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.
Tonight we enter into a marathon of another type, a marathon of liturgy in which we reflect on the path of all of humanity, stretching back all the way to the beginning. We see how God formed man and woman in his own likeness and blessed them abundantly from the very start of their existence. God found all the rest of creation good when He created it out of pure love, but we hear that when He gazed upon creation with the first human family, He found everything very good. God gave us the awesome power of reason and will. Nothing else in creation compares. Tragically, though, we abused the power of freedom given to us through reason and will and separated ourselves from the perfect relationship that God designed us for.
Praise be to God that He didn’t give up on us.God kept on with us and never abandoned us. Even when we separated ourselves from Him, He consistently called us back. He formed covenants, family bonds, with Noah and his extended family, and then formed a covenant with Abraham. God knew that Abraham was a man of great faith, and He tested his faith by seemingly asking Abraham for the one thing that would fulfill the covenant: his only son, his beloved.
As Abraham is making his way up mount Moriah with Isaac, his beloved, at his side, carrying the wood for the sacrifice, we see that Abraham puts his trust in the Lord, not knowing exactly how he would be faithful, but trusting that, as he put it: “God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.” God indeed did provide for Abraham. He never abandoned him, and sent the angel at the perfect time to provide the sacrifice. The Lord provided a ram with its head caught in a thicket. The sheep that Abraham spoke of wouldn’t come for a long time, but eventually God would send us a lamb, the Lamb of God, His only begotten son, His beloved, who would freely carry the wood of the Cross up a hill and offer Himself for us.
God is faithful. He has always had a plan for us even in our wandering, even in our sin. Though Abraham tried to do things his own way to conceive an heir, God provided a son for him at the perfect time and spared that beloved son, knowing that He would one day give His only Son for us.
God never wavered in His faithfulness with the people of Israel. When they found themselves in abject slavery amidst the Egyptians, God delivered them through mighty plagues, not only to free them from physical bondage, but also to rescue them from the deeper bondage of the idolatry they had embraced by living in that pagan culture. He not only brought the Israelites out of Egypt, he brought Egypt out of the Israelites, giving them the pattern of worship that would guide them for centuries. We hear that the Lord fought for his people against the Egyptians. InHhis deliverance of the people from the slavery of Egypt through water, the Father providentially gave the image of the deliverance His Son would one day bring, also through water.
The faithfulness of God continued with His beloved people through the years. When Israel went astray, God would warn them and send them prophets to remind them of His faithful love and their own infidelity. God never gave up on them, and in their lowest points, He gave them sure reason for hope. Listen once again to the words of consolation that God gave them and us through the prophet Isaiah:
Though the mountains leave their place
and the hills be shaken,
my love shall never leave you
nor my covenant of peace be shaken,
says the LORD, who has mercy on you.
The Lord’s love is so constant for us. Though we and our ancestors have strayed, He never lets us get too far, but calls us back again and again and reconciles us to Him. Whenever we have left God, He has faithfully showed us the way back. Again, listen to the words of reproach and consolation to us that the Lord gave through Isaiah: “Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked man his thoughts; let him turn to the LORD for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.”
God has shown us over and over that He is faithfully here for us, to pick us up and bring us back to Him. When we stray, He reminds us of His love and calls us back. No matter how many times we strayed, He persevered in calling us to His ways, which are always better than ours. Again and again, like a patient Father, He worked with Israel, his beloved, but troublesome child. Through the prophet Baruch, He reminded them and He reminds us:
Such is our God;
no other is to be compared to him:
he has traced out the whole way of understanding,
and has given her to Jacob, his servant,
to Israel, his beloved son.
This matchless God cares so much for us that at the perfect time, He gave us a covenant unlike any other. Despite our having never earned it, the Father had mercy on us and gave us the perfect covenant to bind us so closely to Himself that we would actually become dwelling places for Him! In those beautiful words of the prophet Ezekiel, God promised a new covenant where He would place His own Spirit within humanity.
I will sprinkle clean water upon you
to cleanse you from all your impurities,
and from all your idols I will cleanse you.
I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you,
taking from your bodies your stony hearts
and giving you natural hearts.
I will put my spirit within you and make you live by my statutes,
careful to observe my decrees.
You shall live in the land I gave your fathers;
you shall be my people, and I will be your God.
These beautiful words point us directly to the covenant that Jesus opened up for all of us through His love and mercy. When we were dead in sin, God Himself came among us and took our humanity to Himself in order to save us. By freely embracing death, Jesus offered his perfect life for all of us and opened up the most amazing channels of grace the world has ever known: the Sacraments.
In the Sacraments of the Church, God proves His faithfulness to us by giving us His own life within us. As we heard in the beautiful words chanted by Dcn. Doug in the Exultet at the beginning of Mass tonight:
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 gloriously risen after three days to show us the ultimate prize He has won for all put their faith in Him: victory over the grave, freedom from sin! This is what we celebrate today and everyday as Christians.
Tonight, you all get to share in that glorious victory. For those being baptized, you will be 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 will join you to Jesus’ death and resurrection. When you emerge from them, you will be 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 will take away your stony hearts of sin and give you hearts of flesh by His grace! Thank you, Jesus! As we heard in the letter to the Hebrews tonight: “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.”
In Confirmation, you all will share in the fire of the Holy Spirit that came down on the Apostles and Mary on Pentecost. The gifts of God will be 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 will all feed for the first time 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 is what will nourish 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. God has saved us and opened up a glorious new life for all of us. Those burial cloths that they saw in the tomb all those years ago proclaimed the start of something dramatic and new! We can leave behind those tombs of sin and death in our lives!
The risen 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!
+ 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! +