In January of 2017, my brother, Billy, and I woke early in the morning to go run a race together. It was the Key West Half Marathon. We were both excited for the race and looked forward to running together in such a beautiful place. The first part of the race went well, but then I found myself hitting a wall unlike anything I had ever experienced. Looking back, I think it was a combination of different factors. Firstly, I hadn’t trained as thoroughly as I had in past years. We ran the race in January, meaning we did our training runs in Ohio in the dead of winter. I remember that it was snowing during one run. There were times that I made the excuse of the weather not to go out training. I think that lack of training and getting my body prepared to run 13.1 miles cost me. Additionally, I believe I may have had an allergic reaction to something on the race course. Key West, as you may imagine, has much different plant life than Ohio. I think I may have encountered some plants that triggered my asthma, which is allergy induced. So I found myself about sixty percent of the way through the race and I was dogging it. It was so bad that my brother told me, “Tom, you’re going to have to speed up, because I can’t run any slower.” It was a tough moment.
After running together for a few miles more, I finally just asked Billy to run at his own pace. I knew that my snail-like pace was really holding him back. The end of that race was absolutely miserable for me. Without my brother beside me, it was an agonizing finish. I dragged myself across the finish line and almost swore off distance running altogether. This past year, though, I once again trained with my brother and did it the right way. We ran together last fall in the Columbus Half Marathon side by side the whole way. It was a great feeling to cross the finish line side by side with my best friend.
It really makes all the difference in the world to run with someone else. Having Billy by my side helps keep me motivated to keep going in a race. Going at it alone, it is all too easy to get discouraged and to focus too much on the pain and the struggle. I came close in the Key West half marathon to just giving up.
When we look at the story of God and humanity contained in Sacred Scripture, we see a marathon with many twists and turns. So often, we as humans have turned away and refused to be with God, but God has never given up on us. Over and over, God called us back to Himself, working with us and forming covenants with us, making us His own people. Even when we failed to be faithful to those many covenants, God still kept on us. He called us back to faithfulness through the prophets and even promised a new covenant.
As Christian people, we are incredibly blessed to live in the time of the new and eternal covenant. Unlike previous covenants, for this covenant, God offered Himself as the sacrifice to seal the covenant. With the covenants of old, animals were slaughtered to say, in a sense, “If I am unfaithful to this covenant, let me be like that animal.” So now, with the offering of Jesus’ prefect life for all of us, we see God telling us that there is an eternal, unbreakable covenant available to the whole world. Jesus’ perfect death paid the price for sin that we never could, once for all. While we were still sinners, Jesus died for us. So now, even when we sin and turn away, Jesus’ offering on the Cross remains powerfully available to us in the Sacraments, bringing us back to life to live more faithfully in this new Covenant, as part of God’s family, the Church.
In the Sacraments of the Church, God proves His faithfulness to us by giving us His own life within us. Last night, at the beginning of the Easter Vigil Mass, Dcn. Doug chanted an ancient text called the Exultet, which speaks beautifully of the grace we celebrate throughout the Easter Season:
O wonder of your humble care for us!
O love, O charity beyond all telling,
to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!
O truly necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault
that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!
We have been redeemed by Christ, brothers and sisters, saved by Jesus’ amazing life, death and resurrection. He walked forward from the grave after three days gloriously risen to show us the ultimate prize He has won for all who put their faith in Him: victory over the grave, freedom from sin! This is what we celebrate today and everyday as Christians.
Think of the grace that we all get to share in because of Jesus’ resurrection! In our baptism, we were plunged into those waters that Jesus made powerful when He allowed Himself to be baptized by John in the Jordan. Through His grace, those waters joined you to Jesus’ death and resurrection. When you emerged from them, you were cleansed from deep within from that ancient stain of sin from our first parents, renewed and made whole and formed as a temple of the Holy Spirit and a child of God! The Lord took away your stony hearts of sin and gave you hearts of flesh by His grace! Thank you, Jesus! As Peter says so powerfully in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles today: “To him all the prophets bear witness, that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.”
In Confirmation, you share in the fire of the Holy Spirit that came down on the Apostles and Mary on Pentecost. The gifts of God were strengthened within you so that you might share about the new life of Jesus with many others! Praise God for the gifts of the Spirit. Finally, in the Eucharist, you have the amazing privilege of feeding on the crucified and risen flesh of Jesus, receiving Him fully into you so that you might be nourished with the Food of Heaven. Unlike the manna that only fed the people of God to enter an earthly promised land, this Food nourishes you for the journey beyond this life to the promised land of Heaven itself!
Like my brother, shoulder to shoulder with me in the race, God has remained by our side throughout history and has drawn even closer in this, the final age of humanity, the age of His Son! Today and throughout this Holy Season of Easter, we remember that God is faithful and has never abandoned us. Those burial cloths that they saw in the tomb all those years ago proclaimed the start of something dramatic and new! God has saved us and opened up a glorious new life for all of us. We can leave behind those tombs of sin and death in our lives!
The Lord has been with you in the ups and downs of your life, when you’ve rejoiced, when you’ve laughed and cried, and especially in those moments when you’ve strayed. He has never abandoned you even when you’ve felt as though you’re running the race alone. His love is why you are here right now. His grace brought you to this moment. Jesus rose to allow you to share His risen glory, to know that whatever you might face, you can face it through Him, with Him and in Him. He wants to strengthen you so that regardless of what comes your way, you can run the race of life well and make it through Him to the joys of the perfect life to come in Heaven! Praise God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who has always faithfully cared for us and invites each of us to share His very life through Jesus’ resurrection! Alleluia! Alleluia!
+ Father, thank you for sending your Son to die and rise so that we might die and rise in Him. Jesus, thank you for the new life that you give us through Your grace in the Sacraments. Holy Spirit, help us turn away from sin within our hearts so that we might more fully embrace the joy of life in Christ. We ask this through Christ, our risen Lord. Amen. Alleluia! +