JERUSALEM — The mystery of the Resurrection is difficult to understand or explain and can only be welcomed into one’s heart with trust and love, Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, said in his Easter homily at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
“Today in Jerusalem, as in any other part of the world, the mystery par excellence, the core of our faith – that is, the Resurrection – is placed before our consciousness,” he said April 17. “What have we done with this mystery? How much has the consciousness that Christ is risen and alive changed and determined our existence?”
“Let us not retreat or lock ourselves in our fears. Let us not allow death and its subjects to frighten us. That would be to deny with our lives our faith in the Resurrection,” he said during the first Easter Mass following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions imposed in 2020.
Holy Week, which this year coincided with the Muslim holiday of Ramadan and the start of the Jewish Passover, saw the beginning of a return of pilgrims to the Old City, though not to the pre-pandemic levels, which included more than 4.5 million visitors in 2019.
Archbishop Pizzaballa told those at the Easter Mass that, through his resurrection, Jesus saved believers from “oblivion, from slavery, from exile” as well as the last enemy of death: sin.
Looking around at the terrible conditions many people around the world are suffering, including in the Holy Land, Ukraine, Yemen and other countries in Asia and Africa, it is easy enough to find reasons to worry and feel overwhelmed by death, he acknowledged.
The Resurrection should not be looked upon as a “generic symbol of peace and harmony,” or be confused with recovery or a return to normalcy of life, he said, but rather seen as “the breaking of God’s life into ours” as a source of forgiveness, the answer to loneliness and “the fulfillment of God’s desire for unity and love for man.”
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