While the secular world is focused on chocolate Easter bunnies, colorful baskets, and marshmallow eggs, it is easy to forget that, in Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago, the first Easter Sunday changed the course of human history. Regardless of whether you believe that an itinerant rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on Friday and resurrected on Sunday, He has touched your life, in more ways than you probably realize.

Easter Touches You No Matter What Your Faith

Yet the final word remains hope. Not a self-centered hope, a private hope, but hope that’s radically communal, and hence truly Catholic. In words that still echo the discovery of de Lubac’s Catholicism, Benedict writes: “Our hope is always essentially hope for others; only thus is it truly hope for me too. As Christians we should never limit ourselves to asking: how can I save myself? We should also ask: what can I do in order that others may be saved and that for them too the star of hope may rise? Then I will have done my utmost for my own personal salvation as well.”

The great Eastern icon of the Resurrection depicts the victorious Christ who descends to sheol. He firmly grasps the hands of our first parents, liberating them from their self-imprisonment. But the Christian imagination can also envision the sequel. Having released them from bondage, Jesus now turns them toward one another so that, after such long separation and hostility, they may once again embrace. The silent embrace of Holy Saturday, before they ascend together to Easter joy.

Holy Saturday’s Silent Embrace