Wednesday of Holy Week
Easter, conversion time
Then one of the Twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” They paid him thirty pieces of silver, and from that time on he looked for an opportunity to hand him over. On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the disciples approached Jesus and said, “Where do you want us to prepare for you to eat the Passover?” He said, “Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, ‘The teacher says, “My appointed time draws near; in your house I shall celebrate the Passover with my disciples.”‘” The disciples then did as Jesus had ordered, and prepared the Passover. Mt 26,14-19
The feast of Easter is the celebration of our liberation, the transition from a life of slavery to the sin to that of liberated men. In the Old Testament to celebrate Easter meant to actualize the event of crossing the Red Sea, when the Jewish people escaped from the slavery under the pharaoh of Egypt and gained their freedom, despite the problems which such freedom involved for them. During the forty years spent to wander in the desert of Sinai, Israel has found its identity, God has given a law and, at the end, the Promised Land to live as liberated people. The history of the Jewish people, although sacred and fascinating for us as christians, it’s just a story which predicts our liberation from the sin and the gift of another law and another land. To achieve the first story God called a man, his servant Moses, for the second he has even sent his Son, Jesus of Nazareth. In the passage of today’s gospel Jesus celebrates with his disciples the great plan of salvation of the world: the liberation from the sin, the new law of the love and the new earth of the kingdom of the heaven. These are the feelings of Jesus when telling to his disciples: “Go into the city to a certain man and tell him: ‘the teacher says: My appointment time draws near; in your house I shall celebrate the Passover with my disciples’ “. For the first liberation from the Egypt, Moses and the Jewish people had to pass through the opening of the Red Sea; for this new liberation Jesus will have to go through his death on the cross. Then there will be the triumph of the resurrection. Jesus will go to the crucifixion himself alone, but also the disciples, although in different way, will experience the loneliness and the death to rise again like him. For us, to celebrate Easter means to actualize, today, the event of the death and resurrection, from an old to a new life. The church calls us to live this event as a path of conversion leading to a change in life. If we made wrong choices in the past and we got in situations of sin, it is time to make a clean sweep of all of this. It will be our Easter.