Christ is Risen, He Asks Us “Only” to Recognize Him
Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori - “Christ is risen! He is truly risen!” If the Easter proclamation were mere news, we would forget it within a few days, especially because it is the kind of news the media does not like to remember. The media thrives on news that, rather than reality, thirsts for more news, as if the purpose of life were only to be titillated every day by an endless soap opera.
But that Christ is truly risen does not only mean that the news corresponds to facts that have happened; it means that the newness coincides with the reality of this announcement—a reality that remains, a newness that remains real, that is, present. And this changes everything. The novelty is no longer something to be entertained, something we create or remake: the novelty is the very reality of the Resurrection, the presence of the Risen One, the life of Christ, His glorious Body.
What is asked of us to participate in this novelty? It is not enough to renew the information or add episodes to the soap opera. Above all, it is not enough to expect that it is up to us to renew this newness. What, then, is asked of us?
In itself, nothing. We are not asked to add anything to the newness of the Risen One. What, then, is it that welcomes a reality without adding anything to it, indeed, allowing it to be totally itself, and therefore totally new? To recognize it! To lift up our gaze, to open our eyes to a light that already shines, to open our ears to a voice that already resounds, to touch a wounded Body that is already alive and present. All the newness of Christianity, all the newness of Easter, is fulfilled in the recognition of the Risen One.
But it is precisely in this that man discovers his most sublime dignity, and therefore the deepest value of his existence. The risen Christ is already everything; He needs nothing to be the Lord of the cosmos and of history, who has conquered sin and death, to conquer all the evil in the human world, even that which is before our eyes every day or within our lives, in the history of peoples as well as in our hearts and consciences.
But for Christ, this everything that He is in Himself is not enough. For Him, the whole of Easter is not merely rising from the dead and living in glory, but that we recognize Him—that all the newness He embodies becomes newness in us, among us, in the world. The fulfillment of Easter’s fulfillment is the risen Christ recognized by faith, embraced by a grateful love from which a luminous hope radiates throughout history. The dignity of man is that God burns with the desire for his recognition.
Then we understand that the newness of Easter is that this encounter happens for each of us, that it is good for everyone, that it changes the world, that it concerns and saves all of humanity, because the encounter with Him fills us with a breath greater than our own life. The responsibility of proclaiming the Resurrection is not a duty but the simple resonance of the reality of the living Christ in our existence.
Even a dry leaf proclaims the power of the wind by simply allowing itself to be carried away by its breath. The ardent breath of the Holy Spirit, in fact, chose a small group of frightened and incapable disciples to urge them to bring the Risen Christ to the ends of the world and of history, to our world and our history.