Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Every sermon preached in the New Testament, every
proclamation of the
Gospel
message by the first believers,
had this message at its heart. The news
that galvanized the
first disciples and that changed the ancient
world—and that
continues to change our world—is the Good News that the
Crucified One is alive.
Everything said by Augustine, Aquinas,
Francis of Assisi,
Dante, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Pascal,
Newman,
Chesterton, and John Paul II comes down to the declaration
that
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. Every act of every
saint is related
to the fact of the Resurrection.
Over the centuries, various
thinkers and theologians have
tried to maintain that Christianity is
fundamentally a moral
system at whose center stands the command to love
God and
neighbor. Some have wanted to strip Christianity of its
mystical
and supernatural elements, turning the Resurrection
into a pleasant myth or an evocative symbol.
But St. Paul gives the lie to these reductionistic
interpretations: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith
is futile."
In other words, what your faith comes down to is the
conviction that
God the Father has raised his Son from the
realm of the dead. Everything
else in Christianity—ritual,
liturgy, theology, morality—flows from
this fact and is
related to it.
May the truth of the
Resurrection encourage your spirit
and enliven you with the gifts of
faith, hope, and love this
Easter season!
Peace,
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