Like them we too – during Lent and especially Holy Week – have been pondering our Saviour’s Passion and death and the sinful state of our own souls in the sight of God.  The song of Alleluia was stilled and the flowers taken away.  And now all of a sudden the whole scene is transformed by the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ – that public proclamation of his victory over evil and over death – and all is bright and joyous, just as all was bright and joyous for the apostles that first Easter Day.

Their twofold despair – at the way evil seemed to have got the better of both their Master and themselves – that despair was swept irresistibly away.  It now dramatically dawned on them that the Crucifixion, the ultimate weapon of the forces of evil, had been turned against those very forces by Our Lord; for he had used it to expose their utter failure to accomplish his moral and spiritual downfall.

They had striven to disrupt his hitherto undisturbed relationship with God by shattering both his love for his Heavenly Father for willing that he should suffer, and also his love for sinful humankind with whose salvation that suffering was inseparably linked.  Yet in the end what the Crucifixion actually accomplished was to reveal that his twofold love was unconquered and unconquerable in spite of all that evil could do to him.  So the powers of evil fell back baffled and broken, like a wild and stormy sea, which having spent all its fury in vain against a mighty rock, sinks and ebbs with the ebbing tide.