Happy Easter holidays!

[AI translation] This morning we all greeted each other with, "Happy Easter! Do we know what that means? When does someone have a really happy Easter? Is it when you can spend today and tomorrow relaxing in the beautiful spring sunshine, with a happy family, a good meal and a carefree holiday? Isn't it? But if it's a bit like that first Easter... Because the first Easter was a really happy day. Everyone who participated in it with faith was filled with joy. The sorrowful disciples at Emmaus were comforted, the doubting Thomas was reassured, the weeping Mary Magdalene's face was revealed, the unfaithful Peter was forgiven, all sorrow, bitterness, despair, pain was turned into joy, hope, trust... As sad as the Easter morning was, the noon and the evening have become so bright and radiant! In the morning there was mourning, but by evening there was rejoicing everywhere! Yes, that first Easter day was a happy day indeed! And what made it such a happy day, such a full day, such a feast? Well, the conviction of Jesus' resurrection, the encounter with the risen Jesus! That is the true joy of Easter today: the conviction of Jesus' resurrection and the encounter with the risen Jesus! Let us not be satisfied with less joy!Yes, but it is not so easy! The news itself, the news of the resurrection, sounds so preposterous that it is not easy to give it any credibility with a sincere heart. The resurrection, the coming back to life from the dead, is an idea, a concept, which in no way fits into our thoughts and concepts. It cannot fit in any way into the dimension of our human possibilities and expectations. It completely escapes our groping, searching hands. It is much easier to imagine someone leaving this earth to go to another planet than to imagine someone leaving death and returning from the other world alive. Because we are used to the idea that death is a serious matter, that it cannot be played with. In fact, all our experience shows us that only death is truly omnipotent, and that in the end everyone lays down their arms and surrenders to it. Yet the whole world is mobilising against death. The whole of human science, technology, every laboratory, every hospital is mobilised against the power of death. And the only thing that death allows this great collective effort is to be postponed for a few years. Human life has indeed been prolonged, but what does it matter to death, it can generously allow people those few years, or even decades, since in the end it is certain of its prey. There is no escaping it anyway!
Otherwise, we are living in a time which, more than any other, is threatened by the powers of death. There is a technical power in the hands of men with which unimaginable destruction, terrible death, can be brought about. And men, instead of being frightened by this unheard-of responsibility and seeking rapprochement with one another, are only widening the gulf of distrust, increasing their animosity against one another, and increasing almost day by day the terrible threat of great death. And then our own little life is at every moment a life threatened with death, a life locked up in the prison of death!
And would it have been in this world of death that Christ rose from the dead? Well, indeed, it would be good if it were really, really, really so! Oh, how good it would be if someone would show this tyrannical power, death, that it is not all-powerful! That he is not as great a lord as he pretends to be. That it's not true that it's all over once it comes, once it appears. Oh, how good it would be to believe the Easter message, to be sure of the reality of the resurrection! But lo, even those who heard it first could not believe it. They could not imagine that someone could break the omnipotence of death. For them, too, Jesus was definitively dead, with nothing to do but embalm his corpse. Behold, Mary weeps: already she sees the empty tomb, the precious sign of the resurrection, already she stands before Jesus, already she speaks to Him - and still she weeps. She is still looking for the dead Jesus, still under the spell of death, still without the thought that something miraculous might have happened here! But are we not like that? And we have heard the Easter news, oh so many times. We know the Word that tells us that Jesus rose from the dead. For two thousand years the Christian Church has been proclaiming in every language, all over the world, that he is risen - yet we cannot escape the omnipotence of death. The whole Easter message of the resurrection is little more than biblical truth, church dogma, venerable tradition, or perhaps just empty talk. In short, it is not a reality, not a gripping, life-penetrating and life-renewing reality. We only profess the theory of the resurrection, but we do not feel the power of the resurrection. We sing very beautifully: "Christ is risen...", but it has no particular effect on us. Then it is only natural that we should seek the happiness of Easter in the caress of the spring sunshine and in good food and drink!
But how, in the face of the power of death, can we be sure of the reality of the resurrection? Brothers, here is a secret. And that is that there is only one Someone who can give the impossible news of the resurrection to someone without losing all reality: and that One Someone is the risen Lord Himself! Here, from this story, we can see very clearly how the Easter certainty arises. It is not that a man searches, ponders, calculates, speculates, contemplates, reasoned and slowly comes to certainty, but that the doubting, grieving, perplexed, hostile man is addressed by Jesus! It is never our thinking, our intellect, that grasps the miracle of the resurrection, but the power of the resurrection that grasps our intellect and brings it to its knees before the risen Lord! So today, as here in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, certainty is born in the same way: that He is present, that He speaks to us, that He stretches out His helping arm towards us, that He looks at us, that He strengthens us, that He lifts us up, that certainty comes from His side, that His real presence penetrates the reality of His resurrection into the souls of His own.
None of us come to the certainty of the resurrection on our own, but He comes, He speaks: Mary! - or Saul, or Augustine, or Little Peter! So He calls us by name, and at once our hearts are warmed, our eyes are opened, our joyful faith is kindled: "He is risen!" He is risen indeed!
