{"id":12928,"date":"2021-04-08T10:27:19","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T15:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.holytrinityweb.com\/weekly\/?p=12928"},"modified":"2021-04-08T11:03:11","modified_gmt":"2021-04-08T16:03:11","slug":"whered-he-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holytrinityweb.com\/weekly\/whered-he-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Where\u2019d He Go?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Where'd<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

They looked in and saw. He was gone. The tomb was empty. The white burial cloth was folded up and laying on a stone. Scripture says they \u201cdid not yet understand that he had to rise from the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So \u201cwhere is he? Where did he go?\u201d Jesus, we want to know where you are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I remember when my father died in 1988. He had been declining for some months and the night he passed my sister and I sat with him as he breathed his last. (Many of you have had that scary but holy moment.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was so weird. I remember thinking about the large personality he was. How he loved birds, gardening, Italian spaghetti, his country, and his Catholic Faith. How dad hated military parades, foreign cars, squirrels, and the New York Yankees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I looked at his hands that night, hands that fired a gun in Patton\u2019s 3rd Army, cut my hair as a kid, played catch in the yard, and took my hands in his, the day I became a priest. His deep baritone voice called your name like no one else \u201cDad, where are you?\u201d I kept wondering. \u201cWhere did that voice go?\u201d Don\u2019t we all ask that when someone we love is gone? We feel the space they lived in, the chair, the porch, the work bench. The disciples must have felt a similar loss as they peered into the empty tomb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Our Christian faith proclaims something quite extraordinary. Something that science (physics, biology, astronomy, and chemistry) cannot verify or prove (or disprove) . . . Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of us must look inside ourselves for this one. Why do I believe? Is it because the Pope says so? OR because that\u2019s just what I was taught? OR It makes for something nice to teach the children? I hope that\u2019s not your answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

May I suggest an answer? Because we have seen a love that surpasses all reason, a love so strong and pure that it could only come from a source beyond the human heart. (It\u2019s not the love in romance, not the love of hobby or pastimes, not the love of beauty or art.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This past week we have watched a human being love like God. It\u2019s a love never seen or imagined before him. Jesus died giving witness to a God who loves us in a totally selfless way. He endured scourges and spitting, he forgave his murderers from the cross, he emptied himself totally at the will of God his Father . . . so that the invisible love of God might become visible to us by the obedience of his Son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there\u2019s more . . . we believe that Jesus is alive because countless men, women, and children have experienced the love of Christ in their own lives and have in turn given that love to their neighbor. We\u2019ve seen the love that is Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Have you seen it? Have you seen or felt His love working in this world? Of course you have!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n