We’re poor, we humans walking the earth. We’re nothing in the vast universe, and can keep nothing. If God forgot us, even for a micro-second, we wouldn’t exist. Maybe that’s why we crave wealth, because our fundamental poverty frightens us and we want control.

Our greatest poverty is that we’ve been sold into slavery to death. All our bravado can’t control or undo the way death works on us all. We try to control it by delaying or reducing its impact. We even wield it as a tool in our tiny hands—like a small child picking up a sledgehammer. We threaten each other with it, willing to dispatch even the very young and the very old to death. We fool ourselves into thinking we have the ‘power of choice’ over death. Those of us living where assisted suicide has become legal see humanity’s fear of death writ large, and the consequences of that fear amid our efforts to control death.

Our fear of death, and even more deeply the terror of non-existence, haunts us and can twist us into terrible shapes. All emotions, born from this one fear, play on us the same logic of death, so we tend to control them. We squeeze them into logical packages where we can pretend they’re not important, or we give them power to define us and excuse our actions. 

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Such is humanity, on its own against death, indulging or suppressing the mother of all our fears. But what if we learn to confess our fears and emotions, and let them lead us to the conqueror of death?

This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re sinful and we need to go to confession every time we’re angry or afraid, sad or ashamed. Confessing emotions means exposing them to Christ. It’s not easy to feel and show them; but with Him, we come to see them in the light of His victory over death.

Lazarus’ sister Mary, for example, met her brother’s death with her face in the dust. Throwing herself at Jesus’ feet, she didn’t hide her emotions but confessed them to Him with everything she had. Mary of Bethany met Jesus in the heart, a heart feeling grief, anguish and anger, unashamed to open itself to God. They faced death together, awash in tears.

Tears aren’t in short supply in Scripture. Christians needn’t fear them. Nor need we be afraid of anger, shame, or fear itself. When we bring these emotions to Him, He meets us there. Jesus shows us that sorrow, anger, fear, disgust, all can be brought to Him. If we’ve allowed them to lead us into sin, He knows what to do for us. He holds all hearts in His one divine-human heart, sharing our humanity so as to free those “held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:15).

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During the Passion, everybody is afraid, including Judas and Pontius Pilate. Many are angry, including Simon Peter who cuts off someone’s ear. There’s enough sorrow to fill the world and indeed the whole universe. The disciples are naked in their emotions, like the young man who ran away naked in fear of the outcome (Mark 14).

Lent after Lent, the Church asks us to feel the rage as we choose death – “Crucify him!” – and feel the fear and anguish at each station of the cross. Can we bring these darkest of emotions to Him without hiding? Dare we also feel the joy of the resurrection? This can be as difficult for us; sometimes we just want to hop along with the Easter bunny instead.

Joy may be a foolish risk. As we feel joy bubbling up, we’re often nervous. Many people, face-to-face with joy, pause and feel dread or even terror, and possibly turn away. Won’t joy lead us astray? Isn’t it unfair to be joyful when so many people are suffering? Can we trust joy?

But what if joy is something else than what we fear, something God alone can give? 

The women who first witnessed the Resurrection immediately felt fear. Not the fear of death, this time. For the first time in history, on the first Easter morning, humans felt fear not in the face of death, but in front of life.

They felt this fear, but didn’t cling to it. They surrendered, opening their fears to God as Jesus teaches us to do, and so opening themselves also to the gift of joy. If they had protected themselves from fear, how would the rest of us have known the joy of the Resurrection? 

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We can accept sorrow; can we accept and welcome joy? It disrupts the usual news cycle of fear, sin and death. 

Joy is not like the other emotions that are as predictable as taxes and death. It can’t be fabricated, but only created in us by the work of the Holy Spirit, through an encounter that surprises us. In our poverty we expect death, and there we discover—in fear, at first—life.