Happy Easter everyone!  What a beautiful day to celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord. He is truly Risen. It is a cause to celebrate every day, but today especially.

How will you celebrate Jesus’ victory over sin and death today? How will you celebrate?  I was thinking about this as I read the readings, celebrating the victory as a witness to these events, just a strong emphasis on Witnesses today…

• In that first reading St. Peter says “We are witnesses of all that he did”
• In the Gospel we have a bunch of witnesses, Mary sees the empty tomb and they tell the apostles.
• And even in the beautiful poem, the sequence that we heard sung, we command Mary to speak declaring what she saw.

And that emphasis on witnesses is carried on in the early church and early church history.  Early church fathers wrote, “I talked to this person and they talked to this apostle and told us what happened.”

That emphasis on witness is so essential for our faith because our faith is not just a philosophy, it is not just a way of living, it is an encounter with a person who came to this earth, it is an encounter with a real person and a real event.

God really became man, He really died for us, He really rose again in victory, taking away the power of death and sin, and taking away from ourselves our own inadequacies and failings.

It is a real person that we meet this Easter, and we meet a person like we do in any way in our lives.  First we hear about a person from someone else, they say “hey, you should meet my friend, he is a good guy,” and eventually we meet that person ourselves.

When we encounter Jesus Christ, when we meet Him profoundly and experience the power of this incredible event, this life changing event where God died for our sake and rose again, it changes our hearts. 

That intimate relationship of love transforms us and we can’t be the same person again after we’ve met Him. Our lives have to change, we have to realize the incredible joy that comes from Easter comes from the fact that I’ve finally met the one whom my soul loves, and that his love has truly changed me.

This is what it means to be a witness, you know?  When thinking about celebrating the victory that Jesus has won for us, I can’t help but think about baseball, which opened its season on Thursday.

Actually I was just on KDTH on Thursday morning with Michael Kaye who was doing a whole morning dedicated to the start of the baseball season, so I told the short story about the one and only time I was at Wrigley Field for their home opener in 2016.

I told the story about how I met Ryne Sandberg after he threw out the first pitch.  I talked about how my friends got engaged on the Jumbo-Tron.  And I talked about how the Cubs actually won that day!

I’ve told that story dozens of times, re-lived that celebration over and over.  I have lots of good stories from games that I will tell when reminded, stories of various victories, and even defeats.  

But the thing is, none of them, none of those stories are as good as the story of Jesus Christ, when He snatched Victory from the jaws of Defeat.

Friends, this is the best story ever, and let me suggest, that if we aren’t sharing the story of Jesus Christ, if we aren’t witnessing to the events that occurred, we aren’t really celebrating, we are just missing out on a great opportunity.

Oh sure, we weren’t there at the tomb, we weren’t there to talk to the apostles, but these things have been handed on in the full for us.  But we have definitely been witnesses to God’s love in our lives, small encounters, big encounters, signs that were undeniable.  

We back today’s story of Jesus' victory’ up with our own witness stories of His love in our own lives.  We are witnesses to that.

And we have to do that, because, well this is what really struck me today in that first reading, “Peter proceeded to speak and said: “You know what has happened all over Judea...”

And that struck me because that is simply not true.  It may have been then, or even once here, but it isn’t anymore  People do not know the story of Jesus and what happened. They really don’t, even though we expect them to, even though, with almost everything in our lives, we expect people to be at the same level that we are, but they aren’t.

An example of this: my sister and I were talking yesterday.  She told me about how a couple years ago, after nearly 35 years of being Catholic, she had finally connected that Jesus was killed at the Passover to be the final sacrificial Lamb who paid for our sins once and for all. 

It’s language we hear all the time at mass, but she had never connected it to the Old Testament, when God’s people had to sacrifice a lamb each year at the passover to pay for their sins, then eat the flesh of the lamb to complete the passover covenant. 

This understanding of WHY Jesus had to die to take away our sins, and WHY we have to eat the flesh of the Paschal lamb in the Eucharist transformed her faith. The Paschal mystery that we celebrate at Easter finally made sense to her after all these years. Paschal means Passover by the way, and the Spanish name for Easter is Pascua. 

So, as my sister was reflecting on it all these past couple weeks, she got excited about it again and started talking about it to her friends -- how until recently she didn’t understand why Jesus had to die for our sins, why it is truly right and just to participate in the Eucharist, why the Eucharist HAS to be the true flesh of the lamb as the new covenant, not just a symbol of the lamb. 

Much to her surprise, she realized that 6 of her closest friends who grew up in the faith did not understand it either. In her desire for others to experience the joy she has found in truly understanding her Catholic faith, she continues to talk about it. 

And that’s just it. If we want people to experience the joy of Jesus we have to be witnesses to them.  Who else is going to do it if not us?

And maybe you are like, well, I didn't even know that about the Lamb and the Passover, how can I be a witness and share my faith? Well, you know the main thing, God loves you, He has won the victory over sin and death. And sometimes that's all the more you need to know and share. 

In fact, whatever it is that gets you excited about your faith, that’s what you should share, because people want to understand the reason for your joy.

So when you are celebrating Easter today, or celebrating every Sunday, or any time, take the opportunities that are presented to you to share your faith.  We are all witnesses of God’s great love in our lives.