To all God’s faithful children who have, especially, journeyed with the Lord through the Lenten (spring) days of preparation for the celebration of the Pascha, I bring this Resurrection Greeting—Happy Easter to you all! Today we arrive at the culmination of our Lenten journey and we rejoice at the fulfilment of the paschal mystery of the Lord’s passion, death and resurrection.
The words of the Psalmist reverberates: “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!” These words echo the events of today because today the Church marks the greatest event in heaven and earth. This is the feast of feasts, the solemnity of solemnities. It is most correct to simply say that TODAY IS THE FEAST. Every celebration of the Church, every feast, every action of the Church, all our sacraments, our Christian life, the priesthood, our magnificent altar, your faith which drew you to this place, the preaching of the gospel to all the world—all these are made possible and have meaning because of today’s feast, the Resurrection of the Lord.
I once asked children in RE class to tell me the greatest feast celebrated in the Church. Everyone can guess the answer—Christmas. But is Christmas our greatest feast? Not really! Christmas would make no sense if the event of today did not take place. If Christ did not rise from the dead, perhaps his birthday would be celebrated as ours—by friends and close relatives only. The resurrection is the event to which the mystery of the incarnation points. The incarnation is understood through the paschal mystery. The liturgical calendar with all feasts and actions of the Church revolves around Easter, and points toward it. St. Paul says, “If Christ did not rise from the dead, our faith is vain, our preaching is vain” (I Corinthians 15:14). I make the bold claim that Western civilization in the present form with the giant developments in arts, science and technology owes much to the freedom brought to us through Jesus’ resurrection. Easter is our feast; we have been redeemed, humanity is reconciled with God, the gate of paradise closed after the fall is now wide open to receive believers, our access to the Father is reestablished.
Humanity has from antiquity grappled with this question: “What happens to us after we die?” Tremendous effort has been made by philosophers, scientists and experts in various fields to answer this question. All have met a blank wall. But Jesus has given us an answer that is not only appealing, but also assuring and consoling—there is life beyond the grave. The grave is not a home for believers. The empty tomb which the disciples saw today tells the whole story. Death is not a disintegration of life. In fact, death has become rather a pathway to the fullness of life. That is why, while the world celebrates birthdays when people are born in the flesh, the Church celebrates it when souls are born in spirit. Death to those who are saved is infancy again. In the liturgy, it’s called “natalitia,” Latin for birthday.
I’ll propose three reasons why Jesus is extraordinary and the only one worth following: 1, He was prophesied in scripture—everything said about him came true; 2, His coming split time in two (BC and AD); 3, He is the only one who came into this world primarily to die. Everyone else comes to live and to fulfil some plan in living. Hence, we speak of death as something inevitable, for, if we could, we’ll choose to live on. During this paschal season, we should renew our faith in Jesus and live the new life that offers the possibility of truly living on.
Fr. Chukwudi Jo Okonkwo