We enter this Easter season at a time when the world is weighted down by the burden of war. Between the news of military operations dominating the headlines, the disruption of global trade, and the rising costs we all feel at the grocery store and the gas pump, many people are asking whether we are witnessing the end of days. Some voices—even religious ones—are using the language of the Apocalypse to justify the thunderous sound of bombs, claiming that this violence is a necessary roadmap for the return of Christ. 

As your pastor, I want to offer a different word this Easter: Christian hope is not a mathematical calculation of the end times.
 
When we fall into what I call “apocalyptic fear,” we begin to look at our neighbors as characters in a script rather than children of God. We start to see war as inevitable, or even divine. But our faith teaches us that God does not delight in the destruction of the living. To claim that we can force the hand of God through military conflict is, as the Holy Father has recently warned, a grave sin and a supreme deception. The God of Easter morning is not the god of the missile strike.
 
It helps here to distinguish between optimism and hope. Optimism is the casual feeling that things will just work out. Hope is something far deeper. Hope is the conviction that even when the unbridgeable chasm opens up—even when the news is unrelenting and the suffering seems senseless—God is already there, working for the reconciliation of all things. In the Resurrection, Jesus did not bypass suffering. He went through it. When He appeared to the disciples in the Upper Room, He still bore the wounds of the Cross. Our hope this Easter is not that the world’s troubles will vanish overnight. It is that the Risen Christ is present in the midst of them—in the bread we break, in the care we show to the most vulnerable among us, and in our refusal to let fear dictate how we live.
 
So what does this hope look like in practice, here in Pittsburgh, here at St. Benedict the Moor? It looks like checking on our neighbors who are struggling under rising costs. It looks like praying for the families in Iran, Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon—not as players in a prophecy, but as brothers and sisters trapped in a tragedy. It looks like refusing the video-game mentality of war and insisting, without apology, on the dignity of every human life from conception until natural death.
 
While the world argues over political polemics, our pole remains fixed: the Cross and the Empty Tomb. The birth pangs of a new creation are not found in the smoke of a missile strike, but in the quiet, persistent life of the Church—in this parish, at this altar, among this people. As we celebrate the joy of Easter, let us pray for the grace to be people of the Resurrection: people who see the scars of the world and believe, with every fiber of our being, that the last word belongs not to death, but to Life.
 
Peace be with you.
— Fr. Matt