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Vigils Reading – 3rd Sunday of Easter
April 14
THE MYSTERY OF EASTER
An excerpt from “The Eternal Year” by Fr Karl Rahner1
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To do justice to the mystery of Easter joy with the stale words of human
speech is rather difficult. This is so not only because every mystery of the Gospel
penetrates only with difficulty into the narrow confines of human life – thereby
making it even harder for our words to grasp and contain and express these
mysteries – but because the Easter message is the most human tidings of
Christianity. That is why we find it the most difficult message to understand.
For what is most true, most obvious, and most easy, is the most difficult to be,
to do, and to believe. That is to say, we modern people base our life on the
unexpressed, and therefore all the more self-evident, prejudice that anything
“religious” is merely an affair of the most interior heart and of the loftiest spirit
– something that we must bring about by ourselves, something, therefore, that
involves the difficulties and unreality of the heart’s thoughts and moods.
But Easter tells us that God has done something. God himself. And his
action has not merely gently touched the heart of one here and there, so that
they tremble slightly from an ineffable and nameless someone. God has raised
his Son from the dead. God has quickened the flesh. God has conquered death.
He has done this – he has conquered – not merely in the realm of inwardness, in
the realm of thought, but in the realm where we, the glory of the human mind
notwithstanding, are most really ourselves: in the actuality of this world, far
from all “mere” thoughts and “mere” sentiments. He has conquered in the realm
where we experience practically what we are in essence: children of the earth,
who die.
1 The Eternal Year, Karl Rahner, Baltimore: Helicon Press 1964. pp.87f.