Pope Francis invited the faithful to remember their first encounter with Jesus: “If you recover love first, wonder and joy from the encounter with God, you will move on.” The Holy Father was presiding over the Easter Vigil held in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican on 8 April.
Around 8,000 people, including faithful, bishops, cardinals, and religious, were waiting for the Holy Father inside St. Peter’s Basilica, dimly lit, creating an atmosphere of recollection and inviting silence and meditation on the eve.
In his homily, Pope Francis reflected on the sadness suffered by the women on the way to the tomb of Jesus and compared it to the fatigue and pain that people often suffer today.
He stressed that we, too, if we have been “grieved by pain, overwhelmed by sadness, humiliated by sin, embittered by some failure or by some concern, we have experienced the bitter taste of fatigue and we have seen the joy of our hearts go out.” ”.
Along these lines, he also pointed out impotence and discouragement “before the power of evil, the conflicts that tear relationships apart” as well as wars or sadness over the death of a loved one.
As Pope Francis explained, the Lord’s Easter “impels us to move forward, to get out of the sense of defeat, to roll away the stone from the tombs in which we often enclose hope, to look to the future with confidence, because Christ has risen and has changed the course of history.
He explained that Christ’s Easter and Resurrection ask us to “relive that moment, that situation, that experience in which we meet the Lord, experience his love and receive a new and luminous look at ourselves, at reality, at the mystery of the life”.
“To rise again, to start again, to resume our journey, we always need to return to Galilee, that is, to return not to an abstract, ideal Jesus, but to the living, concrete, throbbing memory of our first encounter with Him,” he added.
“Remember and walk!”
Later, Pope Francis assured that “to walk you have to remember; to have hope you have to feed your memory.”
“This is the invitation: remember and walk! If you recover the love first, the wonder and joy of meeting God, you will move on. Remember and walk , ”said the Pontiff.
Later, the Holy Father clarified that our “Galilee” is the place “where you met Jesus in person, where for you He did not remain a historical figure like others, but became the most important person in your life; he is not a distant God, but the near God, who knows you more than anyone and loves you more than anyone ”.
In this sense, he invited the faithful to remember “that Word of God that spoke to you at a precise moment; of that strong experience in the Spirit, of the greatest joy of forgiveness felt after that Confession, of that intense and unforgettable moment of prayer, of that light that ignited within and transformed your life, of that encounter, of that pilgrimage”.
“Each of us knows his own place of inner resurrection, the initial one, the founding one, the one that changed things. We cannot leave it in the past, the Risen One invites us to go there for Easter. Remember your Galilee, revive it today. Go back to that first meeting,” he noted.
Pope Francis encouraged us to ask ourselves how and when this moment was and to relive the sensations of that first encounter with the Lord.
“The Lord, an expert in tearing down the tombstones of sin and fear, wants to illuminate your holy memory, your most beautiful memory, to make your first encounter with Him relevant. Remember and walk: return to Him, find in yourself the grace of the resurrection of God!”, asked the Pope.
Lastly, he urged us to relive the beauty “of when, having discovered him alive, we proclaimed him Lord of our lives. Let’s go back to Galilee, let’s each go back to our Galilee, that of the first meeting, and let’s rise again”.
Later, the faithful renewed their baptismal promises, renouncing Satan, his seductions and works.
Pope Francis blessed the water with which he later baptized and confirmed two groups of adults of different nationalities and confirmed.