Wednesday of the Second Week of Easter
During Easter Season many parishes call on their people to reaffirm their baptismal promises at the Sunday Eucharist. The questions we are asked are based on the Creed. In this profession of faith the question and answer format uses the basic response “I do.” Many of us say it in unison as if we have said it a thousand times before. At Easter Vigil, our elect are invited to make their profession of faith in front of the whole community beside the font. This year what struck me was the response of one of men who was about to be baptized. His answer to the questions was a strong, “I believe.” This young man’s response left few with dry eyes. His journey had brought him a long way and his words came from the heart. My eyes fill with tears just thinking about his passion for what is now our shared faith.
This must have been the passion that the disciples had at their own initiation. The zeal must have been especially profound like Apostles like Phillip and James, who had seen the Lord. Indeed their zeal may have been like the people who were initiated at vigil and likely even greater. Their friend Jesus was brutally executed now appeared in their midst. It was a great miracle, one that has echoed through two thousand years. Sometimes I wonder if the zeal is fading as the years go by?
Has your zeal for your faith faded in recent days or in recent years? Has your prayer ritual become routine so that you have begun to take it for granted? Or do the words pour over you in a way that you become a rock in a gently flowing stream and the spirit flows right past leaving you mildly unaffected? In both the first reading and the gospel, Paul and Jesus are trying to remind the disciples what is important. They are both teaching what is central to our faith. While Triduum is still not so far out of your mind’s eye, consider how you entered into those rituals. What struck you as being profound in those days? How do they inform your faith today?
Awestruck at the Vigil, keeps coming back up within me. Here was a group of men and women who were willing to stand before the community and say in so many ways, “Lord Jesus, you are my way, you are my truth and you are my life.” These neophytes and their zeal are reminder to us and our whole Catholic community of what it means to know the Lord. This knowing is not just something just in their head. This knowing means they live it through every breath and move they make. Their conversion can convert us. Their witness can cause to see the Lord dwelling in them and challenge us to consider what it is we mean by “belief.”
-Michael Montgomery