Bishop Bossuet, short sermon for Easter.  ¤

Ô DAY of triumph for our Savior! Ô day of joy for all the faithful! I adore You with all my heart, Jesus victorious over death! Truly, today is Your Passover, that is to say, Your passage, where You pass from death to life. Grant us the grace, O Lord Jesus, that we may make our Passover with You by passing to a holy and renewed life. The world passes (John II:17), but I do not want to pass with the world; I want to pass to Your Father, this is the journey I have to make: I want to make it with You.  In the ancient Passover, the Jews, who were to leave Egypt to cross into the Promised Land, had to appear in traveler's clothes, staff in hand, and hasten to eat the Passover, so that they would be ready to leave at any moment. This is the state in which the Christian must put himself to celebrate his Passover with Jesus Christ. Ô my Savior! receive your traveler; here I am ready: I want to pass with You from this world to Your Father, which You willed to be mine also.
  Where does this regret come from? What! I am still attached to this life? What error keeps me in this place of exile? You are going to pass, O my Savior! and resolved as I was to pass with you, when I am told that it is in earnest that I must pass, I am troubled. I cannot bear or hear this word.  Cowardly traveler, what do you fear? What is so lovely in this world that you do not want to leave it with the Savior Jesus? Would He leave it if it were good to remain in it? But listen: Jesus passes from this world to go to his own Father; Christian, whoever you are, you pass to a father: the place from which you leave is an exile, you return to the paternal home.
  Let us pass then from this world with joy: but let us not wait until the last moment to begin our passage. Let it be perpetual: let us never stop, but camp everywhere, following the example of the Israelites. Let everything be a desert to us, as it was to them; let us be like them always under  tents; our home is elsewhere.
    My Savior, I believe that You have not overcome death for Yourself alone; You have overcome it for us, who believe in You.  We do not have, in truth, Your privilege of not finding corruption in the tomb; for it is necessary that our flesh, which is a flesh of sin, be dissolved; but our body will be put into the earth like a germ which will reproduce itself and it will leave to the earth only death, corruption, old age and infirmity.
  I adore You,  Ô Jesus, my liberator; I adore You, Jesus, risen for ourselves and for all our members which You have filled with Your spirit, which is the spirit of eternal life. You endured death  'so that death might be conquered, Satan disarmed, and to free those whom the fear of death held in continual servitude.'  (Heb. II. 14.)
  Let us taste, my soul, these words of the Savior, wherewith  death has no more fear: 'I am the resurrection and the life: he who believes in Me, even though he were dead, will live: he who lives and believes in Me will never die. (John IX, 25.)

  I believe it, Lord, it is so; my only deliverer, I adore You, Ô Jesus, You are my life and my resurrection, according to Thy word!

The end.
From "Les Plus Belles Prières des Ames Pieuses",  1892 AD. pp. 943 -945.
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¤ Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, bishop, court preacher of Louis XIV. Born at Dijon in 1627, died in Paris April 12,  1704 AD.