Security

Faced with a threat that neither money nor might can easily solve, many are left wondering, “From where shall come our help?” Deep down all Americans know that neither White House nor Wall Street can offer us anything eternal, and yet we tend to let ourselves get swept up in the false security that comes along with being part of a militarily and financially strong, developed nation. In the face of a threat that does not respond to finance or force, these foundations of American culture are revealed in their inadequacy.

Our true help is neither in words from the White House or numbers from the Nasdaq, not in papers from the Ivy League or products from Silicon Valley; this Easter day reveals our true source of hope: He is bursting forth from the tomb. As we look around, scrolling for new insights and waiting for someone to offer a solution, people ask, “Where is Jesus in the midst of all this?” The question itself contains the answer: Jesus is precisely in the midst of all this. He is living the pandemic with us. He is not gazing on us from afar.

Jesus came into the human experience – all the aspects of it – and blessed and redeemed everything about human life. By living life, He redeemed life. By suffering, He redeemed suffering, and by dying, He redeemed death.

The whole of our human experience is transformed because God lived the human experience. It seems that part of the plan was to show us how to approach our own little stretch of history; He gave us an approach to life we had not yet tried: Trust. From guilty and fearful Adam straight through human history to you and me, we respond to the Father in a variety of ways other than loving trust. Basically, our universal human response to the Father could be described like this: we fear Him, so we hide from Him. Jesus doesn’t lecture us about how to respond to the Father—He simply showed us: trust Him no matter what. In becoming man, Jesus means to show us that the Father is trustworthy and good, and that no matter what we face, fear and anxiety, suffering and even death, trusting in the Father is the only real security. In dying on the cross, Jesus showed us that His trust in the Father wasn’t mere rhetoric. In the face of this pandemic, Jesus is prompting us to trust the Father no matter what, turning to Him as children to a Loving Father. He is our only true security.

Mother Clare, CFR