Dear Friends,
In the eyes of the Church, Easter continues on! Not satisfied with one day, we celebrate Easter for 50 days! The Easter
season ends on Pentecost…fifty days from Easter. To honor that reality and as we celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday, I’d
like to give you a bit of the homily that Pope Francis gave at the Easter Vigil in Rome. I always find his insights so
pastoral and helpful.
The first part of the homily was a reflection of the darkness of the vigil service itself, the darkness in which the
disciples found themselves after the death of Jesus and then the darkness in our world today. Then Pope Francis goes
on:
“It is the silent night of those disciples who are disoriented because they are plunged in a crushing routine that robs
memory, silences hope and leads to thinking that ‘this is the way things have always been done’. Those disciples who,
overwhelmed, have nothing to say and end up considering ‘normal’ and unexceptional the words of Caiaphas: ‘Can
you not see that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed?’
Amid our silence, our overpowering silence, the stones begin to cry out and to clear the way for the greatest message
that history has ever heard: ‘He is not here, for he has been raised.’ The stone before the tomb cried out and
proclaimed the opening of a new way for all. Creation itself was the first to echo the triumph of life over all that had
attempted to silence and stifle the joy of the Gospel. The stone before the tomb was the first to leap up and in its own
way intone a song of praise and wonder, of joy and hope, in which all of us are invited to join.
Today, we are invited to contemplate the empty tomb and to hear the words of the angel: ‘Do not be afraid… for he
has been raised.’ Those words should affect our deepest convictions and certainties, the ways we judge and deal with
the events of our daily lives, especially the ways we relate to others. The empty tomb should challenge us and rally our
spirits. It should make us think, but above all, it should encourage us to trust and believe that God ‘happens’ in every
situation and every person and that his light can shine in the least expected and most hidden corners of our lives. He
rose from the dead, from that place where nobody waits for anything, and now he waits for us – as he did the women –
to enable us to share in his saving work. On this basis and with this strength, we Christians place our lives and our
energy, our intelligence, our affections and our will, at the service of discovering, and above all creating, paths of
dignity.
He is not here… he is risen! This is the message that sustains our hope and turns it into concrete gestures of charity.
How greatly we need to let our frailty be anointed by this experience! How greatly we need to let our faith be revived!
How greatly we need our myopic horizons to be challenged and renewed by this message! Christ is risen, and with
him, he makes our hope and creativity rise so that we can face our present problems in the knowledge that we are not
alone.
To celebrate Easter is to believe once more that God constantly breaks into our personal histories, challenging our
“conventions”, those fixed ways of thinking and acting that end up paralyzing us. To celebrate Easter is to allow
Jesus to triumph over the craven fear that so often assails us and tries to bury every kind of hope.
The stone before the tomb shared in this, the women of the Gospel shared in this, and now the invitation is addressed
once more to you and to me. An invitation to break out of our routines and to renew our lives, our decisions, and our
existence. An invitation that must be directed to where we stand, what we are doing and what we are, with the ‘power
ratio’ that is ours. Do we want to share in this message of life or do we prefer simply to continue standing speechless
before events as they happen?
He is not here… he is raised! And he awaits you in Galilee. He invites you to go back to the time and place of your
first love and he says to you: ‘Do not be afraid, follow me.”
Peace,
Fr. Damian