The day their teenaged son died in a tragic motorcycle accident, Marco Gallo’s parents discovered the following words handwritten on his bedroom wall, next to the crucifix: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” The question comes from Luke 24:5, where two angels confront the women who have come Sunday morning to anoint Jesus’ body.
It is one of the biblical questions I find fascinating for its deceptive naivete. The women might have answered reflexively, “We are seeking Jesus among the dead because He died on Friday.” And then they would have done a double-take. The living? But we thought He was dead. Isn’t He dead?
No; He is not dead.
Jesus asks the Apostles a similar question after the storm at sea: “Why are you afraid?” (Mk. 4:40) The Apostles might have been forgiven for answering, confused, “Master, we are afraid because we were about to die.” But then they should have done a double-take. Weren’t we about to die? And Jesus might have responded to them, “I am Life, I who am speaking with you” (Jn. 11:25, 4:26).
After my father’s death, a dear friend wrote me prophetic words I am only beginning to understand: “Eternal life was your father’s way of life.”
As we grapple, during this season of the Triduum and then the 50 days of Easter, with the meaning of death and Life, I think it can prove a powerful challenge to contemplate Jesus’s assertions regarding these realities.
At His friend’s tomb, seeing Martha and Mary and their friends weeping, Jesus weeps too; He groans in agony. Jesus grieves. But Jesus also tells Martha, “He who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. And he who lives and believes in me, will not die forever” (Jn. 11:25-26). Jesus asserts the existence of a kind of “life” that begins on this earth with faith and endures despite physical death. This “life” is, as Pope Benedict XVI writes in the second volume of Jesus of Nazareth, “real life.” Faith births us to this life. Eternal life is not something limited to the “after-life.” Eternal life begins now, whenever a person encounters Jesus and believes in Him. This is why the early Christians called themselves, simply, “the living ones.”
Marco Gallo’s parents grieve their son. And they know he is alive. One of the most powerful proofs is the many people who have become “living ones” through encounter with Jesus following Marco’s death: schoolmates and friends lined up for Confession; a mother dragged by her daughter to a Mass in Marco’s memory, who began reading his writings and was drawn to pray daily; the annual pilgrimage to his burial place that attracts thousands, some of whom are encountering Christianity for the first time, many of whom are seeking and feel touched by God.
Milanese Archbishop Mario Delpini opened Marco Gallo’s beatification cause on March 7, which would have been his 32nd birthday. Perhaps this Easter season we can ask his help to draw close to the One who is Life.
Sr. Maria Veritas Marks, OP, is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
