LIMA, Peru.
As we approach Holy Week and Easter, Maite Uribe, President of the Teresian Association, greets us from Lima and invites us to reflect on this great Christian festival "with joy and hope.”
With the joy and hope of these weeks that lead up to the great feast of Easter, I would like to send you some words to help us all prepare to experience, in communion, the central mystery of our faith. It is the mystery of the Resurrection of Jesus, the ultimate triumph of life.
This year we are calling on God as Father for his Kingdom to come to our world. The celebration of Easter is a new opportunity to strengthen our desires for peace and justice, freedom and love in our everyday social, family and personal lives.
Easter is something new
The proclamation of Easter reminds us that the resurrection is something new, a new reality to which we are all called. It is taking place here right now in our daily existence. Time is needed so that every person, every place and every culture may accept the risen Christ and be born to true life. Day after day we aim for the ultimate triumph of our existence, the daily victory over the forces of evil.
Pope Francis tells us: “Christ’s resurrection is not an event of the past; it contains a vital power which has permeated this world” (Evangelii Gaudium, no.276) and “Christ’s resurrection everywhere calls forth seeds of that new world” (Evangelii Gaudium, no.278).
New life in Christ is an invitation to go beyond the superficiality of things and to reach to the depth of the soul, as Saint Teresa would say. It is to go from the exterior to the interior, from death to true life. It is a new invitation to live deeply and to love deeply, and like the disciples, to learn from the risen Christ who “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1).
Jesus chose to love in this way. It was total and absolute love that led to his death, even though he did not choose death. His self-giving in love came before his death. This death was not an accident. It was the triumph and consequence of his mission. Through his resurrection, Jesus invites us to a progressive resurrection, a slow and patient maturing of our lives. It allows us to be transformed each day through grace until we become men and women of God. This is how we shall be, in a humble way and unmistakable.
Easter as an expression of Jesus’ relationship with his Father
The Easter experience demonstrates the quality of the filial relationship that Jesus had. It was a privileged and unique relationship, but it was also one that brought loneliness and abandonment. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34). It is a cry of love that feels bereft of the proximity and closeness that had sustained his mission day after day. It is an experience of absence, not the absence of faith but the testing of fidelity to love. The relationship of Jesus with his Father during those testing times was never interrupted or broken. It was strengthened because it became supplication and prayer.
At Easter, Jesus expresses his filial relationship with God in a radical and definitive way. Easter is the triumph of a life given totally to the service of the Kingdom of God. It is the triumph of what he did and taught, of his options and his priorities. Nobody has lived the human drama like Jesus, and nobody has fought for the human cause like he did. He cured the sick and resurrected the dead, freed the captives and rescued people from loneliness, anguish, exclusion and eternal death. No one can be excluded from the Kingdom that his Father prepared for humanity, the Kingdom for which Jesus gave his life.
Easter as the triumph of the Incarnation
The resurrection of Jesus is an experience of faith and hope. Throughout our lives we experience partial liberations, but Easter gives us the utopia of ultimate transformation, the triumph and the celebration of a life incarnate in history but that in Jesus opens up to complete and definitive fulfilment. “The human perfected and made divine because it was filled with God” (Pedro Poveda, Creí por esto hablé, [74]).
Easter is a cause for celebration and joy because it proclaims and expresses victory for the human condition. The Easter experience encompasses the human person as a whole. It includes all that is embodied in the human, individual fulfilment and the social dimension, forgiveness and mercy, frailty and trust, the transformation of the present and hope for the future.
Josefa Segovia reminds us that Mary “believed in and hoped for the resurrection, and her hope was realised when she saw the risen Jesus” (Josefa Segovia, María nuestra esperanza, Spes Nostra p. 322).
Let us celebrate Easter, and let us share the hope that gives us the knowledge that it is in the risen Christ that life, our life, has triumphed over death. Let our table on Holy Thursday have place for hospitality so that nobody will feel excluded, marginalised or forgotten. Let us be “open door” communities (Evangelii Gaudium, nº. 46) in which we can express with gestures and words that “Christ, risen and glorified, is the wellspring of our hope” (Evangelii Gaudium, nº. 275).
Happy Easter 2014 from the Americas
Maite Uribe
Lima, 8 April 2014