Dear Saints,

“All I want to know is Christ and the power flowing from his resurrection!” - St. Francis of Assisi

In the classroom of life, today is one day you definitely don’t want to skip school. As St. Francis intimated, if you can learn the power of Easter, you’ll understand everything worth knowing.

At the turn of the First Millennium A.D., Rome had all the political authority and religious leaders had all the institutional authority. It was constant gamesmanship and manipulations to put oneself in the right place and with the right crowd - by force, if necessary - but it was all very short-lived: when they died, so did their dominion. For all their puffery, no one was a match for mortality.

And then came Jesus, overturning a lot more than just tables. He calmed tempests with mere speech, healed the unhealable, fed a crowd of thousands with one kid’s lunch, and put the temple under judgment. In a word, he was all too much for the powers-that-be as they jostled for popularity and domination, so they decided to destroy him. They might not outlast the grave, but they knew how to crush this growing threat.

Except, of course, that you can’t conquer the one who conquers death. All the real dominion was, is, and always will be found in Jesus’s finishing act of suffering love. This is the power St. Francis wanted to know: we need not long to be people in high places, for we belong to the person in the highest place of all, and he has loved us into life beyond death.

Christ’s Peace,

Father Daniel

δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