OMELIE / Omelie EN

05 apr 2026

05/04/2026 - EASTER SUNDAY

05/04/2026 - EASTER SUNDAY

1st reading: Acts 10:34, 37-43 from Psalm 117 2nd reading: Colossians 3:1-4 Gospel: John 20:1-9 Evening prayer: Luke 24:13-35

‘Grant us, who celebrate the Lord's resurrection, to be reborn in the light of life, renewed by your Spirit’: this is how we prayed. But what does ‘celebrating the Lord's resurrection’ mean? We do so, we receive joy and gladness from it, and we perceive the fruits of renewed life. Yet the word remains mysterious to us, and every year we try to understand it. We understand it from experience, not from speeches, nor even from the homilies we hear in churches.

St Peter speaks of Jesus' resurrection after announcing his death at the hands of men, a killing that everyone would now condemn, knowing that God himself gave him back his life and therefore did not approve of his death.

Here is the problem: what kind of life did God the Father give him back? Not the same life as before, even though Jesus, to help at least his disciples believe that he was truly alive, did the same things in his new life that we do in ours: he ate and drank with them! The newness of his life is a miracle that is continually repeated and that we can experience. In fact, the sinner who repents and believes in the risen and living Jesus, through the invocation of his name by the Church, finds himself truly forgiven; and he can rejoice in the forgiveness he has received. This is what St Peter assures us in the first reading.

St Paul even says that we too, since we are baptised in the name of Jesus, experience his same resurrection. In fact, our desires have changed: we set our eyes on things above. We are pressed by heavenly realities, everything that can form and beautify the kingdom of heaven. The things of the earth no longer rejoice us: we are as if dead to this world, having begun to live a new life.

The poet's sequence describes the Easter events as a “prodigious duel” between Life and Death: two ideal characters who contend first with Jesus and then with the faithful. Obviously, the winner is the one who was killed, because now he lives and triumphs: he is Life.

And Mary is a witness to this: Mary Magdalene herself, who three times reported the incident as a theft of a corpse, even going so far as to directly accuse the Lord of this crime. In fact, it was he who made him disappear from the tomb, but how? He did not explain it to anyone, but now everyone, even though they do not know what happened to his dead body, believes that he is alive, still alive in his body, alive with a life that is prodigiously freer, more concrete, more real and continuous than his previous life, which remains truly dead, or rather, transformed.

Peter and John, alerted by Mary, rush to the tomb. They run, they arrive, first John, then Peter. John, in his humility, gives way to Peter, who enters the tomb to verify what has happened, or could have happened. It is true, the body is no longer there, but the presence and position of the bandages in which it was wrapped testify that it cannot have been stolen. Something completely new and incomprehensible to our experience has happened.

When John sees the same thing, he has no doubts: he begins to believe. He begins to trust in Jesus, alive and present to God and to them in a completely new way. The disciple “believed”. He begins to believe that the Scriptures have been fulfilled in every detail, and not only the Scriptures, but also the words that Jesus had spoken to them many times, that on the third day he would rise from the dead.

These are the facts as narrated. What do we do? How do we live?

Knowing that Jesus is alive after death, we rejoice because our Master and Lord can still speak to us and listen to us. We who are before him, even if we do not see him with our physical eyes, can relate to him. When we do so, we realise that we too are participants in his new life, otherwise we could neither hear him nor respond to him. We are risen, as all the apostles say. That is, we are participants in his eternal life, in his being like God, in his being God, so much so that we enjoy his new life in all its manifestations and expressions.

We still live in this world marked by death and the fear of dying, but we live in it as strangers. We no longer belong to the world of death, we belong to the world of life: the joy we feel when we remember that we are loved by Jesus, and when we remember it together, is a testimony for ourselves and for others: he is alive forever!