Christus resurrexit, quia Deus caritas est! Alleluia!
“Christ is resurrected because God is love! Alleluia!” My dear friends, it is nothing other than the power of God’s love, the same power that brought creation out of nothing, that raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Christ’s Easter victory is our Easter victory.
By the time of Peter’s preaching in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, he had already seen the Risen Lord firsthand, witnessed his ascension, and been infused with the Spirit’s power at the first Christian Pentecost. It is the Spirit who empowered him to spread the Good News that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
Our first reading comes from the section of Acts often called the “Pentecost of the Gentiles.” Peter’s preaching is directed to members of the house of Cornelius. Cornelius was a Roman centurion, a Gentile, as were most of the members of his household. Peter’s preaching gives a concise summary of Jesus’ life ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection. This summary eventually made its way into our Christian creeds. With our Creeds, both the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and the Apostles, we profess the core of our Christian faith concerning God’s salvation in Christ’s Jesus.
As you will witness in a few moments, during the renewal of your baptismal promises (for which Lent is but a preparation), when you are asked the three final questions, collectively known as “the Profession of Faith,” the Apostles Creed was the original baptismal creed of the Roman Church. Since the second century, this is the Creed recited by the Elect prior to baptism.
As our second reading exhorts:
our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the feast, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth1We use unleavened bread for the Eucharist. But what Saint Paul here insists is that by our baptism and by our on-going participation in the Eucharist, we are to be changed, transformed, converted, conformed more and more into the image of the Risen One. Christian life is about dying and rising to new life.
As the Epistle Reading for last night’s Paschal Vigil, taken from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, teaches:
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 life2The apostle’s point is that eternal life does not begin at physical death. Because of your baptismal death, burial, and resurrection, eternal life is now. This is very important to grasp. It’s a matter of life and death. Resurrection is not just something you believe about an event that happened a long time ago in a land far away, something that will perhaps only become relevant again when you face your own death or that of a loved one.
As a Christian, resurrection is something you live every day. Eternal life is always today, always in this encounter in this moment. As followers of the Risen One, we are agents of resurrection. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo (this phrase taken from Pilate in Saint John’s account of Jesus’ Passion when he presents Jesus on the balcony of praetorium- it means “Behold the man”), Friedrich Nietzsche refers to “Christians and other nihilists.”3
Nietzsche calls Christians as nihilists because, in his experience, due to their taking salvation for granted, seeing it as requiring nothing of them, the faith of many Christians makes no difference in how they live their lives. “Christ is risen. So what?” As scripture says elsewhere: “just as a body without a spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.”4
The best way to convince someone Jesus rose from the dead is not to engage in philosophical and apologetical arguments. Besides, most of the time this is an exercise in answering questions nobody is asking. Our lives as Christians should testify to the One who, out of great love, died and rose for us. In another work, Nietzsche wrote this about Christians:
Better songs would they have to sing, for me to believe in their Saviour: more like saved ones would his disciples have to appear unto me!5Especially in these times, it is important for us to sing beautiful songs, redemption songs. The notes of these songs are our acts of love and service performed out of gratitude to Christ for his great love for us and for the whole world. As Mother Teresa exhorted, make of your life something beautiful for God.
Just as resurrection must be preceded by death, hope lies beyond optimism. Hope begins where optimism ends. Nowhere does optimism fail more than in the face of death. Turning to Nietzsche, yet again: “only where there are graves are there resurrections.”6
In our Gospel today, the Risen Jesus does not make appearance. Mary Magdalene goes to Jesus’ grave only to find it empty. Rushing to the empty tomb and entering it, Peter and John only see the burial cloths, with the one that been out on Jesus’ face “rolled up in a separate place.”7 The evangelist makes clear that, while those who went into the tomb “believed,” “they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.”8
Having experienced Jesus’ arrest, his interrogations, his scourging, his public humiliation, and crucifixion, it’s safe to say that the optimism of his closest followers was extinguished. To make matters worse, Mary Magdalene expresses the worry that someone has stolen his body. But for Peter and John, the rolled up burial cloths were enough to give them a genuine spark of hope.
More than a historical fact, more than a discrete event in space and time, Christ’s resurrection is a great mystery. It is unfathomable. It is in this "Paschal" Mystery that you participate each time you come to Mass. Through your participation, the Spirit draws you deeper into this mystery through the circumstances of your everyday life.
Everyday experience is the raw material of salvation. It is only through your life, especially your losses, your downs, your failures, and, yes, even through your sins that you experience for yourself that hope lies beyond optimism. Only in this way do you come to realize that you can’t save yourself. What you experience through your life, living in Christ, is the love of God poured into your heart through the Holy Spirit.8 This is how you come to understand for yourself what it means “that [Christ] had to rise from the dead.”
The love that is the fruit of faith and hope is the same love that resurrected Jesus from the dead. May the renewal of your baptismal promises today ignite hope in your heart, empowering you to recommit to living life in Christ, which is resurrected life.
Christus resurrexit, quia Deus caritas est! Alleluia!
1 1 Cor 5:7b-8.↩
2 Romans 6:4..↩
3 Friedrich Nietzsche. Ecce Homo. “Why I Write Such Excellent Books,” 1. ↩
4 James 2:26.↩
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. XXIV. Second Part, “The Priests.” Trans. Thomas Common.↩
6 Thus Spake Zarathustra. Second Part, XXXIII, “The Grave Song.” ↩
7 John 20:7.↩
8 John 20:8-9.↩
9 Romans 5:5.↩
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