Fake Easter Vs. Jesus’ Easter

  For many people, even Christians sometimes, Easter is the celebration of something simply “positive.” It seems as if they were thinking, “We celebrate life. It is spring! Jesus is alive, rejoice!” And they do not realize that it makes no sense to celebrate Easter Sunday without a reference to Good Friday. I mean, this is not Christmas, it’s Easter. Today, Jesus does not come out from the womb, but from a tomb. Even more, He does not simply come back to this life, like Lazarus; rather, Jesus comes out of the tomb to an eternal, transformed, imperishable life. Lazarus also came out of a tomb but to die again; Jesus dies no more, He can die no more. He is risen to an eternal life.

1.  But this is my first point: Jesus’ resurrection presupposes His death. He could not be now enjoying this life without having passed through the pains of death. He had to die, He had to kill in Himself our sins and our death, so as to grant His and our human nature the gifts of eternal life.

His death and His resurrection are mutually implicated. He dies in order to kill our old ways of living, He dies to bring us a new life by destroying the old one. His resurrection, His new life implies the other life dead, it implies that “former things have passed away,” are dead, and that He is “making all things new” (cf. Revelation 21:4-5). Through His death, Jesus destroys what was bad in us, not what He had created; through His resurrection, Jesus saves, restores what He had created good and gives it a share in His divine life.

2.  We Christians are called to participate in Jesus’ life, to participate in Jesus’ resurrection. But to do that, we also need to participate in His death. We cannot enjoy Jesus’ life if we do not die to sin first. We cannot enjoy the new without killing the old in ourselves. New wine goes into fresh wineskins. For now, clearly, our participation in Jesus’ death and resurrection is only spiritual: we die to sin and we live in His love, as children of God. After our body dies, on the last day, we will also participate in the bodily, physical resurrection of Jesus. Those who participate in the first resurrection, the spiritual one, will be able to participate in the second resurrection, with Jesus in Heaven (cf. Revelation 20:6).

3.  This participation in Jesus’ life, that is, in both His death and resurrection, is given to us through the Sacraments of the Church. Jesus’ life comes from Jesus Himself, but Jesus is now in Heaven. So, for those of us who live after Jesus’ ascension into Heaven, Jesus left the Sacraments of faith as a way of contact with Him. The Sacraments are the way in which, by something visible and tangible, and by our faith in Jesus’ word, we can receive from Him His grace, which is a participation in His death and resurrection. By the Sacraments of the Church, we participate in Jesus’ victory over sin and in Jesus’ new life. The Sacraments are like channels through which His power comes to our lives, when we are rightly disposed.

4.  Some of us here today will be baptized in this celebration, and we all will remember our own baptism and renew our own promises. Today, we are called to rejoice in our spiritual birth as children of God and of the resurrection. The question is, are we alive today? Are we resurrected? In order to respond, the first question is: Have we died? A child of God can be born only if he has died to sin: this is why we renounced sin before baptism. A child of God is alive and kicking if he is dead to sin; but a child of God can die when he commits a mortal sin. When this happens, this child of God needs to enter the tomb of the confessional and come out from it resurrected to the life of grace.

Christian life implies death, otherwise is fake. Christian life implies death because it is a resurrected life, not simply a material, worldly life. Spring is about flowers, flowers that wither; Easter is about the risen Christ, who is alive and young forever. This is why Christian life is better, because it is a life full of love, full of true joy, full of God, full of meaning and truth, full of hope towards the future, full of compassion towards our neighbor. Even when we bear a cross, we Christians are never alone, and never without hope. “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:37-39).

Today we ask God that we may leave in the tomb all of our personal sins: the ones that we have confessed, the ones for which we have done penance and fasting, the ones for which we are so sorry and we wish we had never committed. We ask God also to get us out of our tombs, the tombs of hatred and resentment, the tombs of fear and hopelessness, the tombs of lust and of our worldly views. And we ask God to give us new life. A life of love. May God win over our hearts that we may love Him above all things and above all people. May love take over our hearts, so that we may be fearless in doing great things for our families, our communities and our nation. And for our Church. How would your life look like if your spirit were risen? May God grant us to rise from our death so as to live this new life with Him.