MYSTERY OF HOPE
To believe in the Risen One is to resist accepting that our life is just a small parenthesis between two immense vacuums. Being supported in Jesus, risen by God, we sense, desire and believe that God is leading toward God’s true fulness, the yearning for life, for justice and for peace that is enclosed in the heart of humanity and in the whole of creation.
To believe in the Risen One is to rebel with all our forces against the fact that the immense majority of men, women and children, who have only known in their life misery, humiliation and suffering, end up forgotten forever.
To believe in the Risen One is to trust in a life in which there’ll no longer be poverty or pain, no one will be sad, no one will have to cry. Finally we will be able to see those who come in floating wrecks arrive at their true homeland. To believe in the Risen One is to come close with hope to so many people who lack health, the chronic sick, those with physical and psychological disabilities, people sunk into depression, tired of living and struggling. One day they will know what it is to live with peace and full health. They will hear the Father’s words: «Enter in forever to the joy of your Lord».
To believe in the Risen One is to not resign ourselves that God will always be a «hidden God» of whom we cannot know God’s gaze, God’s tenderness, God’s embrace. We will meet God gloriously incarnate forever in Jesus.
To believe in the Risen One is to trust that our efforts for a more human and blessed world won’t be lost in emptiness. One happy day, the last will be first and the prostitutes will precede us into the Reign.
To believe in the Risen One is to know that all that has gotten stuck half-way in our world, what couldn’t be, what we’ve damaged with our blunders and our sin, will all reach fulness in God. No one will lose what we’ve lived with love or what we’ve given up for love.
To believe in the risen One is to hope that the joyful hours and the bitter experiences, the «footprints» we’ve left in people and in things, what we constructed with love, will end up transfigured. Now we won’t know friendship that ends, celebration that peters out or goodbye that saddens. God will be all in all.
To believe in the Risen One is to believe that one day we’ll hear these incredible words that the book of Revelation puts in God’s mouth: «I am the beginning and the end of everything. To the one who has thirst, I will give freely from the spring of life-giving water». Now there will be no more death or mourning, no more cries or weariness, because all that will have passed.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
