Sunday-Easter morning

Yesterday, Christians observed Holy Saturday, the day of the tomb. It is the day of silence between the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Good Friday afternoon and his resurrection on Easter this Sunday morning. It is the day between sorrow and joy, the day of mourning and the day of waiting.The scriptural accounts give us a telling detail about the burial of Jesus: After being laid in the tomb hewn out of the rock, a large stone was rolled across the entrance and sealed in place. Indeed, when the women set out for the tomb on Sunday morning to finish the anointing of the body, they wondered among themselves about whether they would be able to roll the massive stone away. Our Christian faith is that the stone did not need to be rolled away. Life had come again to the tomb, the divine and human life of the Son of God, and for the one who created life, sun and the stars and the seas, the stone was no restraint at all. The great news that we Christians proclaim at Easter is that no human confinement -- not even that most permanent of confinements, the tomb -- is sufficient to restrain life, to kill faith, to deaden hope. That, too, is one of the signs of our times -- that the attempt to seal off the world of faith with the heavy stone of state power or secular ideology is bound to fail. The stone keeps being rolled away, no matter how extensive the guard that stands watch around the tomb.How else to explain the extraordinary scene at another Christian tomb? The last communist leader of the Soviet empire, Mikhail Gorbachev, was on his knees for a half hour of private prayer at the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi. At first, the visit might have been thought to be another flourish in Mr. Gorbachev's ostentatious environmentalism -- a photo opportunity to attract Christian environmentalists. But he came quietly, not to be photographed, but to pray. He spoke explicitly about his Christian faith, something he had obviously kept hidden when he was leading an atheistic regime. Easter a time of hope for all who are searching, and those who already know it's refreshment to our souls as we go out and carry the message of hope to a world that is struggling under the wieght of so many deceptions and false idols. HE IS RISEN!!!! P.T.L.