So much to wait for. I do pray we are patient. To be patient is to love, for St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Love is patient.” Waiting for us to reach our final and best condition, a condition that will leave behind all that presently opposes the genuine goodness of our bodies and souls, is a lot to ask of every person since the days of Adam and Eve. Yet, this is what God asks of us. To wait for something beyond language’s ability to grasp or understand, something that is so grand and great, that it must have a waiting part attached to it. I guess. We’ve all heard the saying, “Good things are worth waiting for.” Which is true. But this is very different on the waiting scale of one to ten. Probably because this “good thing we’re waiting for” is in fact infinite in number and kind. It doesn’t stop at the supposed highest number of ten. In fact, it leaves the number ten in the dust.

What is it that’s so difficult for us to wait for? The promise, of course, of our resurrected bodies. If only we really knew, or could even grasp in the smallest ways, how perfect and beautiful this condition is that awaits us, we would be crying, yearning, and screaming to possess it right now. Without a further moment of waiting. “Lord, give me the gift you promised to us through the resurrection of Jesus your Son. Allow me to bypass all the things of this world, bring me to that place of perfect peace and health, and allow me to live in the perfection of your light – in body and soul – forever.” The issue here, of course, is how this condition of absolute perfection is fully and totally beyond our capacity to bring about. Which points to the patient waiting referred to above. Otherwise, many would make it happen right now.

Maybe this is why so many good folks want Jesus to return as soon as possible. Their reason is not limited to God doing away with all violence against ourselves, against others, or against any part of God’s creation. This is certainly a good enough reason to cry, “Come, Lord Jesus, come. Do not wait any longer. Come to bring this world you created to its final stage of perfection, where all threat of war from people like Putin, the leaders in China and North Korea, and even the warmongers in our own country go up like a puff of smoke, never to return. Where peace reigns and violence is no longer a threat under our noses. Come, Lord Jesus, and do away with any and all rejection of how you created us in two genders, male and female you create them, how you established the Sacrament of Matrimony as the holy way to produce and multiply offspring who will grow to love you, and how the destruction of sacred, unborn life will never be lost again because those in power call it someone else’s right to destroy your most precious gift.”

The above list for not wanting to wait any longer for the perfection of our bodies and souls is long and varied, and will likely continue to grow longer and more varied if we continue to throw our Creator out of the creation He created, seeing how good it was at one time long ago. As we address the countless imperfections of our own time, in body and in spirit, I suspect this is not a new project for any generation of people. I think of those who were forced to deal with the implications of the Second World War, and the much, much evil that pervaded the world in those years of intense uncertainty. Without question, notably the Jewish people, many of them asked, “Where is God in all this? What happened to the beautiful world God created for our benefit, and the many goods that come from the earth?” Undoubtedly, many millions were saying, “Peace, peace, we have no peace.” They waited for peace to arrive, but the door was not opened for at least a decade of what could be correctly described

as the harshest years in human history. They waited, and waited, and waited, and millions died while waiting.

These are the situations that happen to one degree or another in every generation that make segments of said generation cry out, “Lord Jesus, come. Return to us and me personally so that we and I can finally arrive at the supreme gift you promised to those who believe in you and love you. The gift of human perfection in body and soul raised from the dead. This is what you made us for. This is it. This is the way you formed and shaped us from the clay of the earth, creating us in your image and likeness, so that Funeral Homes will no longer be needed. This is the ultimate meaning of your empty grave with no human body inside. All things and places associated with death will become obsolete. What will be is life, and having it in pure abundance.”

To shift slightly here in this column, I wish to thank Mary Magdalene, whom I look forward to meeting in heaven, for loitering outside the tomb of Jesus on that first Easter morning. See, sometimes it’s good to loiter when we’re searching for the good and holy. When the story seems to be in the negative, like Mary Magdalene thought that morning, well, God is full of good surprises. The last person Mary expected to encounter that morning was an alive Jesus. She searched for a dead Jesus, but she was united again with an alive Jesus. Can we imagine the level of joy that flushed through her heart and all her veins when she came to realize it was Jesus alive and well standing before her? If this does not make for a good meditation, then what does?

It’s a very useful theological question why Jesus chose Mary Magdalene as the first disciple he would appear to after his resurrection. Or at least what’s recorded in John’s Gospel. Maybe our Lord appeared to his Holy Mother first, not causing her to wait or hear the news from someone else, and Mary kept this incredible news in the silence of her perfect heart all those years she lived with John after her Son’s resurrection and ascension. Or, I suppose we could draw this into a male/female type of discussion or meditation like we do in rabid ways nowadays, but to do so, I believe, would not bring us to an answer that ultimately satisfies the truth. Jesus’ appearance first to Mary Magdalene could be connected to the disciples’ flight from the Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane after they all left the Upper Room that evening. They scattered like frightened sheep, leaving the Good Shepherd to deal with worldly forces on his own, while some of the holy women go on to stand at the foot of his Cross. Thus, Jesus was not going to appear first to the ones living in fear. But this does not ultimately satisfy either. At least not yours truly.

In John’s Gospel, Mary goes running back to the Upper Room to inform the Apostles that the Lord’s tomb is empty. “He’s gone, and I don’t know where they laid him!” Peter and John run to the tomb, step inside, see it just as Mary told them, and the two Apostles eventually leave. But Mary stays. She loiters. And by doing so, Mary receives the first ticket. Not a loitering fine, but a loitering ticket. A ticket that allows her to see what her future looks like. When Jesus called her name and said “Mary,” realizing in that moment Who it was that spoke her name, it was like Jesus gave Mary a forever ticket to his presence where she would no longer know the sorrow of someone’s death, the abuses of her own body, the struggles that can accompany the search for holiness, and the dissipation of all human weakness that leads to despair. Mary’s first purpose – and ours – stood before her in all his resurrected glory, ticketing her soul – and eventually her body – for the peak human condition God will freely give to us. Jesus appeared to Mary first because Mary was the only one of his disciples in this group who was moved by the Holy Spirit to stay behind, to patiently wait, and maybe something good will happen. Well,

it did. Mary Magdalene is the best Stayer-Behinder the world has known. Yet, even she waits for our highest condition to come about when Jesus returns.

There is much in our world, as there has been in every past generation, that will cause us to yearn for the Lord’s return at this time, now that his resurrection from the dead has happened once and for all. The constant violence; the abuses of power; the many attempts to control people emanating from governments and other groups; the control speech groups; the burning down cities folks; the abusers of one’s body by ways of sodomic sexuality and uncertain gender; the disruption of God’s values; making good people out to be evil, and those who do evil to be good where common sense is lost; and in our own Church, the blaspheming of the Holy Spirit by certain Bishops and Cardinals, coupled with attempts to make what is profoundly unholy in the sight of God in sexual matters and relations to be somehow God-sanctioned. This, and much more, will make a genuinely devout Christian, and not a self-proclaimed one, to stop wanting to wait for the securing of the forever beauty of our highest condition for which God has created us. The condition, of course, is the resurrection of our bodies as the natural extension of our Lord Jesus’ resurrection we celebrate on Easter Sunday. But, as Jesus said in the Garden on the night he was betrayed, “Father, thy will be done, not mine.” This includes the consummation of the world. So, we wait. Happy Easter.