I said: he comes to us, he calls to us... How? Oh, much simpler than we think. Look, here too, in the story, He goes so simply, so naturally through the garden, that Mary Magdalene thinks it is the gardener. She doesn't glide through the leaves of the trees like a ghostly creature. She is so much a part of that garden that you would think it must be the gardener himself. And when he walks through a factory, it's as if he belongs in the factory, and when he enters an office, it's as if he has some official business there... What I see in this figure of Jesus is precisely that God is not looking over our lives from afar, like a Sphinx staring off into the distance, but is in us, is involved in our daily lives. He is like a peasant in a village for the people of the village. In a big city, he is like a city man. In a royal palace, as if He were the king, among students, as if He were a student, among old people, as if He were old. So Jesus is in all of our daily lives at every moment... Mary Magdalene, who thought of Jesus as a gardener in the garden, would have gone alongside him precisely because Jesus was so much in tune with the environment in which Mary was then. We, too, are in danger of walking away from God, from the living Jesus, because he is much closer to us than we think, much more realistically there in front of us than we imagine. For example, we see two people going to church somewhere and we say: Look, there goes X and Y - but we no longer see that Jesus is actually going there and inviting us to go with Him. Or we see a sick child in the hospital, but we don't see how Jesus is standing behind the child, ready to speak to us. We listen to this sermon and we think we hear human words from the pulpit, but Jesus Himself is there, in these ordinary, everyday words, He wants to enter our lives. We think of a lonely, abandoned old man, we should go and see him; perhaps we go and see him, and we don't recognise Jesus, but He wanted to meet us there... There is the living Jesus everywhere, but we don't recognise him, we think he is just a gardener, or a pastor, or a poor fellow human being in need. Easter proclaims that Jesus is here, Jesus is everywhere, and if we don't see him, it doesn't mean that he isn't there, but that, like Mary Magdalene in the garden, we are not looking right, we are not seeing right. In fact, let me also say quite definitively that right now, at this very moment, He is putting His hand on your shoulder, touching you personally, addressing you, calling you by name - only you, yourself, as Mary. I say quite definitely that Jesus is standing beside you at this moment, as if to say, "Behold, I am alive!
So do not be afraid to believe in the reality of the resurrection, in the risen Jesus. Today, even modern human science has gone beyond considering as reality, as existing, only what it can touch and explain to itself, what it can calculate and measure with instruments - dare to believe in Jesus Christ, who was dead and is alive, and who calls us to live with Him, to live forever!
Look at this Mary, despairing just now, how happy she is! Now she has her hope again, her vocation, her mission: to proclaim the miraculous news that Jesus is risen, that she has seen the Lord... It was as if the whole sad world had changed. But it has changed, because the light of the resurrection has shone on it, and now everything is very different. So now it's worth living, however hard it is, to start again, to struggle, to suffer, even to die, because Jesus is risen, because Jesus is alive, because there is a resurrection. That is the miracle of Easter faith.
Do you know the story of Goethe's Faust? The weary scholar, not wanting to carry the burden of life any further, is about to raise his cup of poison to his lips when the Easter hymn rings out from a nearby church: 'Christ is risen, hearts rejoice, let us feast!' It's only a message, but it's powerful enough to snatch the cup from Faust's lips, to call him back to life, to keep a desperate man from the ultimate desperate act. If even the news of the resurrection is strong enough to keep a man in earthly life, what power can the person of the risen Jesus have in one who believes in Him! If the early Christians had not necessarily believed in the Risen Christ, they would have been inevitably outnumbered by an entire pagan world. It was faith in the living Jesus that kept them alive and gave them victory in the world. The person of Jesus, triumphant even in the grave, gave them a power that fishermen and craftsmen had never had before!
Never give up hope, never despair, never despair, you have a living Jesus! A man of Easter faith can never be a man of passive resignation, of resigned surrender. This word, resignation, should be deleted from our vocabulary. It is not in the Bible. Forbearance is a pagan virtue. Only the unbeliever is comforted in this way: "Be comforted in him. God did not rest in the death of Jesus. That's why it became Easter. And how good it is that God did not rest in what happened on Good Friday, because then something would not have been done there, but everything would have been ruined! Because Jesus was resurrected, we know that the cross is not a sign of the believer's resignation, but a sign of the greatest victory. The believer is always a holy rebel! Of course he never rebels against God, but against sin, Satan and death. He does not resign himself to the fact that, for example, a family life has fallen apart and can no longer be changed, that evil is triumphant, that destruction is in the world, that the world is faithless, that a good cause has failed - but he starts again, struggles, hopes, believes in spite of everything! And even when a coffin is lowered into an open grave, the Christian man does not stand there resigned to the unchangeable, but even then, like an eternal rebel, he believes in the resurrection!
Dear Brothers and Sisters! You weary and burdened people, you betrothed and prisoners of death, you disappointed and discouraged souls, you who have been tried and tormented by life, hear the triumphant song of the power of God, the joyful miracle of triumph over death: Jesus Christ our Saviour is risen! He, the living Jesus, wishes you and gives you a truly happy Easter!
Amen
Date: 29 March 1959, Easter.