Christ’s Resurrection Changed Everything
It Gave Us the Possibility of a Happy Ending
Easter is upon us once again. Every year I attend the Holy Week Triduum, starting with the Mass of the Last Supper on Holy Thursday, followed the next day with the Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion, and culminating with the Easter Vigil Mass on the evening of Holy Saturday. It is actually one long extended celebration of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. I especially love the Easter Vigil, which can take up to two and a half to three hours. It’s meant to extend into the night as we wait in vigil for the Lord’s coming. It starts outside the church with a ceremony of the lighting of the Easter candle, which is then processed into the darkened church.
The Liturgy of the Word continues in the darkness with seven readings from the Old Testament interspersed with singing of the Psalms. The readings and psalms recount singular events such as the Genesis creation story, Abraham’s test of faith, the Exodus from Egypt, and the great prophesies foretelling of the coming Messiah, from Isaiah, Baruch, and Ezekiel. Then, the New Testament Epistle is the last to be read before the Gospel. Just before it is read, the lights blaze forth in the church. From then on, the lights are on again, and it seems extra bright in the church after all that darkness. The Gospel is then read—an account of the holy women finding the empty tomb and an angel announcing to them that that He has been raised from the dead.
We celebrate a historical event in which God allowed himself to be killed in a horrifying way so that we may be saved from eternal death. The place of execution on the Cross was, as local tradition held, over the burial place of Adam, the first man. Christ, the second Adam, was then laid in a tomb on Good Friday, and his body remained there though Holy Saturday until his Resurrection on Easter Morning. Like all of us at death, his human spirit was separated from his body. According to Church Tradition, however, His spirit did not remain idle during that time. Instead, He descended into Hell. You see, ever since Adam’s sin that brought death into the world, everyone, good or bad, went to Hell (also called Hades in Greek or Sheol in Hebrew). This abode of the dead contained an uncrossable chasm that separated the good from the damned. The good, when they died, went to what Christ called the Bosom of Abraham, a place of consolation, while the damned went to a place of torment. Christ went there to free the good captives of death. There is an ancient tradition that Christ pulled Adam and Eve out of that place, declaring that he did not create them to be prisoners.
His mission accomplished in freeing the dead, his spirit returned to his body on Easter morning, transforming it into a glorified state. He himself had raised others from the dead, in particular his friend Lazarus. But these people were returned to a normal human life and they would die again. Unlike them, Christ’s new transformed body had glorious properties and would never experience death again. He could alter his appearance so that his intimates could not recognize him. He could walk through walls into locked rooms, and move about in time and space effortlessly. In this, He gave us a glimpse of what we will have in the next life when our bodies are returned to us after the final judgement. In short, we will have glorious and undying bodies like his.
What does all this mean for us?
If we believe in Him and follow his word to the end, we will become like him in the next life. We don’t have to worry about our imperfectly aligned spirit and body, or our bodies breaking down. That will all be fixed. But not only us, we don’t have to worry about our loved ones simply ending up as nothing, a dead body in the ground. They will live as we will. We will all live happily ever after.
Like all Masses, by the way, the Easter Vigil continues after candidates for admission are received into the Church with the Liturgy of the Eucharist where bread and wine are transformed into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. A transformation that makes present to us Christ’s sacrifice.
You can learn all about all this from one of my favorite podcasts, The Catechism in a Year, presented by Fr. Mike Schmitz. Fr. Mike, who also brings us The Bible in a Year podcast reads and explains the Catechism of the Catholic Church, all 756 pages of it in 365 days. If you are interested at all in understanding the belief system of the 2,000 year-old Church that has given us Christendom and Western Civilization, the greatest culture ever developed in the history of mankind, this is the place to go.
Happy Easter!
