Today I offer you an Easter lesson, courtesy of Elie Wiesel, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and a past winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. In his famous book, Night, he writes the following:

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him.

This time the Lagerkapo refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.

The three victims mounted together onto the chairs.

The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses.

"Long live liberty!" cried the two adults.

But the child was silent.

"Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.

Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon the sun was setting.

"Bare your heads!" yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping.

"Cover your heads."

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive. . . .

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying a slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look at him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?"

And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here he is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . . ."

Although he is not a Christian, Elie Wiesel gives us a distinctively Christian insight in this story: that every bit of innocent suffering is a conscious (or an unconscious) participation in the Cross of Jesus Christ, who, in a very real sense "hung on the gallows" some 2,000 years ago. And so—as Bishop Sheen would put it—we human beings can never say, "What does God know about suffering? What does God know about my pain? Has he ever been hungry—as a person would be if he fasted for forty days in a desert? Does he know what it is to live in meager circumstances and to work hard every day as carpenters do? Does God understand what it is to be a refugee? Has he ever experienced the pain of separation caused by the death of a close friend? Does he understand the experience of betrayal? Does he know what it is to have a headache—as one would have a headache if his head were crowned with a crown of thorns? Does he know what it’s like to die a terrible death—the type of death that little boy experienced in World War II?"

Yes, God knows all these things, for, as Scripture says, "God, in Christ, was reconciling the world to himself." (2 Cor. 5: 19) Thus we can never (or at least we should never) question God’s love for us. As Jesus said to Nicodemus, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life." How many of us would have voluntarily gone into a concentration camp during World War II with the specific intention of experiencing torture and death for the sake of others? And would we have been willing to do it for the sake of the SS guards as well as for the sake of the innocent prisoners? That takes the issue to an entirely different level, doesn’t it? Well, the fact is: in his eternal love, God did all that and much more, by taking to the Cross the sins of the entire human race. We can’t even begin to imagine what that was like!

"But, Fr. Ray, why are you talking about this today? This is a day to rejoice! This is Easter!"

That’s right! But Easter has no meaning apart from Good Friday! Easter is all about liberation, but first and foremost we’ve got to understand what we’ve been liberated from! The day in 1945 that the prisoners of Auschwicz were finally freed by the allied forces was a day of great joy (bittersweet joy, in some sense, because of all the death they had witnessed--but joy nonetheless), because they understood that they were being liberated from a certain death sentence. What happened to that young boy and the two adult prisoners would eventually have happened to them all—and they knew it! Easter, my brothers and sisters, will be joyful for us only to the extent that we understand (and are experiencing) our liberation from an even more horrible death sentence. The Book of Revelation distinguishes between the first and second deaths: the first death is the death of the body, the second death is the death of the soul—which is even worse than physical death, because it means residence in hell forever! This is why St. Paul tells us that "The wages of sin is death!" All of us are sinners, so all of us deserve that second death. (And, by the way, if we say we aren’t sinners, then we are out of touch with reality; and, according to St. John, we are liars.) But it’s precisely that second death which Jesus rescued us from by his glorious Resurrection! On Good Friday, when he mounted the Cross and suffered for three hours, our Lord took upon himself the full force of Satan’s wrath—the wrath that you and I deserve for our sins. And at the end of the day it appeared that Satan had won. But the final, ultimate, perfect victory was to be God’s only three days later when Jesus rose from the dead to a new and eternal life! Thus, all of our sins can be forgiven and we have the hope of living forever in heaven. Remember that sign we had on our bulletin board after the World Series last year? The sign said it all: "Yanks over Braves in 4; Jesus over Satan in 3!"

As I conclude my homily, I ask you to imagine the day of liberation at Auschwicz. Think of the allied tanks breaking down the front gates. Imagine the joyful shouts, the prayers of thanks, the tears of joy. But then imagine one prisoner in the midst of the whole scene who isn’t happy. He goes up to the allied commander and he says, "If it’s all the same to you, sir, I like it here; I like it a lot. This is home. I want the SS guards to come back, and I’d like to stay here with them." We’d call that man crazy, wouldn’t we? If we were that commander, we would say, "Mister, are you nuts? Those people hate you. They want to kill you—and they will! Don’t you understand that? They’ve got you under a death sentence if you remain here with them! We’ve come to set you free! We’re here to take you out of this pit of evil. We care about you; please, please, come with us!"

Jesus is the eternal liberator who will free us from the second death. But he will only do so with our permission. And we give him our permission by receiving Baptism and then by living a life of faith and obedience—obedience to his commandments and the commandments of his Church. I think it would be hard for us to imagine any prisoner from Auschwicz wanting to remain under that horrible death sentence. But the scary thing is, many people in today’s world are quite content to remain under their sentence of the second death—which is far worse, because (as I said a few moments ago) it means the eternal death of their souls in hell. The common mortal sins of our day, like hatred, and sex outside of marriage, and missing Mass on Sunday without a valid reason—these are more important to them than Jesus Christ is. And so (as crazy as it may sound) they would rather stay in the death camp of their sin, under the sentence of the second death, than come out with Christ their liberator. How sad--how tragic--and how UNNECESSARY! The cure—if they would only take it—is as simple as contrition, confession, absolution, and a firm purpose of amendment.