The flowers arrived from Holland, the musical bands that parade along the street of the conciliation towards San Pietro, the pilgrims who crowd the square from all over the world. Little and small, with the sleeping bag in the arms or on the shoulder, with elegant clothes and with jeans, religious, lay people, families since dawn have begun to go to the Basilica to attend the Easter Mass. Cardinal Angelo Comastri, by delegation of the Pope, presides over Easter Mass while the pontiff arrives the wishes of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella: “This year”, writes the Head of State, “all Christian churches will celebrate the most important feast of the liturgical year on the same date. This highly symbolic coincidence exhorts in search of dialogue and unity. I hope that, associated with the Jubilee of hope, the Easter anniversary. May the memory of the Resurrection also inspire those who profess faiths other than Christianity and the non -believers, so that the pursuit of the common good is anchored to the values of justice and equity, essential for the peaceful coexistence and the prosperity of the peoples “.
In the homily prepared by Francesco and that The emeritus archpriest of the Basilica of San Pietro reads in its place “with so much emotion“the Pontiff stresses that “The protagonists of the tales of Easter all run!” Remembering Maria di Magdala, who, given the stone of the sepulcher rolled away, runs to tell Pietro and John, and the two disciples who, having received the news, run towards the tomb of Jesus, the Pope underlines that “this” run “expresses, on the one hand, the concern that had taken away the body of the Lord; But, on the other, the race of the Maddalena, of Peter and John says the desire, the push of the heart, the inner attitude of those who put themselves in search of Jesus. He, in fact, has risen from death and therefore is no longer found in the sepulcher. You have to look for it elsewhere ».
The Announcement of Easter is this, in fact: «We must look for it elsewhere. Christ is risen, it’s alive! He has not remained a prisoner of death, is no longer enveloped in the Southpiece, and therefore one cannot lock him up in a beautiful story to tell, a hero of the past cannot be made or think of him as a statue arranged in the room of a museum! ». To look for him, therefore, you have to get on the move, go out, meet him in the face of the brothers, «look for him in everyday life, look for him everywhere except in that sepulcher. Always look for it ». It must be remembered that it is present and proves to be “even today in the sisters and brothers we meet along the path, in the most anonymous and unpredictable situations of our life. He is alive and always remains with us, crying the tears of those who suffer and multiply the beauty of life in the small gestures of love of each of us ».
Easter, therefore, cannot be “static accommodation or a peaceful to sit in some religious reassurance. On the contrary, Easter delivers us to the movement, pushes us to run like Maria di Magdala and like the disciples; He invites us to have eyes capable of “seeing beyond”, to see Jesus, the living, as the God who reveals himself and even today is not present, speaks to us, precedes us, surprises us ».
We must seek him knowing that he is found and with the certainty that “he has won death, he wins our darkness and will win the darkness of the world, to make us live with him in joy, forever. Towards this destination, as the apostle Paul says, we also run, forgetting what is behind us and living prosthesis towards what we are facing. We hurry then to meet Christ, with the quick step of the Maddalena, Pietro and John ».
In the Jubilee we renew “the gift of this hope” and we resume running with joy, Pope Francis cites the theologian Henri de Lubac to say that, in our life of faith, “there must be sufficient to understand this: Christianity is Christ. No, really, there is nothing more than this. In Christ we have everything ». A whole to which, to put it instead with the theologian Adriana Zarri, we can ask “this gift: to be new to be new to live this perennial novelty. Pegs, O God, the sad dust of habit, tiredness and disenchantment; Give us the joy of waking us up, every morning, with amazed eyes to see the unpublished colors of that morning, unique and different from any other. (…) Everything is new, Lord, and nothing repeated, nothing old ». And therefore, with the Risen Lord, it is the message of homily, “everything starts again”.
