Today the Church is immersed in an extraordinary fight for life at a time when the culture of death is increasingly establishing itself on a planetary scale. Easter belies this culture of death and proclaims the possibility of global hope. Christ's blood does not call for more blood but for reconciliation and love. His Resurrection confirms that love is stronger than death.
"The gospel of life", wrote Pope John Paul II, "is not simply a reflection on human life. Nor is it merely a commandment aimed at raising awareness and bringing about significant changes in society." It consists of proclaming the very person of Jesus. It proceeds clearer than ever from the paschal Christ, the victor over sin and death "curing all who had fallen into the power of the devil", as Peter says in the first reading.
John says: "It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb". Christendom wanted to establish the first day of the week as the new day when life's victory took place. In the background there was also the idea in the East that a dead body started to decompose after three days. We recall that Lazarus had already lain in the grave for four days, meaning that he had already begun to decompose.
Resurrection for us means that God holds the reins of history and has not handed over power to the laws of nature. That is precisely what we are tempted to believe today whenever we give in to the thought that God has abdicated from being God, and believe that He has become powerless in the face of our human constructs.
Our collective and individual problems today are articulated in terms of 'culture' because we are at a point in time when crimes against life are presented as legitimate expressions of individual freedom. There is an astonishing contradiction between what we are proclaiming to the world in Christ's death and resurrection, and what are today hailed as conquests of freedom on both national and international levels.
We may rightly ask: what is one resurrected body against the army of dead stretching back through the world's history? In the face of all history's horrors, the light of Easter seems to dwindle to insignificance. But Easter is not just a story to be told; it is a signpost on life's way. It is not an account of a miracle that happened a very long time ago; it is the breakthrough that has determined the meaning of history.
Jesus's Resurrection as proclaimed by the Gospels and by the Church's faith means that the person of Jesus is more important than his 'cause'. If we were merely to proclaim Jesus's cause, we would have no more to say about Jesus than about Karl Marx or Che Guevara or Martin Luther King. If we just say 'the cause of Jesus goes on', we would be saying too little. Men and women come and go, like replaceable actors on the stage of history. But Christ did not just die for a cause.
If we exclude Jesus's resurrection from death from the Easter message, it means that we hold creation to be unredeemable. Jesus's resurrection signifies the subordination of creation to the spirit. Faith in the Resurrection is the most radical denial of every form of materialism. We ought to open our hearts to the greatness of this message so that we may be set in motion before it is too late, before death carries out its cruel harvest. The Risen One ought to lift us anew out of our materialist consumerism and bring us to the freedom of the spirit that also honours creation and allows it to be great.