During this Easter week, we look back on all of the lessons and graces that God has given to each of us in the course of Lent and then the sacred Triduum that concluded on Easter. We should have done penance for our sins and made a good confession during this holy time of year. And we should have examined our hearts and the conduct of our lives, making changes and improvements in how we live and love Christ.

 

But the event of Easter Sunday and what followed afterwards for the first followers of Jesus gets down to the bedrock of our existence. We are, spiritually, examining the foundation on which our “houses,” our very lives and existence, are built and on which they stand or fall.

 

The resurrection, both for those alive at the time of Jesus and for us now, brings each of us to an encounter with Christ. And from that encounter comes a question that none of us can avoid answering, and which will decide the nature of our life in this world and eternally in the next.

 

In the Gospel of John, we read of Jesus’s encounter with the blind man and of his cure from the inability to see. When the man recounts the truth to the Jewish leaders he is expelled from the temple. John tells us that Jesus then sought out the man for a personal encounter. He asked him, after the miracle that he had undergone and the trial of his witness before the Pharisees, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

 Then Jesus told him, “You have seen him and the one speaking with you is he” (Jn 9: 35-37).

 

A similar moment is recounted in the Gospel of Mark. A father is seeking the Lord’s help for his possessed son. Jesus says to the man, “Everything is possible to one who has faith.” And the man, recognizing his hope but also his weakness, responds, “I do believe, help my unbelief!” (Mk 9:23-24).

 

The most central element of our faith is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Everything else in faith points to the resurrection or flows from it.

 

And we are confronted then with the question of Jesus to the blind man: Do you believe in the Son of Man? Our response about our faith, given to ourselves and to God, cannot be simply a pious nod of our heart and head. To believe in Jesus is to believe fully in who and what He is.

 

Jesus is the Son of God. But Jesus is also truly alive after His suffering and death. Any other Jesus is not really Jesus and not worth our faith.

 

Further, to believe in Jesus, we must believe that He has risen from the dead. And if He is risen, He is risen truly, in the body. He has also promised that we too can rise with Him in glory in our bodies if we are faithful in our lifetime to His teaching and His commands.

 

Our act of faith cannot be limited. It grasps the intimate connection between Jesus, His conquering of death, and our eternal existence that awaits us. By faith we see then the truth of our own existence, meant for resurrected life with Jesus but threatened by sin and the temptations of this life. Now we understand that our every thought, our every word, our every action big or small, is part of our act of faith, for or against Jesus. Our commitment to the moral life, to the poor and to the family are all part of our act of faith lived out in this world.

 

This week, Jesus stands before the empty tomb and asks each of us, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” We do well to respond like the anxious father, “I do believe, help my unbelief.”