Reflection for Easter, March 31

Our Lenten journey has come to an end. He is risen, alleluia!

Throughout the Lenten season, we have posted reflections for holy days and Sundays from previously published Lenten booklets. Today, we share the final reflection from this year’s Lenten reflection booklet, A fast that matters, written by Frida Berrigan. Click here for our Lent 2024 page to see all reflections shared this year, as well as links to other Lenten resources.

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REFLECTION FOR Easter, March 31, 2024

by Frida Berrigan

Acts 10:34a, 37-43 | Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9

On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb.

John 20:1-2

Here we are, finally arriving on Easter Sunday. Hallelujah.

Like a lot of people, I have a complicated relationship with the Catholic Church. The maleness, the hierarchy, the violence towards the vulnerable, the secrecy, all that property, the blessing and/or the silence on U.S. war-making and nuclearism, all that ornateness. My complicated relationship is made slightly more complicated by the fact that my parents were a nun and a priest who fell in love and were pushed out of their vocations. As I have grown older, I have learned that we – the children of nuns and priests – are our own little subculture. My two sisters-in-law are both the daughters of clergy. (We tend to find one another.)

That relationship wrinkle is made even deeper by the depth of grace, wisdom and courage that my parents found in the Jonah House liturgy and Bible study circles far from the institutional church. So, I was raised by two people who grew up with the Latin mass (they literally spoke Latin), were educated in the church and went on to educate within the church, but raised their three kids outside of the strictures of the capital-C Church.

My parents were steeped enough in the Church to sometimes be surprised by the gaps in our religious education. “What do you mean, you don’t know the rosary,” my mom asked me one time. “You never taught us the rosary,” I replied. They forgot that we needed to be taught things like that. I know the rosary now. I learned it during a five-day fast and vigil close to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, as Witness Against Torture prayed for the Muslim men imprisoned and tortured there to be freed.

My husband and I are raising our own kids in the Unitarian Universalist tradition – a good place for a Catholic and an atheist to find solace, community and fellowship. I now find myself exclaiming in some of the same ways my parents did about their very ecumenical, very wholesome, but very de-christological centered faith formation. “What do you mean you don’t know what the Trinity means!!”

I’ll give you an example. The Berrigans – my dad and his brothers Dan and Jerry and Jim – loved to get together and tell jokes. Most of these jokes were religious and bawdy. But a favorite was best told by our friend Ellen Grady. It involved three mafia guys who die and are sent to heaven by mistake. There, they get a chance at a second chance. If they could tell Saint Peter what Easter is, they’d get to stay in heaven. The joke is long and funny mostly because Ellen’s Italian accent is hilariously bad. The first and second guys can’t tell Saint Peter what Easter is … they botch their explanations and get Easter confused with other holidays. They get sent to hell. But, the third guy seems like he is going to get into heaven because he is describing Jesus’ passion and crucifixion very well. Then he gets to the part where Jesus comes out of the tomb “after three days. If he sees his shadow, he goes back down for six more weeks.”

It never fails, it is a great joke!

My kids love it when I tell this joke (I have more of a Northern Italian/Norwegian accent). But, they are not Catholic, and they don’t know the passion and crucifixion story very well themselves. My daughter Madeline will laugh and laugh, “I don’t get it,” she says with laugh tears running down her face, “I love it, but I don’t get it!”

I love it, but I don’t get it. It could sum up how the disciples are feeling at the tomb in this reading, right?

The passage from John’s gospel is full of the disciples’ uncertainty. Mary tells the other disciples; “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.” One of the disciples runs to the tomb, peers in to see the burial clothes but does not go in and the concluding line, “For they did not yet understand the Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.”

Mary of Magdala, Simon Peter, John, the other disciples: they love Jesus, they have walked this long journey with him. They have heard – over and over again – that it would end with this moment, this vindication of life over death, this resurrection. And they do not get it!

Do we get it? Do we understand what Jesus’ resurrection means in our world today? We know it is not chocolate bunnies, jelly beans and plastic grass. We know it is not the Empire’s theology of muscular, white Jesus who triumphs and will save the select few.

Jesus’ resurrection in our world today means that we are alive again too. Our fast is over. And now, renewed by our Lenten rituals, we go forth hungry. Hungry for good things to fill our bellies, maybe … But more than that, hungry for good works to fill our aching world with love, compassion, justice and beauty.

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>> Click here to see more resources for prayer, study and action for the 2024 Lenten season.

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Frida Berrigan  is a writer, columnist, community organizer, and gardener who lives with her family in Connecticut. She is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood, the story of how she tries to apply the lessons of her parents, Phil Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister and community of Jonah House they helped found, to her own mothering and life. We are deeply grateful that she wrote our 2024 Lenten reflection book, “A fast that matters.”