The year turns and we celebrate Easter again. Yet it is not a different mystery or a new celebration simply on account of a year having passed. It’s a chance to enter the same mystery and discover more deeply and interiorly my place in it. And as I visited the seminary for the last time before Easter, I was struck once more by the scriptural phrase carved over the chapel door and highlighted in gold: Magister ad est et vocat te (“The Master is here and is calling you”).
It seems such an apt phrase to be written over the door of a seminary but its original context is not a vocational call. They are the words that Martha addresses to her sister Mary as Jesus arrives following the death of Lazarus (John 11:28). Martha has challenged Jesus by asking him, in effect, to do something about her brother’s death. To her profession of faith in the resurrection on the Last Day, Jesus replies: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
