Is it possible to celebrate Easter, the festival of light and life, with, in the background, what is currently happening in Gaza, for example, given over to massacre, destruction and famine? Faced with the abominable reign of hatred and the atrocious death of thousands of children, does Easter, which evokes the resurrection of a crucified man in Palestine more than two millennia ago, still have meaning or does it divert is it real? The question is radical, because the very actor of Easter, God, is put in the dock.
How can he allow this? How can we believe in a God who lets evil wreak havoc, crushing innocent people? More than 10,000 children have already died in Gaza in 5 months, more than the number of children killed in all conflicts around the world from 2019 to 2022, according to UN data. And hundreds of thousands more suffer from hunger, injury and the horrors of a war that has ceased to be self-defense and has become bloody and unvarnished vengeance.
Where is God in horror, if he even exists? If it is other, of course, than that of the fanatics of all religions who kill and indulge in hatred in its name? This question is answered by the cry of the crucified: “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me? » (Mk 15,34) Observation of the powerlessness of God in the world, he who emptied himself to assume the human condition. He is there, suffering, where we suffer.
This is precisely the news of Easter. The terrible as well as the luminous. Respect for the dignity of all beings, starting with the poor, solidarity with the humiliated, sharing and compassion, posed as inseparable from the love of God, as its exact expression, unless it is hypocrisy: everything this causes Jesus to be crushed by secular and religious powers, to silence him. However, this death is welcomed by him as the gift of his life out of love, as did Pastor Martin Luther King and Archbishop M.gr Romero, and so many other witnesses from yesterday and today.
“To be without God with God,” wrote theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in one of his letters from prison, shortly before being hanged naked, by Hitler’s decree, on Easter Octave Sunday 1945. This is what said this party with loud cries, before proclaiming it with joy. The presence of God is absent. It comes to us through the desire for justice, beauty, goodness, compassion. It radiates, pacifies, heals, serves, loves, cries, resists and fights through us, with us.
Etty Hillesum, who died at Auschwitz, wrote in her diary: “These are times of fear. […] It becomes more and more clear to me that it is not you, God, who can help us, but we who can help you, and in doing so, help ourselves. » The infinite which has its fragile home within us does not distance us from the world, on the contrary, it roots us in it. Infinite become sensitive love. Even if faith in the resurrection has unfortunately often been presented as an escape from our humanity, it is the breath of life and service to the world, in suffering lands (the Galilee of this world): those that Jesus trod, announcing the good subversive news from God, to the humble and humiliated, to the peacemakers, to the comforters, to the just and upright in heart, to the compassionate, to those thirsting for justice and to those persecuted because of it.
God can only be there where evil reigns and crushes beings promised to life, to happiness, to love. He is in Gaza under bombs, crushed or starving, as in any place where the self-proclaimed masters of death exercise their power. But what is the use of an impotent God who suffers and dies with those who suffer and die? It serves. Bonhoeffer echoes this in a poem: “Men go to God in their misery / And ask for help, happiness and bread”; in the light of Easter, they “go to God in his misery, / Find him poor and despised, without shelter and without bread…” It is his weakness that helps. It does not impose, it only serves.
One of the reasons Jesus died was that he subverted the traditional religious view of God. Easter confirms Jesus in this subversion: the one abandoned by God and the powers, whose fate and muzzling the cross was to seal forever, is indeed the icon of God. It refutes God’s break with the world, calling for us to take care of it, to do work of humanity. This is God’s greatest desire.
The territories of pain become the stakes of life, the place of vital meaning, fighting so that life flourishes without exclusion, hatred or oppression, outside the quiet security of the satiated and the peace of cemeteries. For the divine has made its home in us, suffers with the living, hopes with it, struggles, prays, loves, in us, and preserves in times of fear the seed of goodness and beauty so that in time more lenient, life can be reborn.