Easter Sunday glory and joy

[This is inspired by the Easter Sunday chapter of volume two of In Conversation with God, the Opus Dei priest Fr. Francis Fernandez’s acclaimed book of daily meditations.]

Most of Christendom (Roman Catholics, Orthodox and other Eastern rite Christians as well as Protestants who follow the original rubrics of the Church before there were schisms and separations) highly values the Resurrection of Our Lord as the basis of their faith.
Jesus Christ lives! He was killed and he lives again! Glory and kingship is His forever and ever!
This is why Christians experience and commemorate their great joy today.
The gospel of last night’s Vigil Mass of the Resurrection is from St. Luke: “On the first day of the week, at the first sign of dawn, the women went to the tomb with the spices they had prepared. The found that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb, but on entering discovered that the body of the Lord Jesus was not there. As they stood there not knowing what to think, two men in brilliant clothes suddenly appeared at their side. Terrified, the women lowered their eyes. But the two men said to them: ‘Why look among the dead for someone who us alive? He is not here; he has risen. Remember what he told you when he was still in Galilee: that the Son of Man had to be handed over into the power of sinful men and be crucified, and rise again on the third day?’ And they remembered His words.”
Then the women told the Eleven—Jesus’ original disciples (minus Judas, the traitor) whom he had ordained into the priesthood at the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday. They also told “all the others.”
“But this story of theirs,” Luke’s gospel continues, “seemed to be pure nonsense, and they did not believe them. Peter, however, went running to the tomb. He bent down and saw the binding cloths, but nothing else; he then went back home, amazed at what had happened.”s
He has risen! Jesus has risen: He is not in the tomb. Life has overcome death.
The glorious resurrection of the Lord is the key to interpreting his whole life, Fernandez reminds us. St. Paul says, in his first letter to the Corinthians, that without Christ’s victory over death, without this grand affirmation of the belief in the resurrection of the dead and Christ’s resurrection—which is the ground of the Christian faith, Christians must be pitied.
But that is not the case, because (Fernandez tells us) “the guarantee of our future resurrection is secured upon the Resurrection of Christ, because although we were dead through sin, God, full of mercy, moved by the infinite compassion with which he loved, gave us Christ … and He raised us with him.”
Easter therefore is the celebration of our Redemption, and therefore a day of great thanksgiving and joy.
Essential article of faith
The Resurrection of the Lord is an essential article of the Catholic faith. It has been taught as such since the beginning of Christianity. That this miracle is such a central reality of Christianity is shown by the fact that the Eleven, above anything else, were witnesses of the Resurrection. They announced to their followers that the Lord has come back to life. And to firm up their belief, Christ did appear to them and to thousands of others on separate occasions.
The apostles’ successors, and every priest and Christian who does apostolic and catechetical work to this day, continue to make witness to this miracle. If they don’t they are false Christians. They are not alter Christus (other Christs). They are not even worthy representatives of Christ.
The Resurrection must be the nucleus of every priest and apostolic worker’s preaching. For the fact of Christ’s resurrection is the highest argument for the divinity of Our Lord.
It is only in that context that The Light of Christ deserves the great importance we must give it. Only in that context that He is the Truth, the Life and The Way.
Before Christ, in the teaching of Christian orthodoxy, the world was cast in the overwhelming darkness of sin. There was only one other human being who had no sin. It was from her, His mother, the Immaculate Blessed Virgin Mary, that the God-Man derived every cell in His human body.