Papal preacher: Resurrection is power rooted in love, not domination

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Jesus' resurrection is not a triumphant display of power over his enemies, but rather a quiet, radical act of love that invites believers to rise from their own failures with joy and humility, the preacher of the papal household said.

Offering a Lenten reflection for cardinals and senior officials of the Roman Curia April 4, Capuchin Father Roberto Pasolini, the papal preacher, said that "contemplating the resurrection means not allowing ourselves to be paralyzed or imprisoned by the fear of suffering and death, but keeping our eyes fixed on the goal toward which the love of Christ leads us."

"Having come up from the depths of death, Jesus feels no need to take it out on anyone or to assert his superiority over those who were the cause or accomplices of his death," he told attendees in the Paul VI Audience Hall. "The only thing Jesus, now lord of life and death, chooses to do is to manifest himself to his friends with great simplicity and modesty in gestures and encounters."

Father Pasolini began his talk by greeting Pope Francis, who the Vatican press office said had followed the meditation online. The pope has been recovering at his residence in the Vatican since being discharged from the hospital March 23.

The preacher reflected on the abrupt ending of St. Mark's Gospel -- the earliest of the Gospel accounts -- in which the women who go to anoint Jesus' body after the Sabbath discover the empty tomb and flee in fear, telling no one what they had seen.

That ending, Father Pasolini said, "invites us to look at the Resurrection not as an event marked by spectacle or domination, but as an experience of love, quiet and free, that asks to be received in faith, not imposed with force."

The Gospels, he noted, portray the risen Christ as difficult to recognize. "Mary Magdalene mistakes him for a gardener, the apostles take him for an unwelcome fisherman and the disciples of Emmaus mistake him for an ignorant Jerusalemite."

The risen Christ's discreet and often unrecognized presence, he said, offers a model for how those in the church should lead -- not through spectacle or assertion, but with humility and quiet faithfulness.

"The light of the Resurrection seems to be less dazzling than that of the Transfiguration," he added.

Christ then shows his wounds not to provoke guilt among those who did not recognize him but to reconcile them to himself. "He had not wanted to do without them in the hour of the passion," Father Pasolini said, "and now in the hour of the resurrection, he does not want them to do without him either."

Reflecting on Jesus' encounter with the disciples after his resurrection, Father Pasolini said that rather than dismissing his followers who had abandoned him, "Jesus not only does not dismiss his friends, his collaborators, but he confirms them, doubling their mandate." That mission, he said, is not about power, but "the taking on of a responsibility -- the most beautiful one."

"If you, who have lived this experience of love, are not instruments of reconciliation in the world, then who will be?" he asked.

He also cautioned members of the Curia against the temptation to measure one's ministry by success or control. "If we find ourselves deeply upset or resentful when things do not go as we imagined, perhaps it is time to ask whether we are living in a spirit of gratuity," he said.

Father Pasolini said that the credibility of the church's mission depends not on worldly success or strength, but on the ability to live the Resurrection with humility and love. "Only in this way, without resentment and without bitterness, does one become a witness to the greatest love," he said, "the one that the great waters cannot extinguish, the one that remains like an ember at the bottom of all our humanity."