May the Lord give you peace and bless all of you!
Today in Jerusalem we are living a very different and strange Easter, without gathering, without people, very low profile, if I can say this. So it is very difficult in a certain aspect to feel the atmosphere of Easter, that is the atmosphere of joy and cheerful, where people meet to hug one another, and to send their greetings and blessings in the Risen Lord.
Still, It is Easter day, and in Jerusalem we cannot not celebrate Easter. And in the Gospels, we read, that the event of the Resurrection happened during the night, because when the women arrived in the early morning, the resurrection has already happened, so Jesus has risen in midst of the night in the darkness.
This is also my message: there is no darkness, there is no situation, that will not allow us to celebrate the Risen Lord, even today, even now in this difficult situation we are living. And Jesus is not waiting for us to be at the right level of faith, he is not waiting anything from us, it was a gratuitous gift to us, to come to us as Risen Lord, to transform our wounds, and our difficulties to believe. In a way the resurrection is a disobedience, disobedience to mistrust and fear, and we want to obey to the Lord, and obey to the light, because we are celebrating the light that came to us, and not the darkness, we do not allow the darkness to overcome in our hearts, in our way of thinking, in our attitude, and in our relations, even today, despite everything.
This is my greetings to all, there is no situation that will forever be condemned to be under the shadow of death, nothing! Even here! And today we as Christians by faith we say even today that history has been changed, the Risen Lord changed history, and we belong to the history that he wrote, and we want to write with him even today,
Happy Easter to all of you!
