Easter 2015

Mar. 28, 2015

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Once more the holiest time of the year is with us and in this time God calls us to reflect on the sacrificial love shown on the cross by His Son, Jesus. Our minds should be focused on the great love shown by The Lord and the great mystery of His love that God would allow His only Son to lower Himself to suffer and die for those The Father has created.  That God would allow His creations to abuse, torture and put to death His Son so that His creations could find salvation in and through The Lord, Jesus.  This is love beyond human understanding but it is the love that is eternal, heavenly  and divine and the love that we can feel and experience by the grace of God.  That is why it is important to ask the Holy Spirit to lead each one of us deep into the mystery of divine love in this holy week so that we can become more open to that love, which though we will never fully understand it in this life on earth, we may be filled with that love and become examples of that love.

The grace we need is the grace to look beyond self and the world and to look to the cross where The Lord, Jesus, cries out, ‘This is how much I love you.’  To look to the cross and see the responsibility we all bear for the crucifixion of Our Lord and accept that responsibility asking the Lord to forgive us for making Him suffer for our sins.  Realizing that it was not only those at the time who crucified Christ but us too through our sins for He carried all the sins of mankind from the beginning to the end on the cross with Him.  Then in those words of divine love through the enormous pain He carried for us He called out. ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’  We in response should be forever giving thanks that The Lord for no other reason than He loves mankind suffered so much and sacrificed His all for us.

This holy week is a time where we should be calling out in imitation of Christ as we see the sin in our lives and in the world, ‘Lord, forgive us even though we know what we do and forgive those who do not know what they do.’

We should seek in this holy week the grace to change our lives so that we in imitation of Our Lord, Jesus, can embrace the cross for those who will not, that we can carry some of the burden of the sins of others who do not know what they are doing because they have been blinded by the world, so that in Jesus, Our Divine Lord of love and forgiveness others may find salvation. We have the blessed opportunity to cry out to our families, to all we know and to all of mankind, ’This is how much I love you,’ in the crosses we carry for them.  So that through us they may find the way to Christ, Our Lord.

This holy week is a time to truly look to the Lord and His supreme sacrifice and ask for the grace that we too may become sacrificial offerings of love to the Father in Heaven  for our brothers and sisters who are lost in self and the world.  Our Lord is the sacrificial Lord, His way is the way of sacrificial love may it be our way too if we truly want to follow Him to the eternal love that resides in Him in heaven.

May this holy time be a time of grace for you all.

God bless,

Alan Ames