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Mission and evangelization

To follow Christ, we must prepare for a hard road but rest assured He will carry us.

Just as Jesus fed the five thousand - a miracle of very little becoming so much more - the humble bread and wine become His body and blood in the Eucharist.

We should seek to model relationships and our lives after the Most Holy Trinity with sacrificial love.

In the last night of his life, Jesus prayed specifically for his followers to have unity. He said that, through unity, the disciples would bear a powerful witness to his name. Why, on the darkest night of his life, was he thinking about that? The answer is seen in his example: in unity, there is love, a sacrificial love between the Father and Son, and between all who believe in him. Christianity has survived, not because of its cleverness or power, but because of its unified love.

Place yourself in today's Gospel reading, and imagine being in the room with Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper. Jesus sits up and begins to talk. Listen attentively to his prayer to the Heavenly Father.

The readings for the Easter season harken to the first days of Christianity, allowing us to walk in the footsteps of the first Christians as they attempted to follow Christ as part of the young Church.

Today's readings focuses on embracing the crosses that God allows into our lives, even while our human nature resists that kind of suffering. We avoid it and anxiously try to change situations that are unpleasant. Yet Jesus Himself modeled for us the transformation and redemption that comes from hardship and pain.

Have you ever watched a herd of animals as they journey toward a destination? It's remarkable that their every move seems to be in sync with the entire group. Nature itself shows us that uniting together in community – as one body – is the way God intended us to behave.

Just as Peter denied Jesus three times, now the risen Lord asks Peter three times, "Do you love me?"

There are two sides to Christ's love. On one side He mercifully loves us wherever he finds us, even in our sin. On the other side, we see that he loves us too much to leave us in that condition, but draws us out to be transformed.

Today we celebrate the greatest of all Christian feasts: Easter Sunday. We come together rejoicing in the goodness of God, knowing that Christ's resurrection from the dead gives us the hope that we too will rise someday with him.