there’s one thing. If there’s anything you learn from me, it’s one clear, precise thing. You have to believe in. You’re forgiven. And when you experience forgiveness and not judgment and condemnation from everyone around you or from any institution, it’s what we mostly live under.

It passes for the mysterious thing called love. Someone controlling your actions, telling you what to do, approving, disapproving, all of that. He wants us to get out of that system as fast as we can, and then something shifts inside of us. Instead of working for things that people would like us to do and then getting their approval, we take on this beautiful image of who we are as people. Servants. Servants.

So simple. I love the. The way he talks about service because he’s talking about a meal, and he’s asking his disciples, if you’re at a meal and there’s an important guest at the head table, who’s more important, the guest at the head table or the waiters? Well, the guest at the head table is the most important person. But in terms of the experience of eating a banquet dinner and not having somebody cleanse you of the dirt of the road coming in, of not serving you wine or serving you that, or maybe you wait for your. For your meal till you’re starving or whatever, the most important person for the experience is the waiter, who’s there to make sure that you have everything you need to enjoy this experience of honoring this great guest.

So what do you say is most important? If you’re looking at it from what you need, what you need. That’s the thing. Jesus wants to put us in touch with our needs. We have wants, things we’d like to have. But needs are those deep inner longings of our human nature that God created.

And he knows what we really appreciate, what we know we really long for. And when we receive it, it makes us joyous. And then to know that that’s also the thing that brings us joy when we do that for other people, and that is to serve. Be there for each other, forgive each other, respect each other, don’t lie to each other, don’t break promises, don’t destroy each other, don’t envy each other. It’s so beautiful, so simple. So he’s got those clear teachings.

Then we shift to his death. And the radical thing about that death is the way in which he was asked to surrender to it before it happened. He resisted it for a while, but then he gave in. What happens to him? Well, in that moment of his giving in to the way it is written, to the way life is, to the way his life was intended to be, even though it wasn’t his first choice As a human being wanting to succeed, which we all have, that in us. Came to a moment where he was absolutely, to me, the most quintessential example of what it’s like for a human being to be filled with divinity.

We have in that moment on the cross, when he looked out and said, you know, if I wanted to, I could change all this in a minute. But that’s not what I want to teach you. How to make the world into what you want it to be as quickly as you would like it to be. No, that’s not what you’re here for. For. You’re here for something much more mystical and mysterious.

You’re here to do everything you can to change and to grow and to become. But there’s a moment in which you must go back and accept exactly the way it’s written. And when all those obstacles are in the way, no matter what they are. A disease, a disappointment in work, friendship, a marriage that’s dissolved when you’re still in love, when you can say, I forgive that, I accept that, okay? I accept it as part of the work, as part of what it means to be human here. And I have some sense, if we listen to this story correctly, that at that moment, at that moment, there was something mysterious that happened that I don’t always pay attention to in that story.

And that is, he dies, he says it is finished. Then everybody that’s watching this sees these signs around them. There’s a total eclipse of the sun. There’s an earthquake, there’s thunder, there’s lightning, there’s wind. All manifestations of the power of a God. And they all walked away saying, we’ve done a terrible thing.

How could that be? Everybody there, one minute, jeering, spitting, ridiculing. A figure that they believed was somehow getting their people in trouble because he was angering the Romans or whatever their motive was for saying we should execute him. It all melted away in a second when they saw something that they could never imagine doing. A human being forgiving, 100%, 1,000%, the worst thing that could ever happen to them by people who are freely choosing to do it. And he said, they don’t know what they’re doing.

They don’t know what they’re doing. I think that’s such an insightful, unbelievable, clear image of what it is to be a believer. You take on not the teaching of a religion or even the customs or moral laws of a religion, and then you surrender to that, and that makes you holy. No, it’s much more of an interior Transformation. And that interior transformation is that you begin to see the world with a completely new vision, a new understanding. Yeah, we work hard to change and to grow and to become.

But if we ever lose sight of the fact that we’re not in charge of that, we’re not the ones who determine how we are to grow and the people around us are to grow. Unless we give up on that seductive power thing that we love as human beings. I’m in charge of this whole thing and I’m making it happen just the way I know it should happen, where I know it should happen. That’s what we have to forgive. That incredible, insatiable desire for control, redemption, renunciation, two words, they somehow fit together. When the church calls us to renounce things, what is it calling us to renounce?

Sometimes it seems if we oversimplify and maybe caught in a very excessively moralistic cult like religion, we might feel that, well, I, you know, I must, I must, I must, I must do exactly what I’m told. That’s it. So I renounce any of my wants, my needs, my feelings. I become a nobody. And there’s something in that is mysteriously attractive also to human beings because we don’t have any responsibility on our own. We just give in.

And that’s the other temptation. One is to control everything, the other is to not have any influence on anything at all. I mean, those are the typical opposites we find in every issue that is, is a struggle for human beings. It’s always the struggle between the opposites. Truth and lies, self centeredness, selfishness, giving, taking, healing, saving, condemning, forgiving. It’s everywhere.

And if we think that there’s a way in which the one, the opposite of what we, the negative side of that opposite. If we think, if we get rid of that, destroy it, you fall back into a very, very ancient, hopefully outgrown way that cultures can live by going around destroying everything that isn’t the way they want it to be. And we know that we’ve had that kind of history in our past, but we have a new history, a new beginning, a redemption. Redemption is a recovery, a returning to something lost, something that’s a gift that brings us back to the thing that we lost. We don’t have to pay for it, we don’t have to earn it. What we have to do is receive it and know that we need it.

And what is that thing we return to? I want to call it the life force. Goodness, integrity, love, the things that God created in us in a way that wasn’t complete when we began to become conscious. He’s got us in this process, this program that we’re involved, that is about us. And then whatever we do with our story affects everybody else’s story. This incredible union and communion of people living together, working things out, that’s that core.

That is the goodness that’s pushing that which is always damaged and sometimes even destroyed by abuse. But that’s the thing that we’ve recovered in this mysterious sequence of actions of our Messiah, because it means we go through those same stages of staying with ourselves, nurturing ourselves, surrendering to the way things really are. And then this amazing thing called resurrection. Resurrection a new life. The disciples were in complete disbelief that this could happen. And I’d like you to think about this one thing.

Are we in that state? Are we in the redeemed state? Do we really not believe that’s possible? That’s the question that Easter asks us every year. Do I believe in this incredible miracle? Foreign the Closing Prayer Father, the world has always been in need of your message.

Always longing for the unity it promises, the peace that is its greatest effect on our soul and our relationships. So I beg you to bless our time, our country, the world, with this understanding of how important it is that we get past differences and stop attacking and destroying each other and move closer and closer into the oneness that is our inheritance, acceptance. Striving together for the same incredibly marvelous goal of union with you with our true self and being instruments that serve one another. So bless us with this grace. Especially bless my listeners, Lord. They’re very special to me.

And whether you’re a first time listener or that you’ve listened for 30 plus years, it’s it’s my privilege to be able to bring you the truth of what I pray God is sharing with me to share with you. Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you.

You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections in Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.