Easter: A Gift to All Believers

Colleen Mallette considers how Easter is a gift from God after receiving a new insight during Lent.

What a glorious time of year this is: celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection after experiencing the sorrow of Lent. For forty days we wallowed in sadness as we walked through not only the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, but our own struggles with temptation as we tried to unite our little sacrifices with His. By devoting extra time to prayer and church services, fasting and giving alms, we fought Satan just as Jesus did during His forty days in the desert.

I was blessed to spend time this Lent studying St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, which were almost exactly in sync with our liturgical readings. As I read and meditated on three different Gospel readings each week, I was touched more than ever by really contemplating the events and how they applied to my life.

One of the main impacts on me was the idea that Jesus suffered so much during His last week on earth because of His humanity; and He purposely hid His Divinity during that whole time. He experienced all the pain, agony, embarrassment, ridicule and of course death itself as a fully human being. Yet only once did He acknowledge that as a divine being he could have easily changed everything (when, as described in Matthew 26:53, Jesus told His arrestors that He could have called upon “twelve legions of angels” —which according to Fr. Mike Schmitz in his Bible in a Year podcast, amounts to an amazing army of 72,000!

When we think about all of the circumstances in the week of His Passion, we realize how many awful things Jesus endured when He could so easily have overcome all of them and not experienced them: being betrayed by one of His closest followers, angrily rejected by the religious and government leaders, arrested by surprise in front of His believers at nighttime, dragged before a whole group of fellow teachers who hated Him and tried to trap Him with His words, publicly humiliated, mocked, spit on, whipped, beaten, and neglected over another convicted criminal, besides the torment and agony of carrying His own heavy cross up a hill through crowds and being brutally crucified.

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At every step of the way, Jesus could easily have halted all of it with His unlimited godly powers. He could have taken control of the people and their actions, and not had to suffer any of it. And yet He not only endured all of it silently and willingly, He purposely hid His Divinity from being shown.

Why? As we read on the fifth Sunday of Lent, “It was for this purpose that I came to this hour” (John 12:27). Had Jesus shown any resistance, or overpowered anyone at any one of those stages, His mission would not have been completed.

Jesus silently and stoically went through all that He did, to fulfill His Father’s Will.

He humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:8)

For Easter.

For the salvation of believers from all of history.

For you and me.

Then He ultimately and gloriously revealed not His humanity but His full divinity on Easter morning and forever after. He let His godliness shine to save us all and confirm that He fulfilled God’s plan from the first sin of Adam through all of the Old Testament.

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On Easter morning Jesus revealed His true identity. He defeated death by rising out of the netherworld to return in His glorified body with complete control over His destiny, appearances, and godly powers, to defeat Satan once and for all.

Yet as we look back over all of the suffering Jesus endured, we realize that there is nothing we will ever go through that compares. This realization brings us comfort and strength when we turn to Him in prayer for His sympathy. It ought to calm our reactions if we can imitate His way of dealing with adversity and pain. It should bring us to a greater appreciation of the gift of Easter.

May we always be grateful that Jesus hid His divinity to let God’s plan happen, so that His glory would be revealed and celebrated every Easter since.

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