A Forever Kind of Love

A Reflection on the Psalm for Sunday, April 5th, 2025:
The Solemnity of Easter Sunday

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Psalm 118

R. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever. Let Israel say, “His steadfast love endures forever.”

R. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.

“The right hand of the Lord is exalted; the right hand of the Lord does valiantly.” I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.

R. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.

The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.

​R. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

“I haven’t heard that song in forever!” “Ugh, this elevator is taking forever!” 

I’ll be the first to admit that I am a big-time culprit of these kinds of misuses of the word “forever.” If something feels relatively long, we call it forever, even if it’s been under a minute!

The concept of “forever” is admittedly really difficult to wrap our finite minds around. We are used to time, and we’re used to chopping up our time into smaller, manageable blocks so that we can conceptualize it and get through it. 

So – for the sake of reflecting on today’s Psalm – would you do an experiment with me? 

Let’s take a breath and think about the Trinity existing before time began, before there were humans or dinosaurs, before there was any earth or sun or anything material. God was always there…. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit – I imagine them floating in an abyss of space for all of the time before the earth was formed, forever before.

Now think about the earth coming into being at God’s Word, and dinosaurs and humans and all the rest: paradise, sin, strife, Jesus’ redemptive sacrifice, our lives, our deaths, the lives and deaths of all those who will come after us and the end of time and the earth as we know it … and then what? Then God exists for all eternity, forever after. 

This is the kind of expansive, mysterious “forever” that we should understand in today’s Psalm. “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!” 

His love existed not only from before the beginning of time, His love for us endures forever – and we get the opportunity to live with Him forever. This Psalm is so beautifully chosen for Easter as it proclaims that we too will live forever because of Christ’s death and resurrection: “I shall not die, but I shall live…. Alleluia!” Because of Jesus’ rising from the dead, we are able to live in that steadfast love forever.

“This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad.” This new day that we experience on Easter morning is a new day that spans into eternity. May we all experience that huge embrace of the Trinity, God in Three Persons, who have loved us from before time began, and will love us, with a steadfast love, forever.

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Sr Angela Burnham

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