Easter is the arch-holiday of Christianity, as it was once the arch-holiday of the old law. You shall celebrate it solemnly from generation to generation with perpetual divine service (Gen. 2:12). This divine command given four thousand years ago does not cease with the Resurrection of the Lord, but on the contrary enters into the fullness of the law.
The day of the Resurrection, the Lord’s day became our Sunday, the first day of the week, the official day of God’s service.
What does the Easter of the Old and New Orders mean? Freedom! Yes, Easter is a celebration of the freedom of God’s people. The day of the exodus from slavery and the grave. Death defeated, fetters fall; new life arrives – the spring of souls and peoples. This is Easter proper.
It is not enough, however, that the calendar indicates Easter, that the Church and nature celebrate it. What good is Easter in the temple, in the field and in the forest, if the Easter bells do not ring in your heart and soul.
The Gospel says that at the death of Christ the Lord, the earth trembled, the tombs opened, and the dead arose.In spirit, we should repeat this every Easter. Let the sleeping awaken, let the bound throw off their fetters, let the dead rise.Christian holidays must be celebrated in truth.If they are not a faithful reflection of the inner mood, they must be rejected, because they would lie.
Easter more than any other holiday is a day of liberation; liberation from servitude and bondage.
Let’s bring to mind the genesis of this holiday.
The chosen people of the Israelites were 400 years in Egypt, in the pagan diaspora. The beginning was bearable, then begins a period of misery in exile. The political-national hatred of the Egyptians commits barbaric cruelty on the Jewish “minority”. The Israelites are to be exterminated at all costs: economically, politically and in the religious field.This extermination struggle does not spare even the cradles of infants.
Terror and persecution reign in the field of labor.The free become slaves.But slavery often breeds cowardice.Six hundred thousand Israelites tremble before Pharaoh and his governors.They rebel not against the oppressor, but against the liberator, Moses, because his energetic conduct causes them some inconvenience.The difficulties, associated with the men’s freedom movement, seem to them more unpleasant than slavery.
God can use his strength to turn this nation of slaves into a for the greatest obstacle to complete liberation is not tyrants, but cowards who refuse to get rid of their chains for fear of losing a few drops of blood.
This first Easter – this liberation of the Church of the Old Order from Pharaonic bondage, the liberation of the whole nation, caused by the power of God, is a picture of every spiritual freedom movement in the history of the New Testament Church.
The Church today lives in Egypt.We have become a nation of slaves.We are not masters, but lackeys.We do what the rulers of the world tell us to do: Protestants, liberals, Freemasons, Jews, socialists. We are lackeys in the field of the press, lackeys in literature, lackeys in broad politics, in economic matters.They command – we listen, sometimes perhaps murmuring, but we listen.
You can not embellish the sad fact, you can not deceive yourself and your own that everything is fine because we go to church on Sunday, perform some deeds of love of neighbor or hold a meeting. All this will not help, will not change the fact that in public life we mean terribly little. Catholicism lives in Egypt and groans under the political and social yoke of the rulers of the present day. Worse, the degrading policy of compromise plays the silent role of servants of his majesty – the spirit of the times.
If we had become a people of martyrs in Egypt! It would not have been a disgrace but an honor. But we have resigned ourselves to this pagan status quo; most feel happier with full pots in Egypt than with quail and manna in the desert – in the wild. The spiritual dependence of Catholics on others – lesser as they call themselves – is so widespread that there is often not one individual in a thousand who does not bow his neck to some idol.
The time is great to come out of Egypt. Let holy discontent be the prelude! Why should it be the same again and again? Why shouldn’t what is today at the bottom be tomorrow – after the passage of the Red Sea – at the top? Why shouldn’t divine politics do in a few days what it used to do, after the holy night of Passover – for which it normally takes several centuries of evolution. Don’t we live in an age of unlimited possibilities?
And if one does not believe that politics is governed by blind chance – belief in this admittedly does not belong to dogma – then isn’t communism the ultimate consequence of logic, which ruled the history of the world, after which only the final judgment or a radical turn can blunt. However, in whatever direction things go, in the end there must be a resurrection.
Of course, first there must be a celebration of inner liberation. True freedom must be born in the heart, in silence.It lies not from loud platitudes, not from political coups.It is the work of religion, not diplomacy or some organization.The greatest liberator of all ages is Jesus Christ.Not liberalism or socialism.
What does the liberation of man consist in?
Christ told us this: If ye will listen to my speech, ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Then the Jews answered, We have never served anyone. Jesus answered them: Verily, verily, I say unto you, Every one that sinneth is a slave of sin. If the Son sets you free, then you are truly free – Freedom consists in this, to do according to one’s own judgment what is right.
The enemies of freedom are: error, passion, violence.Error so blinds a man that he does not see the truth.The blind man loses his freedom.Passion leads the eagle’s wings – the will. Passionate man is not free – Violence admittedly has no power over the spirit of man. It can not force you to do something you do not want. But for centuries only a few individuals have the courage of martyrdom, i.e. the courage to positively resist violence.
So who will save freedom?
This will be done by faith: by combating error, it removes the veil from the eyes of freedom.This will be done by religion, taming the wild beast of passion.This will be done by the Church, condemning all injustice and rape.For the Church is the mother of freedom and the parent of all true freedom.And as the Church’s influence on minds grows, tyranny falls on the one hand and servility on the other.
Where is the remedy with which wounded freedom can be healed? The confessional is that remedy. Confession, unless it is turned into a comedy, will do infinitely more for freedom than all demagogues and political tricks.
Holy confession – this is the breaking of the shackles and the unrolling of the grave stones. If we consider what the first Jewish Easter was and what the first Christian Easter was, we will know that it was a day of liberation, because it was the Lord’s day, the work of God, His grace and the work of the Holy Blood. Today, in our circles, the overwhelming majority thinks to achieve something only and only by human means, by natural means, by meetings, by newspapers.
We do not deny that these are measures of great importance. After all, their momentousness must not be overestimated. In the face of the work of grace, in the face of the Holy Sacraments and prayer, they are negligibly small.
Easter, the day of the exodus from the land of slavery, will forever remain the day of the Lord, both in the Old and New Orders. Easter is a celebration of human weakness, and God’s omnipotence.
Ks. Robert Mäder – Katolikiem jestem!. Księgarnia Świętego Wojciecha w Poznaniu. 1929.
Catholic during the Great Apostasy 
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