"Joy made possible"

Christian joy, the joy of Easter, is offered to the world not to guarantee a permanently happy society in the sense of a society free from tension, pain or disappointment, but to affirm that whatever happens in the unpredictable world – sometimes wonderfully, sometimes horribly unpredictable – there is a deeper level of reality, a world within the world, where love and reconciliation are ceaselessly at work, a world with which contact can be made so that we are able to live honestly and courageously with the challenges constantly thrown at us.  And on the first Easter morning, it is as if ‘the fountains of the great deep’ are broken open, and we are allowed to see, like Peter and John at the empty tomb, into the darkness for a moment – and find our world turned upside down, joy made possible.   

+Canterbury's Easter sermon.

Paschal mystery

Et te quidem omni tempore, sed in hoc potissimum die gloriosius prædicare, cum Pascha nostrum immolatus est Christus. Ipse enim est vere Agnus, qui abstulit peccata mundi : qui mortem nostram moriendo destruxit, et vitam resurgendo reparavit.

The traditional proper preface for the octave of Easter in the Western rite, from the 1560 Latin BCP.

Here the Church rejoices in the Paschal mystery - His death destroys our death, His rising to life restores our life.

Holy Saturday: victorious silence

In his address yesterday at the Way of the Cross, Benedict XVI referred to the hours following the death of Christ as "full of silence, full of hope". His words echo those of Ephrem of Syria regarding Holy Saturday:

Death could not devour our Lord unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swallow him up unless he bore our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld. This chariot was the body he received from the Virgin; in it he invaded death's fortress, broke open its strongroom and scattered all its treasure.

Today's silence is not the silence of defeat - it is the harbinger of the Incarnate Word's victory.

"A wonderful transaction"

This Word of God 'became flesh and dwelt amongst us'; for in himself he was incapable of dying for us, unless he had assumed mortal flesh from us. In this way he was able to give his life for mere mortals ... Of ourselves we did not have the ability to live, just as of himself he did not have the ability to die.

In this way Christ secured a wonderful transaction, a transaction of mutual sharing. He died from what was ours; we will live from what is his ... For by assuming death from us, death which he found in us, he promised most faithfully to give us life from what is his.

From a sermon of St Augustine.