Angelus News | April 21, 2023 | Vol. 8 No
On the cover: Christ pulls Adam out of “limbo” while surrounded by other biblical figures in a late 13th-century painting (artist unknown). St. John Chrysostom famously wrote about Easter: “Forgiveness is risen from the grave.” But what does that mean for us? On Page 10, Mike Aquilina details how history, Scripture, and the experience of the apostles reveals forgiveness as the Resurrection’s most tangible result. On Page 14, Jennifer Hubbard recounts how her 6-year-old daughter’s murder in the Sandy Hook shooting led her on a journey to do the impossible.
On the cover: Christ pulls Adam out of “limbo” while surrounded by other biblical figures in a late 13th-century painting (artist unknown). St. John Chrysostom famously wrote about Easter: “Forgiveness is risen from the grave.” But what does that mean for us? On Page 10, Mike Aquilina details how history, Scripture, and the experience of the apostles reveals forgiveness as the Resurrection’s most tangible result. On Page 14, Jennifer Hubbard recounts how her 6-year-old daughter’s murder in the Sandy Hook shooting led her on a journey to do the impossible.
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Greg Erlandson is the former president and<br />
editor-in-chief of Catholic <strong>News</strong> Service.<br />
where you wanted; but when you grow<br />
old, you will stretch out your hands,<br />
and someone else will dress you and<br />
lead you where you do not want to go”<br />
(John <strong>21</strong>:18). Jesus wasn’t just foretelling<br />
Peter’s end, but the likely end of so<br />
many of us as well.<br />
It is sometimes easier to believe in<br />
Good Friday than in Easter Sunday<br />
when in my mom’s bedroom, but<br />
not only there: in the muddy charnel<br />
house of Bakhmut, in the 18-wheelers<br />
filled with the bodies of migrants risking<br />
all in the failed hope of a new life,<br />
in the gunshot victims on a thousand<br />
U.S. streets.<br />
It is not difficult in these darkening<br />
hours to believe in Good Friday. It is<br />
an act of courage, of faith, to believe<br />
in Easter Sunday. “I look forward to<br />
the resurrection of the dead and the<br />
life of the world to come,” we say every<br />
Sunday in the Creed. That fantastical<br />
assertion is based on our faith that<br />
Christ did indeed rise again. “Death no<br />
longer has power over him” (Romans<br />
6:9), Paul wrote. And because of our<br />
faith in Christ, death no longer has<br />
power over us. In faith, we look forward<br />
to the resurrection of the dead.<br />
Looking upon the body of my<br />
sleeping mother, a sleep that even now<br />
resembles death, I am speechless at<br />
the impenetrable mystery of it. That’s<br />
because of the sacrifice one God-man<br />
made 2,000 years ago, a sacrifice memorialized<br />
every single day since then,<br />
my mother’s life does not end here. In<br />
her end will be a beginning.<br />
I do not know what life beyond death<br />
will entail. Will she be transformed as<br />
Jesus was in the post-resurrection appearances?<br />
Will that vital woman who<br />
birthed eight children, who taught me<br />
to pray, to garden, to cook, to care, will<br />
she be restored to something altogether<br />
new, yet recognizable?<br />
What will 99 years of life come to<br />
be in the afterlife? I don’t know the<br />
answer to that. Yet, I believe that ours<br />
is “an inheritance that is imperishable,<br />
undefiled and unfading” (1 Peter 1:4),<br />
as Peter wrote.<br />
Even now, as my mom climbs her last<br />
Golgotha, in her love and her patience<br />
and her faith, she points toward Easter’s<br />
dawning and immortal light.
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