Francis Speaks

Extracts from the Pope’s Easter Vigil homily, 20 April 2019

The women bring spices to the tomb, but they fear that their journey is in vain, since a large stone bars the entrance to the sepulchre. At times, it seems that everything comes up against a stone … It seems that the steps we take never take us to the goal. We can be tempted to think that dashed hope is the bleak law of life.

“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

Today we see that our journey is not in vain; it does not come up against a tombstone. A single phrase astounds the women and changes history: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5). Why do you think that everything is hopeless, that no one can take away your own tombstones? Easter is the feast of tombstones taken away, rocks rolled aside. God takes away even the hardest stones against which our hopes and expectations crash: death, sin, fear, worldliness. Human history does not end before a tombstone, because today it encounters the “living stone” (see 1 Peter 2:4), the risen Jesus. We, as Church, are built on him, and, even when we grow disheartened and tempted to judge everything in the light of our failures, he comes to make all things new, to overturn our every disappointment. Each of us is called tonight to rediscover in the Risen Christ the one who rolls back from our heart the heaviest of stones.

The God of the living

Often what blocks hope is the stone of discouragement. Once we start thinking that everything is going badly and that things can’t get worse, we lose heart and come to believe that death is stronger than life. Life becomes a succession of complaints and we grow sick in spirit. But at that moment, we hear once more the insistent question of Easter: Why do you seek the living among the dead? The Lord is not to be found in resignation. He is risen; he is not there. Don’t seek him where you will never find him: he is not the God of the dead but of the living (see Mark 22:32). Do not bury hope!

The Lord calls us to rise

The women who went to Jesus’ tomb and halted in amazement before the stone that was taken away. Seeing the angels, they stood there, the Gospel tells us, “frightened, and bowed their faces to the ground” (Luke 24:5). They did not have the courage to look up. How often do we do the same thing? We prefer to remain huddled within our shortcomings, cowering in our fears. Why do we do this? Because, glum and closed up within ourselves, we feel in control, for it is easier to remain alone in the darkness of our heart than to open ourselves to the Lord. Yet only he can raise us up. A poet once wrote: “We never know how high we are. Till we are called to rise” (Emily Dickinson). The Lord calls us to get up, to rise at his word, to look up and to realise that we were made for heaven, not for earth, for the heights of life and not for the depths of death: why do you seek the living among the dead?

You are not alone

God asks us to view life as he views it, for in each of us he never ceases to see an irrepressible kernel of beauty. In sin, he sees sons and daughters to be restored; in death, brothers and sisters to be reborn; in desolation, hearts to be revived. Do not fear, then: the Lord loves your life, even when you are afraid to look at it and take it in hand. In Easter he shows you how much he loves that life: even to the point of experiencing anguish, abandonment, death and hell, in order to emerge triumphant to tell you: “You are not alone; put your trust in me!”.

Easter teaches us that those who believe do not linger at graveyards, for they are called to go forth to meet the living One. Let us ask ourselves: In my life, where am I going? Sometimes we go only in the direction of our problems, of which there are plenty, and go to the Lord only for help. How many times, once we have encountered the Lord, do we return to the dead, digging up regrets, reproaches, hurts and dissatisfactions, without letting the Risen One change us?
Let us put the living One at the centre of our lives. Let us ask for the grace not to be carried by the current, the sea of our problems; the grace not to run aground on the shoals of sin or crash on the reefs of discouragement and fear. Let us seek him in all things and above all things. With him, we will rise again.

^{Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana}