The Best News

No one likes to receive bad news. But bad news is part of life: the ballgame is rained out, you didn’t get the job, the doctor calls with a scary diagnosis. But sometimes bad news is followed by good. The game is canceled, but tomorrow is a doubleheader. You didn’t get the job, but the boss is offering a better one. That scary disease? No worries – there’s a cure.

In today’s first reading, the apostle Peter addresses the people of Jerusalem. What he has to say must have been very difficult to hear: the man Jesus whom they had killed had been sent by God, was in fact God’s very Son. As he says, “The author of life you put to death.” Talk about the ultimate bad news! But quickly he follows it with good news – the best news, actually: God has raised this Jesus from the dead, and through him he has made it possible to receive the forgiveness of sins.

This is the basic message of our Christian faith, and one which we continue to proclaim today: that we human beings did the worst possible thing – we killed the Man who was God – but even then God did not stop loving us. Risen from the dead, Jesus continues to offer us the love of God – the love that heals, reconciles, and forgives. We need that healing, reconciling, and forgiving, of course, because of our sins. It can feel like receiving bad news to realize that sin is still a part of our lives even when we believe – that even after receiving the Good News of the Resurrection, we can struggle with sin. But as St. John tells us in the second reading today, fortunately we have an Advocate: Jesus who continues to intercede on our behalf with the Father, most especially in the area of mercy.

"Jesus Appears to the Disciples" (14th cent.), Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
Photo by Ralph Hammann, Creative Common License CC BY-SA 4.0

Sometimes we hear the criticism, “Why does the Church focus so much on sin?” That’s sort of like asking why a doctor focuses so much on disease! The Church speaks about sin, because sin is what stands in the way between us and God. Because of the Resurrection, there is no sin more powerful than God’s love, but to receive that love we must let go of our sins. That’s why the apostle Peter ends his address to the people of Jerusalem by urging them to repent: to turn away from sin in order to turn toward the forgiving love of the Risen Jesus.

If we really have faith in the Lord’s Resurrection, then repentance must be a theme never too far from our minds and hearts. We focus on it especially in the penitential seasons of Lent and Advent, but in Easter, too, there is cause to look at the newness of the risen life of Christ and where it is that we might need and desire that newness in our own lives. What in our lives feels old and tired? What still stands in the way between us and God? The Resurrection allows us to bring those things to Christ and to invite him to transform them, so that we can be transformed. The Lord comes to us, as today’s Gospel tells us, always with the gift of peace – a peace beyond what the world knows because he is beyond the power of the world.

Friends, receiving bad news is a part of life. But there is no bad news that isn’t followed by good news, the best news, really – that the love of the Risen Jesus heals, reconciles, forgives, and ultimately saves us, if we receive it. That is *the* Good News, the Gospel, which we must come to believe again and again and to which we must bear witness to the world.