Easter Sunday B 2024

This is the day of Christ the Lord…

The Holy Scriptures are rarely accurate. He tells the truth precisely as it is. It does not subtract or add. We remember the event in the Garden of Gethsemane when they came to arrest our Lord. Then he told them: This is your hour and the power of darkness. Yes. The night has its power. Evil has its power, and God sometimes allows it to manifest itself for reasons known only to him. But the power of evil is limited. It is your hour, the hour of darkness. Not less, but not more. As much as I’ll let you. In this sentence of the Lord Jesus, there is also a warning for those who do evil. The hour will pass. After night comes dawn, after dawn, morning, and then day. Once and for all, everything will end, and a light will come to illuminate your deeds. And it happened. After the night of suffering and pain, the whole day of Christ the Lord comes after the hour of darkness. Let us rejoice, hallelujah. Victory does not belong to evil but to Christ. He is above everything and has everything firmly in his hands. The day that will never end has dawned. Christ’s day lasts forever, and evil has no more dominion over it. So, let us cast off the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. We live honestly as in the day.

Day and light should also be in us and around us. The life of a Christian who believes in the resurrection can sometimes be difficult and painful but never sad. The resurrection is an event that disrupts the status quo. It is not a passive event that leaves things as they are. No one remains unaffected by it. The stones are rolling away from the graves; the dead are not in their places where they were placed; the frightened disciples open the door and run to the grave because before, they ran in the opposite direction out of fear. The heroic soldiers run in the exact opposite way because they built on their strength before… The world is being turned on its head to finally get it right. And we, Christians of the third millennium, may look bored at the altar or the churches’ walls because we still haven’t understood what is happening. Let us grasp the transformative power of the resurrection and be motivated to live in its light.

The writer J. Green, on the threshold of his conversion, once stood at the church door and observed the faces of those coming out. He pondered: if they truly believed in what they were participating in at St. mass, their faces would radiate, their eyes would be filled with light, and their hearts would burn. Conversely, he saw people with bored faces and indifferent eyes, and one could doubt whether their heart was still beating… If only there were mirrors at the exit of our temples and we could look into them to see what we look like, we might startle ourselves. Do we rejoice that Christ rose from the dead? Or are we still bored with life? Let’s introspect. The day of Christ the Lord is here, and it calls for our active, joyful participation.