All the “astounding things” that God has done find their fulfillment and more than fulfillment in this astounding thing: the resurrection of Christ. The Risen One entered the upper room “when the doors were locked”; today too he passes through locked doors. Through the locked doors of hearts, through the locked doors of cultures and periods that deny his resurrection, through the locked doors of atheistic regimes that refuse to acknowledge him and that fight against him. He has passed, quite recently, through many of these walls, of which the Berlin Wall was merely symbolic. One of our brother poets, Paul Claudel, devoted these wonderful lines to the resurrection:
Nothing resists this conqueror.
He passes
through locked doors from the other side of the wall.
And thus it is that through the ages
He passes without any breach of rhythm.
Nothing could have stopped its being Easter again this year; nothing will stop its being Easter a year from now, and so on until he returns. Nothing can stop the Church from repeating at every Mass: “We proclaim your death, O Lord, we proclaim your resurrection, until you come in glory.”
- Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, The Mystery of Easter, p. 35