Heights that do not frighten us

Fr. Livio Tonello, director

Being on a ledge makes us feel dizzy. Many people are scared of heights even from a small height. But one can fear the emptiness in many ways: memory lapse, inner void, psychological void, cosmic void...

But what is the meaning of the empty tomb of Jesus? On one hand it reminds us of an absence: when two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, asked Mary Magdalene: “Woman, why are you crying?”. She answered: “They have taken my Lord away”. On the other hand the men tell the women: “why do you look for the living among the dead?”. In Eastern philosophy emptiness is not negative because the void can be filled. So according to the Kabbalah God began the process of creation by “contracting” himself descending into that void where. He emanated, created and formed all the worlds. This is called “tzimtzum”.

Before the empty tomb Christians should not think about death but about life because Jesus resurrected from death, it is a triumph over the empty grave. The message that comes from the empty tomb is that there is an everlasting hope. The strips of linen lying there as well as the burial cloth belonged to someone who left this place of death to come back to life. It is an emptiness full of hope and his resurrection provides the hope that followers of Christ will be raised to new life with him as well.

Nowadays we fear silence (absence of sounds), solitude (absence of people), poverty (lack of goods). But we are anguished because the empty space left by people cannot be filled with something meaningful. The resurrected Christ is always and everywhere with us. His presence fills the emptiness of our rooms, he guides our steps, he accompanies us in our daily life. In today’s society people try to fill the emptiness of life with many different things that do not fulfil their longings and desires. The myrrh bearing women went away quickly from the tomb, fearful yet overjoyed, and ran to announce to the disciples that a a new light was shining in the world.

As Christians we should do the same in the darkness and in the tragedies of this world. When we have God in our hearts we will have hope in difficult times and comfort in the midst of tragedy. If we remove God from our lives only apparently his absence will be filled by science and by technology. If we do not have God in our hearts we will feel that something is missing, we will not find the meaning of our lives in the world.

The vertigo of power and of human pride leads to the edge of a cliff. And here the fear is terrible because we do not see the bottom. May the Resurrection of our Lord remove all doubts about his “supposed absence” from this world.