“Christ is risen! / He is truly risen!” Countless number of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Catholic Christians, Roman Catholics and Protestant Christians joyfully greet each other on Easter Sunday.
This is because this Eastertide greeting is a profession of faith and dedication to life, as it undoubtedly was for the women Matthew spoke about in his Gospel: “And behold, Jesus met them and said, ‘Hail!’ And they came up and fell at his feet and worshiped him.”
Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.” The joyous proclamation of Easter that death divides but resurrection unites, that death destroys but resurrection heals, that death sows despair but resurrection instils a sure hope, is the ongoing Good News we need to be continually bombarded with. Easter offers strong hope that never disappoints. How?
The late Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume OSB, used to say: “The great gift of Easter is hope – Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake.” Evil cannot deter us from being totally immersed into the saving reality of God’s love, shown to us by Jesus’ paschal mystery. In the end, death is always obliged to pave the way for resurrection. Death’s fate is humiliation and defeat.
This is so since Jesus’ resurrection necessarily brought about recapitulation, re-creation, renewal, restoration and rectification.
This extraordinary reality shows that resurrection occurs when the world resolutely halts from its senseless progression and humbly returns back to its original genesis. A homily written for Easter in 387 AD thoroughly explains this movement from darkness to light.
“Wanting to procure the resurrection for fallen human nature, wanting to renew it and re-create it by means of his passion in its original state, behold what the only-begotten Son of God did! Himself the creator of the first man, he also wanted to be his saviour after he had fallen, with a view to restoring all nature. Not content therefore with consigning himself to the passion, to effect this renewal he re-united all those chronological elements which had existed in creation, so that the end might seem in harmony with the beginning and the creator’s way of acting consistent in itself.”
The homily’s content points to the biblical idea of regeneration which takes place every time a person encounters God personally. Psalm 80 illustrates this felicitous return to the Lord God when thrice it proclaims: “Restore us, O God; let thy face shine, that we may be saved!” (Ps 80.3.7.19). The saving face of this personal God (v 3), who is also the “God of hosts” (vv 7 and 19), is the factotum for individual and collective salvation.
The Resurrected Christ has himself become the foundational principle for the resurrection of our corruptible bodies. Did not Saint Thomas Aquinas say: “Christ has really, truly, and substantially risen, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, from the dead. The whole Christ has risen indeed for the completion of the work of our redemption?”
Consequently, Christ’s resurrected body embraces our deadly body by restoring it into its very incorruptibility. For that matter Saint Gregory of Nyssa observes: “After the resurrection, when our bodies will be reunited to our souls, they will be incorruptible; and the carnal passions which disturb us now will not be present in those bodies; we shall enjoy a peaceful equilibrium in which the prudence of the flesh will not make war upon the soul; and there will no longer be that internal warfare wherein sinful passions fight against the law of the mind, conquering the soul and taking it captive by sin. Our nature then will be purified of all these tendencies, and one spirit will be in both, I mean in the flesh and in the spirit, and every corporeal affection will be banished from our nature.”
Can we not deduce that the eventual resurrection of our bodies is the surest hope Easter can ever offer to us?
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
SAN GWANN