2 Sm 5:1-3 / Col 1:12-20 / Lk 23:35-43
A scrawny little guy was sitting at a bar staring at his drink. Suddenly, a burly truck driver sat down beside him, grabbed the guy's drink, and gulped it down. The little fellow burst into tears.
"Oh, come on, pal," said the truck driver. "I was just joking. Here, I'll buy you another."
"No, that's not it," the man blubbered. "This has been the worst day of my life. I got fired. My car was stolen. I had to walk home, and when I got there, I found my wife with another man. So I grabbed my wallet and came here. And just when I'm about to end it all," said the man sobbing, "you show up and drink my poison!"
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Where will it all end? Sometimes the bad news just keeps coming and it seems as if it'll never stop. Then we know what the Apostles felt, watching Jesus die on the Cross: Can anything good come out of this? As they fled from Jerusalem, despair was on their lips: "We used to hope, but not anymore."
That's the way it looked to everyone that Good Friday afternoon. Yet, only three days later, Jesus rose from the dead, settling once and for all the contest between good and evil, between life and death: Despite all appearances at any given moment, and despite all delays, good will triumph in the end. That's settled! And why? Because God is God!
That's fine for the big picture and the very long term, but what about you and me, and our individual lives now? Will what's best in us ultimately prevail? Will the spirit that God put in us grow and thrive? Will we actually rise with Christ for all eternity? Or, in the face of life's hurts and all the terrible things that people do to one another, will we slowly wither at the core and fade into cosmic nothingness? It all depends — not on God, but on us.
God doesn't promise to hold us unharmed in the face of life's troubles and tragedies. (Yet there are empty seats in every church in the world, left vacant by folks who thought that coming to church would guarantee good luck, and who felt betrayed when the "insurance policy" didn't pay off.)
God doesn't promise His faithful people a "teflon" life. What God does promise is that, whatever comes, no matter how huge and how evil, it won't destroy us. It may kill us, as Jesus said in last Sunday's Gospel, but it will not destroy us, it will not annihilate us at the core, if we are deeply rooted in the Lord, Who is the very ground of our being. As long as we are deeply rooted in Him, we can at every moment draw from Him the life and sustenance, the strength and comfort we need to face and to triumph over whatever comes.
Our fate truly depends on us: God has already given us the gift of His extended hand. We have only to take it and never let go.
So take His hand, never, never let it go, and rise with Him for all eternity!
