This week begins the Easter Season. For the next 50 days, until Pentecost, our faith calls us to rejoice in the central, life-giving reality for all of creation and existence. That is, that Jesus, as the savior of the world, truly died but then rose again from the dead.

 

Even more, Jesus rose not as some sort of phantasm but in His same body. That same body, however, is now glorified in a way that we cannot yet understand or imagine. It is the resurrection that has changed everything.

 

Our Christian and Catholic faith rises and falls on this point. As St. Paul wrote, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.” (I Cor, 15:17-19).

 

Faith in the resurrection is a test for every person. St. Augustine commented, “On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body.” (En. in Ps. 88, 5). We know from the New Testament that among the Jewish leaders, the Sadducees rejected the possibility of the resurrection of the dead while the Pharisees believed in it (Acts 23:8). Further, when St. Paul preached at the Areopagus, his mention of the resurrection of the dead drew the scorn and rejection of the Athenians (Acts, 17:32). 

 

Our faith, however, leads to and draws its strength from the experience of the first believers that Jesus who was dead appeared to them. As the Gospels tell us, at first the disciples only saw an empty tomb. Angels told them that Jesus was risen but they didn’t grasp what they meant.

 

But then, in the Gospels, the first encounters with Jesus Himself are recorded. Jesus eats a piece of fish in their presence. He will invite Thomas to put his fingers into His wounds and his hand into Jesus’s side. 

 

Even more, following the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, the apostles were transformed. They went forth and, at great risk and ultimately to their deaths, they preached Jesus dead and risen. It has often been commented that only their personal experience can really explain these fearful and unimpressive men having the transformative courage and the will to testify to the risen Jesus to a doubting and hostile world.

 

For each of us, there are very real and personal implications. Because Jesus is the head of the human race, where He goes first, we are called to follow Him and to share what He has done. Jesus was tempted for us and overcame temptation in the desert. (Mt 4, 1-11). Jesus, though sinless, was baptized for us. (Mt 3, 13-17). And Jesus died and rose from the dead as the first fruits of the human race. (1 Cor 15: 20-23).

 

We must, then, prepare for our own resurrection by following Jesus and His teaching. We receive baptism into Jesus’s death and resurrection. We must prove our worthiness of the gift of the resurrection to eternal life with Jesus by our love for Him in this life. Our lives must give witness to that love by our constant prayer, our love for Jesus, our moral lives including purity and chastity, fidelity to marriage, charity and care for the poor and marginalized, honesty and a simplicity in the use of creation.

 

Above all, we must be conscious of the use of our own bodies throughout our lives. They must be respected in terms of food, drink, drugs and holiness. In that way we constantly affirm that we believe our own body and those of others is a body destined to rise as Jesus did.

 

Our test of faith is before us, here and now. 

 

We are to become the witnesses, to ourselves and to the world, that Jesus is risen. It’s time to 

get started.