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Dark times, like those of today, existed, as we learn from the Holy Books, even before the birth of Jesus. That is why the chosen people awaited a Savior who would save them, but many imagined Him as a military leader, capable of freeing them from the yoke of the Roman Empire. No one could have conceived that He would be, in essence, the mysterious liberator of the human soul.
The fact that Jesus preached the healing of the world's evil through love, discernment, and vigilance, going as far as the ultimate sacrifice, that He equated master and servant, overturning hierarchies, and that He urged people to renounce egocentrism, to cast off self-concern and personal wealth for the sake of the needy, all these made His teaching “a scandal to earthly reason,” as Søren Kierkegaard remarked.
But only in this way did the Son of God show those around Him how they could free themselves from the calamities of time and space in which they lived, how they could heal from their own opacity, with the help of introspection, of inner cleansing, preceding enlightenment.
Threatened with death from the moment He was born by those who considered themselves the powerful of the day, Jesus transformed the most terrifying moment of life, on the verge of ending, into a window to spirituality.
The Gospels bear witness to many miraculous healings, to the snatching from the deathbed of the centurion's servant, and to the three resurrections performed by the Lord, with ever-increasing “degrees of difficulty” (the awakening as if from sleep of Jairus' daughter, the awakening from the coffin of the widow's son from Nain, on the way to the cemetery, and the bringing to light of Lazarus, buried for three days).
But when the Lord dies on the cross, taking upon Himself the sins of the world for salvation, He does so once and for all, not just for those present then, but also for those in times to come, thus for us too, and His Resurrection signifies the triumph over death as well as the path it opens to our souls, to follow Him into the Kingdom of God.
By transforming death into an interval leading to Resurrection, Jesus frees us from the great anxieties of the immediate and the fear of the end, bestowing upon us hope in the victory of divine Good over the evil within us and in the world. There is no greater joy than this.
Monica Pillat