At today’s General Audience:

The Pascal mystery “is not just a memorial to a past reality, it is a present reality: today, Christ’s love continues to defeat sin and death”. “Evil does not have the last word” and “the final triumph belongs to Christ”.  Pope Benedict XVI re-proposed the “certainty” on which “our Christian existence is founded and built ” to a crowd of twenty thousand people present in St Peter’s square for his general audience, on the vigil of the Easter Tridium, during which we rediscover space for silence and time for reflection, both greatly needed in a world filled with inflated words.

The Pope says that today, Spy Wednesday, “introduces us to the dramatic atmosphere of the following days”.  Benedict XVI outlined the Easter journey, starting from Mathew’s account of the “brief exchange between Jesus and Judas during our Lord’s last supper, following his words ‘one of you will betray me’”.

The Pope underscored that John closes the announcement of the betrayal with few words: “it was night: when the traitor leaves the supper an interior darkness settles”; “darkness of abandonment and of hate thickens”, drawing us closer to “the supreme encounter between light and dark, life and death”.