“He is not here, he is risen! »

Gospel according to Saint Luke, chapter 24, verse 6

Meditation

He is no longer here, He is risen! Just these few words to announce Easter.

He is no longer here, the body has disappeared. The women came to take care of the body of their Lord and Master, the ultimate gesture showing love and their immense pain. It's hard to watch your loved ones die, harder still to helplessly witness an unjust killing, the humiliation of someone who is nevertheless perceived to be telling the truth. It's very hard to see how the taste for power, for power exercised over the weakest, can claim to commend itself to God and come to betray God himself, to the point of excluding him from this world. The pain was immense, and no doubt the women hoped to be able to appease it a little by performing with infinite respect these ritual gestures which would restore the remains of the man they had followed and loved to his own mystery. The pain was immense and there, in this tomb, would close such a beautiful but so tragic page in their history: there are often no more words to express the pain. And it is the empty tomb that is given as a sign to pass from sorrow to hope.

First, from the silence of this empty tomb springs the words of the angels: “Why do you seek the Living among the dead? Remember what he told you...». It is indeed the Lord Jesus, crucified, whom the women came to honor early in the morning. Jesus, this man whom they had followed in Galilee, and who walked among his own doing good. Jesus, this man among men, who testified to the Goodness of the Father and his will to make an alliance with humanity to bring it into Life. Jesus, Son of man, Son of God, who denounced the powerful and the learned who bound heavy burdens on the shoulders of the little ones, instead of transmitting to them the Word of freedom and Life. The Lord Jesus who was put to death because he denounced the idolatry by which man alienates the other man, and because he revealed the truth which sets us free. Yet this truth rang so true in their ears: God wanted life for everyone! And everything would be broken?
But no ! You who think the story is over, remember, remember what He told you, what He lived, what He shared with you, what He gave his life. Remember, take up the Word, leave your sorrow behind, and let the living memory of the Lord Jesus bring your story to life again, relaunch you in history.

He is no longer here. Curious sign that the emptiness of the tomb in this dawn of Easter. How can it help us to dare to live our history again?
Indeed, isn't the void what many of us fear the most in the world? The void that terrifies and leaves us flabbergasted, preventing all movement, causing us to lose all bearings. This void which makes us believe in the power of nothingness, which makes us think that nothingness, death, can make everything disappear, starting with love. That nothing makes sense anymore.
But the Word, again, resounds through the voice of the angels: He is risen, as he had promised. At the same time, the Word that speaks Life where we thought we were sinking into the penalty of death, and the assurance of a promise kept. A Word kept, finally, which is our assurance, and which fills with life what we thought was lost. Easter is the announcement that no human story can lose its meaning, that love is never lost, that the generosity of a life given is leaven for even more life, that It is to lose one's life to give it that one gains it in abundance, and more. From the void, in which our gaze sometimes gets lost without discerning the slightest horizon of hope, there springs a Word which gives life and meaning. Strength and hope.

The tomb is empty and dark, but the clothes next to it are dazzling with light in this fragile dawn of Easter morning. Like a morning on the mountain of transfiguration, the Light comes to burst the darkness, reversing the dawn of the early morning and bringing it to light. How often this is how our stories are constructed! Everything seems so fragile, so close to failure that we think the night would be like our destiny. And then, it takes so little, such a small glow which, again, awakens us and brings us back to life.
Women can be seized with fear before this empty tomb which is the sign of a brand new Presence of their Lord. He who shared the simple life of his disciples, who labored with them on the paths, behold, having passed into death, he is raised from the dead. He is not only alive again among his family, as before the tragedy. He is raised from death, and thereby he has definitively overthrown the power of death over humanity. His absence from the tomb transfigures the whole life of humanity and becomes the Light of human history. Light that allows us to detect in the heart of humanity a new life, whose heart is the very life of the Spirit.

They thought he was absent, his heart heavy with abandonment. And now these men of Light say he is alive. Hearing the angels speak in this way, the women go back to tell their astonishment to the apostles, who will have a hard time not taking them for mad. But the women, in the astonishment of this absence, in fact announce a whole new presence which will change their lives, even more perhaps than when they followed him.
Often we think of the resurrection as the future that awaits us. And such is the future that is promised to us. But, on this Easter morning, we must rather learn to live from the resurrection of Christ, to live this life raised from the dead which overthrows death: you are risen with Christ!
After the women, it is Pierre who goes to the empty tomb. Peter to whom Christ will entrust his Church, born of the resurrection of Christ. Life has overthrown death and of this Life we are alive. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, wrote Saint Paul. This life “hidden in us”, is it not the power of the life given by the broken bread, and the shared cup? Memory of the death and resurrection of Christ, Easter of Christ for us today, the true force of our life.

He is no longer here, He is risen! And begins, with Him, our story...