For My Brothers Sake (Psalm 122:8)

 


Monday, April 21, 2025


Psalms 121; 122; 123

Exodus 12:1-20

John 20:1-18


For My Brothers Sake (Psalm 122:8)


For my brothers and companions' sake
    I will say, “Peace be within you!”


Christ is risen, alleluia!


How was your Lent? How was your Holy Week? How was your sacred three days of the Great Triduum?


What I love about this time of year is that it feels like, by comparison to the rest of the year, a time of being spiritually supercharged. The slow burn of Lent, the imminent catastrophe of Holy Week, the dread of Maundy Thursday, the horror of Good Friday, the slow exhale of Holy Saturday, and the unspeakable joy of the party of Easter Day – time truly is a gift from God to be used in order to get to know him better.


And yet all these things have already happened. We do not re-enact so much as remember Christ’s passion, cross and resurrection. Now that we explode into Easter Week, we hopefully have a new and greater love for Jesus, because of what he has done for us, and more importantly, who he is to us.


When he speaks to Mary Magdelene in the garden he refers to his disciples as his “brothers”. Up until this point he has called his followers “servants” and “friends”.


He closed the yawning gates of hell;
the bars from heaven's high portals fell.


Through his blood which has satisfied the punishment for sin, God and his people are now truly one big happy family.


I deliberately chose the Psalm as today’s verse for the day, not the passage where Jesus calls his disciples his brothers. If we read the Psalms with our ‘Easter antenna’ up, we often discover Jesus speaking in places we never realised. And since Christ is our brother, the one in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:31), we sing these Psalms as his words through him, as his close relative. And he speaks them to us: for the sake of the house of the Lord, Christ will seek our good (Psalm 122:9).


The three sad days are quickly sped;
he rises glorious from the dead.
All glory to our risen Head.
Alleluia!

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