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Christ is risen! Christ is truly Risen!
Throughout the world from the very beginnings of the Church this has been the cry that gives us our identity. This is the truth that changes everything and everyone. “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.” Easter is the great celebration of victory of life over death. Ours is an Easter religion. We do not deny or turn away from the evils that surround us. We are witnessing the horrors of war in Ukraine daily on our TV screens. Some 100 million people died due to conflicts in the last century. Poverty grips more than half of the human race and hunger kills millions every year. Discrimination divides the human family into contending parties.
We do not deny these miseries, but we refuse to surrender to their power because of our faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The postmodern world has problems with resurrection. It has problems with anything transcendent. “This life is all there is” they proclaim. You live only once - Grab all you can – By all means you have! It doesn’t get any better than this. Bound by immediate distraction, enthralled by skills of indulgence, we are jarred by talk of heaven. For the secular media the subject is even inappropriate.
Discomfort with transcendence churns in us Christians as well. Sometimes there even seems to be a hidden assumption lurking in our theology and ritual: This life is all there is. It is reflected even in our parents who ‘price’ past times over religious events! Sometimes—although more rarely—complaints can still be heard from premodern survivors that they rarely hear homilies and sermons about end-of-life realities. We are very much a people of this age, the here and now.
But to the extent that we partake of postmodern sensibility, we are on a collision course with the content of our worship. Easter celebration is Eucharistic because it is the promise of an eternal banquet. Christ, having entered into the depths of our humanity, even to the extent of dying its death, and returned alive, visibly experienced by his disciples.
If we take soberly enough the passion and death of our own lives, of humanity itself, and of Jesus who is the eternal Word made flesh, we will more fully appreciate the radical nature of our faith, especially at Eastertime. “We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.” Suffering will be vindicated; death will be overcome; a new life will arise: that is the Easter message of the paschal mystery. Together today we have the means to make all things new. Why? How? One answer: The great truth! Jesus Christ! Yes! He died for us! Yes! He conquered sin and death forever! Yes! He is truly Risen! And we are the witnesses who proclaim that God has raised him up and given him the name that is above every name that we might profess to the glory of God the Father.
JESUS CHRIST IS LORD! AMEN! ALLELUIA!
Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O