Today’s readings: Acts 10, 34.37-43; Colossians 3, 1-4; John 20, 1-9.

Every time Easter comes and we proclaim that Christ’s mission is accomplished and we have been redeemed through his death and resurrection, I always have the feeling inside of something easier said than done. Christ gave his life to free us from sin, from all that enslaves, to set prisoners free, to proclaim grace for all: this is what we believe. But so much has since remained unchanged. And this weighs down on our faith.

Many a time we feel so disheartened when Holy Saturday seems to be endlessly prolonged. The events and circumstances that marked the end of the Jesus’s life left those who had believed in him speechless. There was a long interval of silence after Jesus’s death and burial.

The gospels tell us practically nothing about that interval, it’s simply a gap. We have no idea what actually happened, not even what were the dominant feelings of those who had followed Jesus from the beginning. Only a deafening silence is narrated, mixed with doubt and incredulity.

Most probably his disciples had prefigured an entire life till old age in his company to set up the new order he so often spoke about. So his early departure was a shattering experience for them. His execution led many to postulate that all the promises that seemed to have materialised in him were only a sham. Yet for many others, the delusion was short-lived as much as it was inconceivable.

Little did they imagine how transforming that same experience was meant to be. John himself confesses in today’s gospel that till the moment he and Peter reached the empty tomb, “they had failed to understand the teaching of Scripture, that he must rise from the dead”.

Our failure in time to grasp and express the fullness of God’s act in history continues to sustain our doubts and, like Peter and John running to the tomb, renders us bearers more of questions than of answers.

Easter is for us believers a homecoming, the coming to wholeness which during life’s journey remains always something longed for. That is why throughout the preceding 40 days we speak of mortification – literally ‘making death’.

Henri Nouwen, in one of his letters, writes that mortification is what life is all about, a slow discovery of the mortality of all that is created so that we can appreciate its beauty without clinging to it as if it were a lasting possession. Easter is every time a revisiting of this basic lesson to see life constantly relativised by death so that we can enjoy it for what it is: a free gift.

Nicholas Wolterstoff, professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, is author of a book Lament for a Son which he wrote on the tragic death of his 25-year-old son Eric. The book is a shared grief, yet honest and tough-minded. At one point he writes: “To believe in Christ’s rising from the grave is to accept it as a sign of our own rising from our graves. It is to live with the power and the challenge to rise up now from all our dark graves of suffering love.”

Our daily pains will always condition our belief, at times hardly leaving enough oxygen for the faith. Life, to some extent remains always hijacked by the twin instinct within us towards trust on the one hand and doubt on the other. We are constantly tempted to give in, to linger in the darkness and silence of Holy Saturday without venturing into the light of Easter Sunday which, honestly enough, never becomes an enduring evidence.

It was Peter’s temptation and John’s and of all the others, probably including Mary. What was transforming was their endurance and their transformation in turn became for so many others the evidence and foundation of the love and power revealed in the Lord Jesus. Wolterstoff again writes: “If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded, if commitment to what is important is not strengthened, if hope is weakened and faith diminished, if from the experience of death comes nothing good, then death has won”.

Faith is the struggle to live the reality of Christ’s rising and death’s dying. Struggling with life is not to be avoided, but embraced as an experience of what can make us resilient and give us inner strength and depth.