Jesus’ Resurrection – the Center of our Christian Life

The Resurrection is the greatest of Christ's miracles. For the soul of each of us, it is also the most important. But we need to know why!

The Son of God died and he rose again. The death of a God to satisfy our sins moves us deeply; it is a pathetic moment, we believe, but essential to our salvation and a testimony of the infinite love of God. On the other hand, the Resurrection of Jesus does not tell us much; it is a more glorious mystery, certainly than the first one, but only a magnificent appendix to the chapter of our redemption.

Alas! If we think like this, our faith is vain, as St. Paul says, and our life is meaningless. For the Resurrection, far from being a kind of addition to redemption, is an essential moment of it. The death and Resurrection of Christ form a whole. One without the other makes no sense. Together they constitute the Paschal Mystery, which is at the center of our faith and animates all Christian life. How does it work?

The promise of a redeemer

Adam and Eve Driven From Paradise by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836 - 1902)In the fall from the earthly Paradise, Adam had lost for himself and for the whole human race more than the state of integrity; he had lost the supernatural life that God had given him. He had reversed the original order in which humanity was subject to God. Yet, if at that moment we turned away from God and became a slave to sin, God, for his part, did not abandon us. He promised a Redeemer for fallen humankind, the protoevangelium: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; They will strike at your head, while you strike at their heel” (Genesis 3:15).

This Redeemer is Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary — God and human at the same time. It was he who came to reconcile us to God, to redeem us from sin, to re-establish, in an even more marvelous way, the order overthrown by Adam. At the very moment of his Incarnation, when human nature and divine nature met in his person, Jesus began this reconciliation of the human race with God. He continued it in all the acts of his earthly life, all directed toward the supreme gesture of his death on the cross.

Christ completes our new life, our reconciliation

Jesus’ death, however, could not be an ordinary death; his life was not to end in defeat. He had to accomplish the work entrusted to him by the Father, a work which was not completely summed up in something purely negative but which included something very positive – in his own words: “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10b).

Having come to give life, could he leave us with death? Having come to reconcile us to the Father, was he going to be satisfied with completely destroying sin without infusing virtue? No. That is why the Redemption does not end with death on the cross, but reaches its climax three days later. It is in his resurrection that Jesus completes the reconciliation. In Christ's resurrection, the victory over sin and death is realized for all of humanity, once for all. This moment marks for us the beginning of a new life.

The life of grace – God within us

Eastern Orthodox icon of Jesus Christ as the True Vine, 16th centuryThis life to which we are born through the Resurrection is the life of grace, the divine and eternal life, the very life of God. It elevates and divinizes our whole being. It touches the soul and the faculties of the soul and body, and disposes them to act supernaturally, since the soul must express itself through these faculties.

From it come the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, which divinize the will and the intelligence and make them capable of entering into contact with God; the supernatural moral virtues of prudence and justice, of strength and temperance, which transform human action into supernatural and meritorious action; and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which dispose our faculties to accept readily the immediate inspirations of God.

Thus our whole being lives by the supernatural life received through Christ’s Resurrection. We are no longer only humans; we are truly and really children of God, and as children of God we have the rights of God’s child, the right to the divine inheritance, to eternal life, to beatitude or happiness. As children of God we can therefore hope to live eternally with the very life of God.

However, the life of grace, like any other life, can weaken, even be lost, if it is not maintained and nourished. In order to continue and develop, it must keep a vital contact with Christ, “Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches” (John 15:4b-5a).

The role of faith in our daily life

How then do we graft ourselves onto Christ? First of all through faith. The Paschal Mystery, although accomplished two thousand years ago, is still the source of life. And the glorified Christ continues throughout the ages to give life to all people who come to him and unite themselves to him in faith. In the present age, God justifies “the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26b).

But to be perfect and fully effective as a channel of life, this faith must be joined to charity. For even if we have the fullness of faith, a faith to move mountains, as St. Paul says, if we do not have charity we are nothing. Only then, when our faith is united with charity and expressed in our actions, do we become fully children of God and can we hope with filial confidence for our justification and glorious eternal life.

However, the faith that transmits to us the life of grace is itself based on the Resurrection. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Not only does the Resurrection engender us in supernatural life, it even grounds the faith by which we come to possess that life. But its influence on the Christian life does not end there.

How the sacraments help us . . .

It extends to the sacraments, which visibly express our faith and reproduce, each in its own way, the paschal mystery. All of them transmit to us the life of grace. Some give it when it has been lost, others increase it as it is lived. All are personal, vital, and in a sense physical encounters with the glorious Christ, the Christ of the Resurrection, and in him, with the Father.

It is Jesus who forgives, baptizes, orders, sacrifices. This aspect of encounter is clearly seen especially in Baptism and the Eucharist. In Baptism the glorified Christ takes possession of the new Christian to make the person relive the paschal mystery. St. Paul expressly teaches that: “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).

The Eucharist expresses most clearly, most purely, this “physical” encounter with Christ. For then we eat his immolated but living body to nourish our supernatural life. What we can say about Baptism and the Eucharist we can say just as well about the other sacraments. Let us repeat: they are all vital encounters with Christ. Without the Resurrection the sacraments could not be; they would have no reason to exist.

The empty tomb is the manger where the Church was born

Resurrection window, St. Joseph Church, Winsted, ConnecticutHowever, in his Resurrection, Christ did not give a new life that would only animate each of us individually. He was forming a new self, a new organism, of which he is the head and of which all those who live by his life are the members. The empty tomb is the manger where the Church was born.

But if the Resurrection was necessary for the spiritual organization of the Church, it was no less necessary for its physical formation. The Scriptures strongly attest to this when they present the Apostles and the disciples, discouraged and scattered after the Passion, regaining their faith in Jesus only after being convinced of his Resurrection. And the faith they preach, after having received the Spirit, is the faith in the Resurrection.

The Resurrection and our need for prayer and worship

And through this Church, thus born and raised, the Resurrection leaves its mark on all worship. As we have seen, all the sacraments instituted by the Church, all the blessings, the very organization of her liturgical year find their meaning only in the Paschal mystery. They are all attestations, testimonies of faith in Christ, in his death, in his Resurrection. All of them are meant to nourish and develop in us the divine life.

The Resurrection extends to all other aspects of Christian life and the life of the Church. Why have the Catechism of the Catholic Church, sermons, missions and retreats, if not because our life needs the word of God in order not to die out? We do not live by bread alone, Jesus said, but also by the word of God. Why does we have prayer, devotions, pilgrimages, if not to keep us in contact with God, to increase our love, to strengthen our faith in him?

Thus the Resurrection of the Savior generates and sustains our personal Christian life, which blossoms into the social Christian life, that is, the life of the Church. Far from seeing in the Resurrection of Christ a mere glorious addition to the work of reconciliation, we must see in it the basis on which the actual economy of salvation is built. It is the glorious mystery which the Church relives at every moment and which we ourselves must relive in our whole being. We must see in it the path of our return to the Father, the absolute Principle from which all that is came forth, the ultimate end in the intimacy to which we must all return.