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Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth!
Sing the glory of his name;
Give to him glorious praise.
Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds.”

Three years ago, most of us dreamed of this past week. We didn’t know when it would come, but we thought that when it did, we would all be out dancing in the streets. We expected to be living the words of today’s Psalm as we shouted thanks and sang praises to God.  But the silence was far louder than the gratitude. This week the World Health Organization declared that Covid 19 is no longer a global emergency, and most of us barely noticed. So many prayers have been answered and yet we are more aware of what we don’t have than of what we have been given.

Somehow that seems like a fitting metaphor for my faith in the sixth week of Easter.  All through Lent I gave extra attention to prayer and fasting, identifying broken places in my life and turning to God.  On Holy Thursday and Good Friday, I felt like I had accepted my human vulnerability and my human limits.  When Easter came, I was filled with a renewed sense of wonder and hope.  I felt myself to be a small child tenderly carried in the loving hands of God.  In my vulnerability, I felt safe and protected.  I started into the Easter season ready to live in gratitude, appreciating the gift of life in every moment in such a way that joy would spill over onto all those around me.  Easter Sunday night, even as I cried with someone dear to me, I knew that God brings beauty out of suffering and life out of death, and I knew that life is good even when it’s not going the way I want it to go.

But as the days wore on my focus started to shift again. The farther away I was from Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the easier it was for me to forget that they are a pair. Instead of watching for Christ in the midst of suffering, I slipped back to thinking that he would be in places without suffering, which meant that I was not finding him.  And when it came to this week, instead of seeing the wonder of our God who has brought us through the pandemic into a time without a health emergency, I have seen a society and a health system that have been exhausted and fragmented by a pandemic.

It is from this place that I read Jesus’ promise in today’s gospel that even though the world will not be able to see him, we will see him if we keep his commandment to love.  I cannot see Jesus if I look for him in “safe places” standing on his own in glory, all the suffering overcome.  I can, however, see him if I enter the difficult places and choose to love as he did, even when it is not easy.  In those moments when I accept the vulnerability of unconditional love, I see Jesus because I am in him and he in me.

And finally, I can see it: the miracle is not that the pandemic is over. The miracle is that God was with us all the way through the pandemic and if we were listening, he used the pandemic to teach us more about love.  “He turned the sea into dry land; they passed through the river on foot. There we rejoiced in him, who rules by his might forever.”

Pam Driedger