Jesus Is Risen

Guide: Joy

We knew from the beginning that God’s victory over sin and death was complete. Now we come to know it through the experience of new life given to Jesus. For months now we have been given the grace to become intimate friends with Jesus, who has shown us his life and who he is for us. Now we simply pray to experience joy with Jesus in the gift of risen life he enjoys.

Jesus really died and his dead body was laid to rest in a tomb. The tomb is empty! It is forever a symbol of God’s power to liberate - to set us free from the power of sin and death.

Jesus is alive! And he is forever alive, with a life beyond our imagining. For the next several weeks, we want to enter into a taste of that new life. For in celebrating his liberation with Jesus, we grow in anticipation of the way that has been opened for this new life for us.

This week we contemplate, using the Scriptures and our imagination, the experience for Jesus of being raised from the dead and his sharing of that experience with those he loved. What inexpressible joy Jesus must have had at experiencing eternal life, as a human being! Having just experienced the depths of our suffering and death, he now knows what it will be for us to experience the life of the Resurrection.

And how he must have delighted in sharing that joy with those who suffered with him at the foot of the cross! We can only imagine what joy filled the heart of Mary, his mother, when she saw him alive. Who could have experienced joy with Jesus more completely?

Finally, I contemplate our risen Lord sharing his joy with me. Alive forever, and able to be with me at every moment, he still has holes in his hands and a gaping wound in his side. He still is the person whose life we have contemplated for months. The past and the present come together for us in this encounter with Jesus, risen.

All week, we will try to let ourselves walk around in the sense of Jesus, alive and with us. The more I let Jesus be alive and present in every event of my daily life, the more completely his resurrection confronts the fear, doubt, lack of courage, lack of hope, I might experience.

Use the resources here to get started and enter the movements of the week more deeply. Our awareness of Jesus’ standing with us in the most mundane and ordinary moments of our days will breathe the life of his Spirit into our hearts. And we will indeed share his joy.

Consider sharing the graces you have received this week with others making the retreat.

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