Wednesday, April 7, 2021

The Resurrection Calls Us to Newness of Life

Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

The miracle we celebrate in these days of Easter is the new foundation of human history, revealing the mystery of the Father's plan from the beginning: to put all things under the headship of Christ His Son (see Ephesians 1:10). Every facet of human experience, human interaction, and human life has been transformed and given a new meaning by the Person who has transformed our humanity by making it His own, by dwelling with us, by living with us a truly human life "in all things but sin." 

Jesus never sinned, but that didn't mean He was "missing out" on something in His humanity. We sin because we are missing something that God intended for us to have. God never wanted us to sin. He made us free for the sake of love. And although He permitted humans to reject His wisdom, His grace and gifts, and allowed sin to wound the foundations of human freedom and human solidarity, it was only so that He could turn our failures into a more profound revelation and outpouring of His love, by healing us and restoring what was lost in a more wondrous and beautiful way. As Saint Augustine said (and as the Church sings in the Easter Vigil liturgy): "Felix culpa ... O happy fault ... that gained so great a redeemer!"

Sin itself, as we know only too well, adds nothing to the enrichment of our humanity; it reduces, divests, and destroys us, and in itself it is "no-thing" at all - rather it is our shrinking and withdrawal from the full measure of being, from truth, goodness, beauty, and the reality of life.

Jesus who is the Life accompanies us into the depth of the impoverishment that is the consequence of sin and death. Indeed, He "goes before us," bearing our sorrows all the way to the end out of love - as the gift of the Father's love - so as to open a new way for reconciliation with God, a new and inexhaustible life that overcomes all the violence we inflict upon ourselves and one another.

The Risen Lord invites us to a renewed and transformed life. He seeks us who are lost. He dies for us (and "with us") so that He can find us and save us. He wants us to rise with Him, to be free from the tombs in which we have imprisoned ourselves.