Ave Maria Meditations
Graces of the Resurrection
Jesus says of his death: “I go away, and I will come to you.” It is by going away that he comes. His going ushers in a completely new and greater way of being present. By dying he enters into the love of the Father. His dying is an act of love. Love, however, is immortal. Therefore, his going away is transformed into a new coming, into a form of presence which reaches deeper and does not come to an end.
Jesus, who is now totally transformed through the act of love, is free from barriers and limits. He is able not only to pass through closed doors in the outside world, as the Gospels recount (see Jn 20: 19). He can pass through the interior door separating the ”I” from the “you,” the closed door between yesterday and today, between the past and the future … Now he can even surmount the wall of otherness that separates the ”I” from the “you.” This happened with Paul, who describes the process of his conversion and· his baptism in these words: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2: 20). Through the coming of the Risen One, Paul obtained a new identity. His closed “I” was opened. Now he lives in communion with Jesus Christ, in the great “I” of believers who have become – as he puts it – “one in Christ” (Gal 3: 28).
Believers are never totally cut off from one another. We are in communion because of our deepest identity: Christ within us. Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord we have become close (see Eph 2: 13) … The Lord has granted us the light of truth. This light is also fire, a powerful force coming from God, a force that does not destroy, but seeks to transform our hearts, so that we truly become men of God, and so that his peace can become active in this world … At this hour, let us thank the Lord, because through the power of his word and of the holy Sacraments, he points us in the right direction and draws our heart upwards. Let us pray to him in these words: Yes, Lord, make us Easter people, men and women of light, filled with the fire of your love.
Pope Benedict XVI
