Vigils Reading – Easter Monday

From a homily by

POPE BENEDICT XVI

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“You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen. He is not

here.” With these words, God’s messenger, robed in light, spoke to the women

who were looking for the body of Jesus in the tomb.

But the evangelist says the same thing to us: Jesus is not a character of the

past. He lives and He walks before us as one who is alive; he calls us to follow

him, the Living One, and in this way to discover for ourselves the path of life.

At Easter we rejoice because Christ did not remain in the tomb, his body

did not see corruption; he belongs to the world of the living, not to the world of

the dead; we rejoice because he is the Alpha and also the Omega, as we proclaim

in the Rite of the Paschal candle; he lives not only yesterday, but today and for

eternity.

But somehow the Resurrection is situated so far beyond our horizon, so

far outside all our experience that, returning to ourselves, we find ourselves

continuing the argument of the disciples: Of what exactly does this “rising”

consist? What does it mean for us, for the whole world, and the whole of history?

A theologian once said that the miracle of a corpse returning to life would

be ultimately irrelevant precisely because it would not concern us. In fact if it

were simply that someone was once brought back to life, and no more than that,

in what way would that concern us? But the point is that Christ’s Resurrection is

something more, something different… It is the…most crucial leap into a totally

new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its

development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and

concerns the whole of history.

The crucial point is that this man Jesus was not alone, he was not an “I”

closed in upon itself. He was one single reality with the living God, so closely

united with him as to form one Person with him. He found himself, so to speak,

in an embrace with him who is life itself, an embrace not just on the emotional

level, but one which included and permeated his being. His own life was not just

his own, it was an existential and essential communion with God, a “being taken

up” into God, and hence, it could not in reality be taken away from him.

Out of love, he could allow himself to be killed, but precisely by doing so

he broke the definitiveness of death, because in him the definitiveness of life

was present. He was one single reality with indestructible life, in such a way that

it burst forth anew through death…

His death was an act of love, of self-giving. At the Last Supper he

anticipated death and transformed it into self-giving. His existential

communion with God was concretely an existential communion with God’s

love, and this love is the real power against death, it is stronger than death.

The Resurrection was like an explosion of light, an explosion of love which

dissolved the hitherto indissoluble compenetration of “dying and becoming”. It

ushered in a new dimension of being. A new dimension of life in which, in a

transformed way, matter too was integrated and through which a new world

emerges.