I wish you all a blessed and happy Easter. May the peace, the joy and the hope – that the Risen Lord brings to each of us – fill your hearts, your families, colleagues and friends during this Easter season.
Easter is called the feast of the feasts; the greatest feast in the church, because Easter is the fulfillment, and completion of Jesus’ mission on earth. It is also the center of our faith.
That is why St. Paul tells us: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain; and your faith is in vain…But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep”. So, the feast of Easter tells us that there is something beyond death; something beyond the tomb.
A tomb for all of us brings the bad and the sad news of sorrow, grief and death. And the closed tombs hold the remains of our loved ones and they hold the memories of pain and sorrow, broken and unfulfilled dreams.
However, Fr. Mark Link reminds us that the greatest event in history began in a tomb — a tomb that was secure and guarded. It is the greatest event in history because of the transformation it brought about in Jesus. That our Lord, who was crucified and buried in the tomb is in fact ALIVE: is alive in our midst and is among the living. Jesus’ tomb is open and empty – a sign of hope and a sign of new life. And because Jesus was raised to new life, the world was also raised to new life. That is what Easter is really about. It’s about being reborn. It’s about being re-created. It’s about becoming a new person.
One of the things that help us to go on living in spite of troubles, failures, disasters, death of our loved ones and the many sufferings we experience, is the ability to hope. Especially at this time, we hope that this pandemic will come to an end soon and we will be able to gather together without masks and hug each other, we hope that our troubles will end, we hope that we or our loved ones will get well soon, we hope that we will succeed and do well, we hope that tomorrow will bring a new day.
And it is this hope about the future that helps us to go on living. At Easter we celebrate the feast of the resurrection, the feast of hope. The same God who raised Jesus from the dead will help us rise from whatever is keeping us down, pulling us down, weighing us down, keeping us in our own tombs.
Time and again we may find ourselves buried in some tomb. It may be a tomb of resentment because of some hurt received from someone. It may be a tomb of fear about the future and what it holds for us. It may be a tomb of confusion or indifference about our faith and how to deal with it. It may be a tomb of disappointment and despair about some difficult situation in our lives and how to handle it. Or it may be a tomb of selfishness. And like Jesus, sometimes we have been in tombs made by others, ourselves or by the circumstances of our lives.
But what happened to Jesus in the tomb in Jerusalem is what God wants to happen to us. God wants to raise us up from our tombs to a new life. On that first Easter Sunday, Mary Magdalene and the disciples discovered that everything had not come to an end, that the tomb was INDEED empty and that Jesus was risen.
The message of Easter is that nothing, nothing can destroy us – neither pain nor sin, neither rejection nor death – because Christ has conquered all these and we too can conquer them if we put our faith in Him, if we have him by our side. Pope Francis reminds us – let Risen Jesus give our life a new horizon, a new hope and a decisive direction.
The Easter story remains the same, it has been the same for the last 2000 years – that Jesus is Risen. But it will change our stories forever; our stories will truly be different, if we truly believe in Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus victory over selfishness, sin and death reminds us that every Good Friday in our lives will have an Easter Sunday, because the love of God conquers all things.
Alleluia, Jesus Christ indeed is Risen and SO WILL WE BE. Amen!
