You could go here and read the Pope’s entire Easter message, but I was so struck by these passages that I want to repeat them here:
Indeed, one of the questions that most preoccupies men and women is this: what is there after death? To this mystery today’s solemnity allows us to respond that death does not have the last word, because Life will be victorious at the end. This certainty of ours is based not on simple human reasoning, but on a historical fact of faith: Jesus Christ, crucified and buried, is risen with his glorified body. Jesus is risen so that we too, believing in him, may have eternal life….
Ever since the dawn of Easter a new Spring of hope has filled the world; from that day forward our resurrection has begun, because Easter does not simply signal a moment in history, but the beginning of a new condition: Jesus is risen not because his memory remains alive in the hearts of his disciples, but because he himself lives in us, and in him we can already savour the joy of eternal life….
The proclamation of the Lord’s Resurrection lightens up the dark regions of the world in which we live. I am referring particularly to materialism and nihilism, to a vision of the world that is unable to move beyond what is scientifically verifiable, and retreats cheerlessly into a sense of emptiness which is thought to be the definitive destiny of human life. It is a fact that if Christ had not risen, the “emptiness” would be set to prevail. If we take away Christ and his resurrection, there is no escape for man, and every one of his hopes remains an illusion.
Yet today is the day when the proclamation of the Lord’s resurrection vigorously bursts forth, and it is the answer to the recurring question of the sceptics, that we also find in the book of Ecclesiastes: “Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’?” (Ec 1:10). We answer, yes: on Easter morning, everything was renewed…
If this message sinks into your mind and heart, you begin to feel that you cannot contain it. You are living in a new world. You are not simply hoping for eternal life, but have begun to experience it, because the blank wall that loomed at the end of what you thought was your life is no longer there.
Maybe, like me, you aren’t always sure that you really believe this; maybe you even think the fact that you have such a desperate need for it to be true means that it probably isn’t. But when you do believe it you understand those well-known words of Julian of Norwich: all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
My old friend Anja, who lives in Finland, tells me that in the northern countries Good Friday is called Long Friday. And she wonders what’s good about it (she grew up with Christianity but, like many or most Europeans of our generation, is not a believer). She remembers it as being only long and sad. Of course the whole complex theology of sin, sacrifice, and atonement is involved, but it occurred to me that there is also a more straightforward reason why we call this Friday good. The moment of Jesus’s death is the moment when Life enters Death and begins to destroy it—not in the sense that a powerful force overpowers and crushes a thing, but in the sense that where light is, darkness is not.
I’ve sometimes wondered what the progress of light filling a dark room would look like if we could slow it down. Light moves so fast that, on a human scale, we can’t detect any lapse of time between the kindling of a light in a dark place and the place being filled with light. But if we could slow it down, we would see first a tiny point of light, and see it gradually expanding until it took in the whole room. (Well, ok, this is not just practically but theoretically impossible for us, since we don’t see anything until the light reaches our eyes, but we can imagine it.)
Maybe something like that happened between Good Friday and Easter: at the moment the Savior entered death, an infinitely small point of light appeared in the blackness of death, and it grew and grew until it had completely replaced the darkness. Death died, as darkness dies in the advance of light. And the light has continued to expand into human history and indeed the whole cosmos ever since.
Oh foolish death, to have swallowed that which is your own negation.
(P.S. Curious about the term “Long Friday,” I looked around on the web and found this interesting comparison of the terms written, apparently, by a Swede living in Ireland. While you’re reading it you can listen to an excerpt from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
And a hat tip to Amy Welborn for the link to the Pope’s address.)
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