Audio recording (2.17MB mp3)

Often we hear that “love is blind.” Someone looks at a friend’s fiancée and sees his friend and his girlfriend are somehow mismatched, that their marriage might very well be troubled, and wonders why his friend doesn’t see the obvious? Or a parent can look at a daughter’s choice of a future husband and be concerned that she’s not seeing what is obvious to her mother. Love is blind.

But love also enables us to see. We know that sometimes we are more comfortable in darkness, sometimes we would prefer not to see. At times, it’s easier not to see a friend when he or she is in great difficulty, not to see all the ills of the world, not to see our own sinfulness. We sometimes might prefer to remain a stranger, even to ourselves. But affection opens the eyes to notice what a stranger easily ignores. In the Easter Gospel just proclaimed, we see John, the beloved disciple, the one whom Jesus loved and who was faithful to him even during Jesus’ crucifixion, hurrying to a tomb now empty of Jesus’ body. He outran Peter, who was older. When Peter got to the tomb, out of breath, he saw the grave clothes that had contained Jesus’ dead body still folded in the empty tomb. He was perplexed. He didn’t know what to think. John went in and saw the same collapsed and folded shroud that Peter saw, but John looked with eyes of love, and he knew. He knew that Jesus had risen from the dead, that Jesus once dead body, now immortal, had passed through the binding cloths, through the rocky tomb and would pass through closed doors and into sinful hearts. Nothing had completely prepared the apostles for this truth that turned their world and ours upside down, although Jesus had tried to tell them that the grain of wheat had to pass through death in order to give life. But, finally, John’s love enabled him to see, to know what Jesus had done. John’s love for Jesus gave him insight into the ways of his friend. John had witnessed Jesus’ death on the cross as an act of forgiveness and love. Such a death opens graves and hearts.

Love therefore also enables us to live. Love and life are found together because love creates life, and love is stronger than death itself. God created the world out of nothing through his infinite power, and then God redeemed the world from sin through his infinite love. The love of husband and wife creates new life for themselves together and new life in their children. St. Paul told the Colossians in the words we just heard: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory.” Where there is love, there is life. Where there is eternal love, eternal life becomes possible. Our deepest hopes are anchored in love, all our loves find fulfillment in the risen Christ’s love for us, a love that gives us life everlasting when we go into the dark waters of baptism and rise in Christ’s love for us.

Love gives us sight; love gives us life; love also gives us speech. We speak about people we love. We bring out the photographs and speak. We recall events and relive them in telling others about them. In the Acts of the Apostles, we hear the apostles speaking about Jesus. Peter’s love, professed three times to the risen Christ, leads him to meet even the enemies of his country, people who were not part of God’s covenant with the Jews; in meeting them, he speaks of God’s love made visible for them too in Christ Jesus: “This man, God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commissioned us to preach to the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead.” We speak of what we love; we cannot not speak about Jesus, whose love for us gives us sight and life and also courage to proclaim to the world that He is risen. This faith we proclaim to one another and before the Lord when we renew the promises of our baptism in a few moments. We need to find ways to proclaim it anew to others, to a world where love has grown cold and life is cheap and threatened.

But now, in this Easter Mass, anchored in Christ’s eternal love, we see, we live, we speak: Christ is risen. Alleluia.

Francis Cardinal George, OMI

Archbishop of Chicago