04/26/2026
๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐๐ ๐๐ฎ๐๐
For forty days after His resurrection, Christ was with His Disciples. They were forty days of amazement, confusion, hope and doubt, forty days of wonder. We continue to celebrate those forty days. We call them Eastertide: we sing Easter hymns, exchange the Easter greeting, โChrist is risen!โ, that originated with them so long ago. They are forty days of feasting during which, since the time of Nicaea, permit no fasting or abstinence.
Lent was the time for fasting and penitence; Eastertide transfigures those forty days of Lenten sorrow into Easter joy. St John Chrysostom, in his Paschal Sermon, tells us, โYou who have kept the fast and you who have spurned it, rejoice together todayโฆ let no one weep over his sins, for today, pardon shines forth from the graveโฆโ In the Gospel appointed for the Third Sunday after Easter, the Lord Jesus says to His befuddled disciples at the Last Supper, โI will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.โ
Happiness and joy arenโt the same thing. Weโre happy when we find a steak restaurant where โmedium rareโ really is medium ๐ณ๐ข๐ณ๐ฆ, when we receive a letter from an old friend, telling us weโre loved and missed, when we watch a mama duck teach her ducklings how to fly. Iโm happy when I find my reading glasses. Life is rich with occasions of happiness and flashes of delight.
But Christian Joy is something quite different. Happiness and delight are discoveriesโthey come and goโbut joy is an underground spring, always there, constantly flowing if sometimes barely perceived. Joy and peace are intimates, profoundly related. If happiness lightens our spirit, joy graces our soul.
Joy is not a sudden discovery but an abiding gift. St Paul counts it as a high gift of the Holy Ghost. โYour joy,โ the Lord Christ assures His disciples, โno man takes away from you.โ
He told them this, on the night in which He was betrayed, because their joy was about to be snatched from them. Within a few hours, Heโd be arrested. They would abandon Him in terror. Heโd be beaten and mocked, tortured and killed. His broken body would be buried. His cowering disciples would go into hiding. His words about joy were driven from their minds by iron nails and Roman whips.
And then-Easter.
Forty days of Easter, forty days of being with the One Who was dead and is now forever alive. During those forty days He opened their eyes, enlarged their hearts and transformed their minds so they ๐ฃ๐ฆ๐จ๐ข๐ฏ to understand what Heโd been saying to them and doing with them all along. He healed their guilt and freed them from sorrow. He taught them the Faith they thought they already knew, broke the Bread with them and opened the Scriptures to them. Those forty days of Easter laid the foundation of the rest of their lives.
Theyโre intended to be the foundation of ours, too. No less than them, weโre His disciples. Weโre ofttimes as clueless as they were to the meaning of His words. Like them, we sometimes run away, hide for fear and deny that we know Who He Is.
The abiding gift of those forty days of Easter was joy. The disciples came to see, some perhaps gradually, some maybe all at once, but all with equal certainty, that their Lord Jesus, the Victor over death, had not only overcome death and hell Himself, but destroyed its power over them, too โ over all who would ever be His disciples. You and I and โas many as have been baptized into Christโ are free. Not only free from death but more importantly, born again to joy, a joy nothing can take away from us; a joy lost only when we toss it aside.
The Joy of Christians is Jesus Christ Himself.
Not a sentimental, saccharine joy that floats on the surface of our psyche telling us if close our eyes real tight and hope real hard and think nice thoughts we can make the world a better place for you and me. Joy is no effeminate or adolescent virtue. Itโs the virtue of those whoโve been squeezed through the wringer, hung out on the line to dry and found grace in the breath of the breeze in which they were hung. Joy comes from the certainty that we belong to God, that Heโs doing with us precisely what He wants and that
๐ฏ๐ฐ๐ต๐ฉ๐ช๐ฏ๐จ ๐ฆ๐ญ๐ด๐ฆ ๐ฎ๐ข๐ต๐ต๐ฆ๐ณ๐ด. Thatโs โthe peace of God which passeth understanding,โ the pax which is the knowledge of God and the joy which is the Spiritโs high gift.
The feast of forty days bestows joy a lifetime canโt adequately celebrate.
๐๐ญ๐ฆ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฐ๐ด ๐ข๐ฏ๐ฆ๐ด๐ต๐ฆ!
the Third Sunday after Easter, 2026
