Invincible Love

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Photo by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash.

During the entire Easter octave, the Church seems not to come out of her unspeakable rapture.

Paschal joy is the gladness of triumphant purity, the gladness of Jesus risen, which pours forth upon the world such an abundance of happiness that, as someone has said, "There should never again be sadness upon the earth after the Resurrection of the Lord." What are our poor miseries and sorrows, even those that distress us most, compared with that immense reality of the definitive triumph of sinlessness over sin, of light over darkness, of love over hate? The Passion was a combat, a gigantic duel between life and death, between sinlessness and sin. The Easter Sequence sings of it thus: Death and life / In a strange conflict strove, / The Prince of life who died, / Now lives and reigns. Life by dying seemed conquered, but death was defeated forever.

Jesus, divine purity, the whiteness of eternal light, impelled by an unutterable love, came to seek souls lying in the mire of sin. Only he could free them, only light can touch mire without being stained—only he is so pure that he can destroy our sins with the splendor of his purity. But it pleased him to come as a mighty wrestler, as a grand conqueror, first in his own heart and afterwards on Calvary. The heart of Jesus was broken by indescribable sufferings, his blood-stained body appeared as a cluster of grapes squeezed out in the winepress, upon the cross were heaped up all ignominy and suffering; the power of darkness, in its transitory but terrible hour, threw all the forces of evil upon the Immortal Victim.

Satan seems to sing his victory over a lake of pain and blood when Life dies, when Jesus inclines his head under the immense weight of man's injustice and of God's justice. Our Lord's sad disciples saw the precious body of the Master disappear beneath the stone of the sepulcher, for their tear-filled eyes did not even faintly perceive the tremendous mystery. But a woman whose heart beat with a fathomless, invincible love, returned from the sepulcher, radiant with jubilation, on the luminous Resurrection morning. From the depths of suffering and death, sinlessness arose victorious over sin to bestow upon the world the divine gift of joy.