Waiter: Tea or coffee, gentlemen?
1st customer: I'll have tea.
2nd customer: Me, too. And be sure the glass is clean.
(Waiter exits. Returns)
Waiter: Two teas. Which one asked for the clean glass?
Well, dear reader, I'm inviting you to sit back, way back in time, and reflect on what Easter used to mean when we were in the innocence and faith of childhood.
In his Easter homily "Here comes the Resurrection" Father Brendan McGuire spoke about when he first knew, without a doubt, that God was real in Christ. He relates a faith story about his father who made this realization possible.
"My father had bought a large piece ofswampland in Irelandbog land can be cut into turf, which is a fossil fuel basically. It can be cut with a plough and then planted with treesI was 12 years old at the time and I was with him as the first tractor appeared on the bog land to plough but it sank completely into the bog.
So he hired the best tractor man in the town to lift out the first tractorit sank as well
Basically, my dad was bankrupt if they stayed there. I remember him looking back at me and saying, "I don't know why this has happened but the Lord will provide a solution."
Two weeks later a rather inventive farmer, who had creatively put a plank of wood on every single one of the tracks of his bulldozer tractor so it basically floated, appeared on the horizon, and my dad said, "Here comes the Resurrection."
The man stepped out and he sank down to his waist." He pulled out the first tractor and then the second. And then he ploughed the bog in huge furrows so the McGuires could live off that land for the next twenty years. The Lord will provide!
The first message from the risen Christ comes from the angel in the tomb who says, "Go to Galilee and there you will see him" (Mark 16:8).
If we go to our Galilee, the place where we first knew the Risen Christ, where our faith was solid and unflappable, we will experience again that trust we knew back then.
What was it that our forefathers knew and that many today seemed to doubt about the Easter story? Think of all the Holy Week services we attended as children and how we just knew it was more important than the hockey game even though the Leafs were in the playoffs. And we couldn't even record the game!
