DID JESUS REALLY RISE FROM THE DEAD?
- 12 hours ago
- 3 min read
Easter is a time to re-centre the faith, hope and mission of the Church on Jesus Christ, risen from the dead. As St Paul reminds us, it is the foundation of our faith. If it never happened, or if we reduce it to a mere symbol, then we are the most pitiful of all people (1 Cor. 15:19). The proclamation of the Gospel accounts of the resurrection in the liturgy during this Easter season unleash a divine power that makes all things new and transforms every aspect of life. It is nothing less than a spiritual revolution that permeates human relationships, cultures, institutions and societies in ways that we continually underestimate. If you doubt the inherent power of the Gospel to effect change, listen again to the words of Maud Gonne, who was involved in the Easter rising in 1916 and who knew all about change though social activism. A convert to Catholicism, she once wrote:
‘I believe every political movement on earth has its counterpart in the spirit world and the battles we fight here have perhaps been already fought out on another plane and great leaders often draw their unexplained power from this. I cannot conceive a material movement that has not a spiritual basis. It was this that drew me so powerfully towards the Catholic Church’ (A.N. Jeffares – A. MacBride White, eds., A Servant of the Queen: the Autobiography of Maud Gonne, p. 336).
The conviction of Maud Gonne of the spiritual roots of social and spiritual change, takes us back to the fundamental gift the Church possesses and cannot keep to herself. It is the bold proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and that God’s love and truth are the greatest powers at work in the universe. The late Pope Francis, whose first anniversary we celebrated this week, urged all Christians to rediscover the evangelical power of the resurrection as the foundational key to the recovery of kerygmatic preaching, spirituality and the apostolic mission of the Church today.
There are two major implications for this retrieval of the centrality of the resurrection for the Christian life. The first is the intimate accessibility of the risen Lord to all, to which he invites everyone to a renewed personal encounter. Pope Francis pointed out that those who accept this encounter with the risen Lord “are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness” (The Joy of the Gospel, 1). The second implication of this re-centring on the resurrection is a deeper faith that the Spirit of the risen Christ makes all things new. Here is the saving love which comes before moral and religious imperatives for ‘God loved us first’ (1 John 4:19). In contrast to symbolic interpretations of the resurrection, what has come back to life is not just Jesus’ message and kingdom, but his very person. With this in mind, the late pope cautions against a type of evangelisation that is more ‘philosophical than evangelical’ and spells out the communal and societal repercussions of a kerygmatic spirituality that becomes incarnate in history.
Peter Maurin, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, once said that the Church has taken its own dynamite and placed it in sealed containers and sat on the lid. It’s time to step off the lid and unleash anew the power of the resurrection. The first thing to do is to believe it ourselves. ‘Lord, deepen our faith that your Spirit that rose Jesus from the dead, is at work within us and that its power can do infinitely more than we can ask for or imagine’.
In the videos above and below, Dominican Sisters debate the resurrection and Trent Horn offers an amazingly clear and precise teaching on why Jesus Resurrection makes sense.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH:
Comments