We celebrate the memory of the resurrection of Jesus every Sunday. We live the miracle of the resurrection proclaimed with the Introit of the Holy Mass, and through that divine action become transformed into new creatures. “Christ has risen from the dead! He conquered death through his death and gave us life with his resurrection! Eternal glory to him! Amen.”
Captured in the empirical certainty of our short-lived life, our mind and attention stare onto a reality into the future the same way that the Apostles were peering into the sky at the ascending Lord until two angels appeared to them and prodded them saying, “Men of Galilee why are you standing here staring into the sky?” (Acts 1.11). The kingdom of the Father is not a far off reality but is available here and now, and, through the resurrection of Jesus, the Father established the Day when He will judge the world with ultimate justice–as Paul proclaimed in the Areopagus of Athens (Acts, 17.31).
One of the first rational explanations for the existence of evil and the good is the story of Man’s disobedience in Genesis 3.1–19. This disobedience resulted in the penalty of death that was imposed on mankind as a “curse,” which did not carry even a flicker of salvation usually packed in any punishment. It is this curse that Jesus took away with his death and gave us life.
In the death of our Lord our own death receives its temporary measure and true meaning; our death becomes participation in the death of the Son of God, and through that participation acquires saving power. Through such communion in the death of the Lord our death carries the righteousness of the divine judgement and follows the example of the grain of wheat which does not die first to be buried but is buried first and dies afterwards to bring forth the new life packed in it as it is the principle of a new life; it will definitely spring and bloom and be fruitful. In the death of our Lord our death ceases from being eternal and becomes the entrance into the ultimate and eternal judgement of justification and salvation.
Our death in the death of Jesus gives us the opening to understand the true meaning of God’s will, helps us understand the meaning of punishment, teaches us to recognize the necessity of discerning what is important from that which is not, sets God as the vanishing point governing the perspective of our lives whereby we project ourselves on eternal values, reveals to us the full extent of the Father’s New Promise making mankind His children and heirs (Galatians 3.25-27) in the Church, the Body of Christ.
When we contemplate death in the death of Christ, we find there a beginning and an end, we become privy to the immense value of the death of the Lord, we become acquainted with the salvation brought by the power of love and sacrifice, we are apprised of the pascal transformative force, we find life.
In the death of Jesus our Father revealed in us His love, writes Paul the Apostle to the Romans (5.8–11), not to us but in us. He spread his love in us (Romans 5.5) as the seed of his own eternal life, in such a way that however much sin increased, this divine grace was always greater and more abundant with life.
Our resurrection in the death of our Lord proclaims the knowledge of the new and eternal life, and spreads everywhere the fragrance of our ever-living Lord, writes Paul the Apostle in his second letter to the Corinthians (2.14–16). Our Lord’s death is the fruit of the tree of life planted in the center of Paradise, giving to us not only the true knowledge of good and evil, but eternal life, cutting short and ending the dominion of physical death.
