Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Easter

Author Max Lucado tells the story about a newspaper article about Chippie the Parakeet:

One day, Chippie was sitting peacefully in his cage. One minute he was there and the next minute he was gone.

It was time for Chippie’s owner to clean his cage and she decided that a more efficient way to do it was with a vacuum cleaner. Just as she stuck the neck of the hose into the cage, the telephone rang. Without thinking, she turned to answer the phone and she heard a terrible sound. Chippie had been sucked into the vacuum cleaner. In horror, she dropped the phone. She opened the vacuum cleaner bag and was relieved to see that Chippie was still alive, albeit quite dazed.

Since the bird was covered with dust and everything else that was in the bag, she picked him up and ran to the bathroom where held him under running water from the faucet to clean him off. She saw that Chippie was sopping wet and cold, so she grabbed the hairdryer and let the poor bird have it until he was dry.

Later that week, the reporter who had written about it, contacted Chippie’s owner to see how the bird was doing. “Well,” she said, “Chippie doesn’t sing much anymore; he just sits and stares.” [1]

It may be that we often feel like poor Chippie –disheartened, disappointed, distrustful. The optimism and joy of our youth can, if we are not careful, be replaced by cynicism, doubt, and scornfulness.

It is easy to understand the reaction of Thomas in today’s Gospel when he hears the shocking news that Jesus had risen from the dead. But the empty tomb calls us to move beyond our fears, sorrows, anger, and doubts in order to awaken the possibilities for resurrection along our journey to the Easter promise as well as the completion of that journey.

As Thomas experiences, Easter transforms our crippling sense of skepticism and cynicism into a sense of trust and hope in the providence of God.

Life will give us many reasons to have doubts about the goodness of human nature and life in general. But Jesus’ Resurrection and our annual celebration of this season of hope, give us reason to turn our sorrows into joys, our despair into hope, and our defeats into triumphs of faith.

Let us pray that this Easter season will be an opportunity for us to turn to God with our difficulties and ask God, with open hearts, to transform our lives through the joy of this season.+

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[1] Lucado, Max, “In the Eye of the Storm,” Thomas Nelson (HarperCollins Publishing), 2012.