John Fischer The Catch

In dramatic fashion, Pope Francis delivered what turned out to be his final address yesterday — his traditional Easter message from the Vatican — and promptly went home to be with the Lord earlier this morning. Following is a paragraph from that address I thought was particularly poignant today, as we think of how Easter plays out into the rest of the year.

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The wounds on His hands bled slowly. Pressure from the weight of His body held back the flow. If there had been no other sounds that afternoon, it probably would have sounded like the slow, steady drip off the eaves of a mountain cabin on a damp, foggy night.

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On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross

The emblem of suffering and shame

And I love that old cross where the dearest and best

For a world of lost sinners was slain

                      – George Bernard (1913)

On a hill called Calvary, two thousand years ago, the Son of God was nailed to a cross for the real sins of the world. There was nothing pretty about the Crucifixion. When stripped of the religious sentiment of two thousand years of symbolism and ornamentation it appears as a gruesome and incomprehensible execution of God’s most treasured human expression of Himself.

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Until John the Baptist, the law of Moses and the messages of the prophets were your guides. But now the Good News of the Kingdom of God is preached, and everyone is eager to get in. Luke 16:16

The operable word here is “everyone.” The Pharisees would say, “Everyone wants to get in? Well that’s just too bad because everyone’s not going to get in, not if we have anything to say about it.” And of course we know that they don’t have anything to say about it, but they thought they did, at least until Jesus came along. That’s why they wanted to get rid of Him.

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Until John the Baptist, the law of Moses and the messages of the prophets were your guides. But now the Good News of the Kingdom of God is preached, and everyone is eager to get in. Luke 16:16

This statement by Jesus must have irked the Pharisees and religious leaders no end. It’s statements like this that got Jesus crucified. These two sentences in this verse present the history of religion in a nutshell.

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