Fr Liam Power: Celebrating Easter 2025

As I write, we are preparing for the Easter ceremonies, the celebration of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in ritual form.

The celebration of the Easter Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil on Saturday night ritualises the central doctrine of the Christian faith: the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ. 

It is encapsulated in the Cross, the primary symbol of the Christian faith.

It all sounds rather abstract and esoteric, removed from the ordinary everyday experience of people. 

The Cross sums up the great paradox of the Christian faith, that out of darkness comes light, out of failure comes new hope and possibility. 

The Cross is, as St Paul reminded us, “a stumbling block for the Jews, folly to the Greeks.” 

If I could paraphrase St Paul for today, it is an absurdity in the new Trumpian world order.

And yet, at a deep level, perhaps in the subconscious, the symbol of the cross resonates. 

Calvary was a dark time. We are told in the Gospels that darkness covered the earth. 

From a human perspective, it represents the failure of Jesus in his mission. 

Jesus himself felt abandoned by God: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me”?

The symbol resonates because, through the cross, God is revealed as One who is found to be active and present in the midst of extraordinary evil, suffering and death, drawing good out of evil, salvation out of suffering, and new life out of death. 

As theologian Dermot Lane claims, “the cross captures the paradox in life that those moments in which God seems most absent can be recognised as moments in which God is most present.” 

The cross is a proclamation that God is personally affected by the suffering in the world. The God of Jesus is not indifferent but one who is moved by the suffering and death inflicted by humanity on Jesus and therefore God is touched by the suffering of all humanity. 

Of course, God is not responsible for suffering, but in freedom lets humanity run its evil course. Nor does the Cross give us a reason for accepting suffering passively. We must continue to fight against injustice.

In so many ways, the Cross therefore reveals something of the God Jesus calls Father, a revelation that occurs in and through the darkness and suffering. 

Personally, I feel that the Cross sheds a new kind of light that enables us to see in the dark. 

I remember sitting in the audience as the drama Equus was being staged in Garter Lane. (The late Jenny Ledwell was one of the stars of the show). 

The beleaguered psychiatrist treating a very disturbed young patient who had committed horrific crimes cried out, “I need... a way of seeing in the dark”. 

Surely that cry applies to all of us today; the world and the Church need a way of seeing in the dark, especially a world threatened by the darkness of war, ecological crisis, and authoritarianism.

The darkness of the Cross certainly has many points of contact with suffering in today's world. 

Just look at the Holy Land. The persecution of and war crimes committed against the Palestinian community in Gaza represent, as it were, the darkness of Calvary. (I think also of terrible suffering endured by families here in Ireland when faced with the news of the death of a loved one from whatever cause).

The Cross and the current tragedies disclose the “potential within humanity (and indeed religion) for destruction" as theologians like Jurgen Moltmann and Dermot Lane point out. 

But the Cross shedding a unique type of light in darkness may help us bear the awful pain of witnessing so much suffering. 

It can also instill hope in the possibility of peace and new life lived in harmony.

Martin Luther expressed this hope in a beautifully poetic manner: “The Christian is someone who, in the face of darkness, goes into the garden of life to plant a tree and knows that he or she does not plant in vain.“ 

The Cross reveals the dark side of humanity, but as a kind of sacrament of darkness, enables us to live with hope in the midst of darkness and to see beyond the darkness of life. 

All of course is utterly dependent on the Resurrection of Jesus to new life. 

If Jesus has not been raised our faith is in vain, darkness overcomes the light, the powers of this world triumph.

The Easter Vigil ceremony celebrates this triumph of light over darkness with the proclamation that Christ is risen. 

The light from the paschal candle, dispelling the darkness of the night, symbolises the presence of the risen Christ, the foundation of our hope, the light that enables us to see in the dark.

Wishing readers a very happy Easter.