ROME – Despite missing a significant Holy Week event the previous night due to concerns about lingering bronchitis symptoms, Pope Francis led an Easter vigil Mass on Saturday night, emphasizing that the vacant tomb, symbolizing Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, offers hope amidst life’s trials and letdowns.
Having presided over a lengthy Passion service on Good Friday at St. Peter’s Basilica, the pope opted out of the customary Via Crucis prayers at Rome’s Colosseum last minute to conserve his energy for the Easter Vigil on Saturday and Easter Sunday Mass. This decision was likely influenced by the chilly and damp nighttime conditions in Rome during that week, with medical advice suggesting that the pontiff avoid prolonged exposure.
During the Saturday liturgy, Pope Francis, in a wheelchair, entered St. Peter’s Basilica and conducted the ceremony from a chair positioned on a platform beside the main altar. He also performed the church’s sacraments of initiation – Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist – for eight individuals from Italy, Korea, Japan, and Albania.
Delivering his homily in his usual voice, Francis highlighted the women who visited Jesus’s tomb post-crucifixion to anoint his body, pondering among themselves, “Who will remove the stone from the entrance to the tomb?”
However, the pope pointed out that upon their arrival, the women discovered the stone had already been rolled away.
He described the stone as “a formidable obstacle” representing “the sentiments of the women. It epitomized the termination of their hopes, now shattered by the enigmatic and sorrowful mystery that terminated their dreams.”
This sentiment, according to the pope, is something everyone can relate to when obstacles block the heart’s doors, “suffocating life, extinguishing hope, confining us in the tomb of our fears and regrets, hindering joy and hope.”
These obstacles manifest in various life experiences and situations that hinder perseverance, such as grief, fear, or failure, as well as selfishness and apathy preventing generosity and attentiveness to others, he noted.
He mentioned that these barriers are also present “in all our desires for peace shattered by brutal hatred and the savagery of war.”
“When faced with these disappointments, do we also feel that all these aspirations are destined to fail?” he questioned, highlighting that the same women who fretted about moving the stone covering Jesus’s tomb also realized, upon looking up, that it had already been rolled away.
The imagery of looking up and finding the stone removed, Pope Francis explained, “is Christ’s Passover, the revelation of God’s power: the triumph of life over death, the victory of light over darkness, the resurgence of hope amidst the wreckage of failure.”
“It is the Lord, the God of the impossible, who permanently removed the stone,” he stated, adding that even now, God opens the tombs of human hearts “to allow hope to be continually reborn.”
Francis encouraged believers to gaze upon Jesus, who descended to the depths of death after taking on human form and infused them with life, “permitting an infinite beam of light to penetrate each of us.”
By resurrecting in human form, Jesus, he said, “initiated a new chapter in human history.”
“If we allow Jesus to guide us, no experience of failure or sorrow, no matter how agonizing, will have the final say on the purpose and trajectory of our lives…if we permit ourselves to be lifted by the Risen Lord, no setback, no suffering, no death can impede our journey towards fullness of life,” he expressed.
Quoting renowned German Jesuit theologian Father Karl Rahner, Pope Francis affirmed that this history now possesses “a significance devoid of absurdity and shadows…a significance we call God.”
“All the streams of our transformation converge on him; they do not flow into the abyss of nothingness and absurdity,” he remarked.
Jesus, the pope asserted, is the one who guides humanity from darkness to light, rescuing each individual from sin and death, leading them to a realm of forgiveness and eternal life.
Francis urged believers to welcome Jesus into their lives, stating, “then no obstacle will obstruct our hearts, no tomb will suppress the joy of life, no failure will condemn us to hopelessness.”
“Let us lift our eyes to him and request that his resurrection power remove the heavy burdens weighing down our souls,” he urged.
Believers, the pope emphasized, must fix their gaze on the risen Jesus and “move forward with the assurance that, amidst our shattered hopes and deaths, the eternal life he came to offer is already present among us.”
Pope Francis concluded by quoting Jean-Yves Quellec, a French Benedictine priest, writer, and former prior of the Clerlande abbey, who said, “All peoples besieged by evil and afflicted by injustice, all displaced and devastated peoples: on this sacred night, set aside your laments of sorrow and hopelessness. The Man of Sorrows is no longer imprisoned: he has breached the wall; he is rushing to meet you.”
“In the darkness, let an unexpected cry of joy ring out: He lives; he is risen! And you, my brothers and sisters, young and old…you who are weary of life, who feel unworthy to sing…let a new flame ignite in your heart, let a fresh vitality resound in your voice. It is the Lord’s Passover; it is the celebration of life,” he concluded.