Easter Sunday: 3-27-16
Peace be with You,
Happy Easter! Friends, we have reached the apex of our liturgical year! This is the celebration that gives life to our faith, for without it, we would have no reason to believe in Jesus Christ. As Saint Paul says: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). But notice, please, how Paul ties everything together here. The resurrection is intimately tied in with the forgiveness of sins. Generally, we associate the sacrifice of the cross with the forgiveness of sins, and to be sure, the death of Jesus was necessary to atone for our sins. However, had he remained dead, our situation would not have changed, we would have remained under the punishment of death incurred by our first parents in the Garden of Eden. So, though the sacrifice of the cross be indispensable, we must not stop there. The final blow to sin and death is the Resurrection! In it, we have the opportunity to live in Christ! After all, who would declare that he or she shared the life of a dead man? As Christians, we profess to share in the life of Christ, and by virtue, we profess him fully alive!
But this life cannot be had, cannot be shared, without first sharing in a mutual death. It is a common occurrence in our day to tend to totally skip Good Friday in anticipation of Easter Sunday. However, we must remember that the only way to become fully alive is to pass through death. This is true not only of the end of our earthly life and birth to eternity, but also to our lived reality here and now. This process of dying began at baptism as Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans: “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” In short, through our baptism, we “die to self” to live to Christ. But this is not a one time occurrence, this death must take place on a daily basis. However, please, do not be mistaken. This death is not a renunciation of the self, it is a renunciation of all we have let enter our lives that prevent us from being what God has created us to be! It is a death that has life as its aim! My friends, during the Lenten season we sought to put to death those elements in our lives which separate us from God, precisely so that we might rise to new life in Jesus Christ! Today is the celebration of your life fully lived in Him!
Your Servant in Christ,
Tony
Tony Crescio is the founder of FRESHImage Ministries. He holds an MTS from the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD candidate in Christian Theology at Saint Louis University. His research focuses on the intersection between moral and sacramental theology. His dissertation is entitled, Presencing the Divine: Augustine, the Eucharist and the Ethics of Exemplarity.
Tony’s academic publications can be found here.