Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - “'Why look among the dead for someone who is alive?” (Lk 24,5). A question valid also in our epoch which challenges those who search for the Lord Jesus as if he were a character of the past, famous perhaps, but someone who lived on this earth and like all mortals died. The Living One cannot be found among the dead! He does not fit into our human categories, he does not remain, as we would like him to do, in our history archives, along with other more or less famous personalities of history. Jesus of Nazareth is not simply one of many characters, He is totally different, He transcends them all, because He is Risen. As He said all through his life here on earth he is the Resurrection and the Life and those who believe in Him have eternal life (cfr. Jn 11, 25-26). We Christians, realising that like shipwrecked persons we are thrown here and there by the waves in the tempest, entrust ourselves to the Risen Lord and experience a mysterious transformation, like leaven which makes dough to rise, life to rise.
To discover Him, His nature, is to discover a captivating person who sets fire to our hearts so that we can never forget that we have been absorbed by Him. The Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI spoke of this miraculous transformation in his homily for the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday, dedicated to all the baptised, but priests especially: “God, as the Fathers say, worked the sacrum commercium, the sacred exchange: he took on what was ours, so that we might receive what was his and become similar to God. With regard to what happens in Baptism, St Paul explicitly uses the image of clothing: "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ" (Gal 3: 27). This is what is fulfilled in Baptism: we put on Christ, he gives us his garments and these are not something external. It means that we enter into an existential communion with him, that his being and our being merge, penetrate one another.” (Benedict XVI, homily 5 April 2007).
We can never properly appreciate the Work of salvation undertaken by the Father which not only ransoms us from sin, it sanctifies us and takes us to the incredible heights of divinisation. Once we are captured we can never forget Him. The Office of Readings for Holy Saturday includes these marvellous words by the Risen Christ who goes down to Hell to bring Adam up to the Kingdom of Light: “Rise up, let us leave this place. Because of the enemy you had to leave the Garden of Paradise. Whereas I will place you not back in that garden but on a heavenly throne. You were told not to touch the symbolic tree of life, but I am Life, I tell you, I Am. I placed cherubim to serve and protect you. Now I order cherubim to adore you almost as they adore God, although you are not God” (cfr. From an old homily about Holy Saturday).
Only the one immaculate creature wished by the Father, who remained such because of her fidelity, could adhere with her whole self to this ineffable programme of Redemption: Mary of the Cross! To whom the dying Son entrusted the Church. The Word of God, proclaiming her Mother, gave her to the redeemed, represented by John who was with her at the foot of the Cross, and to all men and women, children in her Son.
“Mother of the Church” is the title which reveals her universal spiritual maternity. Mary believed without seeing, she loved as her Son loves, she offered herself to the Father as a spiritual sacrifice, sharing with her Son an interior martyrdom, which rendered her Mother of divine Grace. She did not go to the sepulchre with the other women on the first day after the Sabbath, she did not carry perfumed nard to anoint the Body of Christ because She knew in faith that that Body was living, as her Son had promised.
Only if we welcome Mary like John, who “saw and believed”, can we reach the ineffable heights of our Redemption, because to her heart we have been entrusted in a universal “Totus tuus”, a wave of grace which starts from Golgotha and flows through the history of our salvation. The path of a Christian, to reach certain faith, unflinching love, cannot do without the Mother of Jesus who takes us by the hand on Good Friday at the foot of the Cross and leads us to the dawn of Sunday of the Resurrection, passing by the empty tomb where only the Holy Shroud, silent and eloquent witness of Christ’s resurrection, remains. Our Lady, like the Angels, whispers to us all through our life, all through our ‘holy weeks’ “not to seek among the dead He who is Risen”, and Who is living and present in the Church. (Agenzia Fides 11/4/2007; righe 53, parole 828)
