I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me. We can only appreciate the beauty of this refrain from today’s psalm if, we like the psalmist, recognize what God has done for us.
In today’s psalm, the author celebrates the extraordinary truth of what God has done for us and the desire of God to give us the fullness of life. When God entered the world in the person of Jesus, God shared fully in our humanity so that we could always trust that our God understood the joys, the difficulties, and the challenges of human life. In sharing our humanity, God also experienced the reality of human sinfulness. God did not participate in sin, but God was the victim of human sinfulness through the suffering and death of Jesus. God, therefore, knew that we needed to be liberated from the power of sin so that we could live as the children of God we are called to be. Through his suffering, death and resurrection, Jesus broke the power of sin and death so that all who placed their faith in him could live in the hope of one day sharing in his resurrection – the fullness of life. God has saved us from the power of sin, our own sin and the sin of others, so that we can live in the hope of one day living in the fullness of God’s life forever.
The Easter season is a time in which we celebrate the salvation that God has won for us. It is a time when we celebrate the real hope that is ours – our hope of everlasting life in and through Jesus Christ. The challenge of the Easter season is to recognize the ways that we turn from this hope that is ours by enslaving ourselves to patterns of behavior (sin) that deny us the rich and abundant life that God offers us. We must also recognize how our sin not only has an impact on us, but also on other persons. Our sin diminishes the richness of life that is the desire of God for all of God’s people.
In this Easter season, let us celebrate the truth that God has rescued us and let us seek the grace to diminish in our lives the frequency with which God must continue to rescue us.

Fr. Mark Hallinan, S.J.