Tuesday in Easter Week

I Corinthians 15:12-28

 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.

It is clear from the way that St. Paul writes here in I Corinthians 15 that even in his own day, just a few short decades after the event, people were confused about the resurrection.  People certainly liked the idea of Jesus and his teachings were nice, but for many the whole resurrection thing was just too much.  Read Paul's address to the philosophers in Athens (Acts 17).  He has them eating out of the palm of his hand until he gets to the resurrection, then they dismiss him as a fool.

Isn't it the same way today?  People want to pick and choose from Christianity, keeping what they like (i.e. what confirms their way of thinking or living) and rejecting the rest.  The resurrection is still just too much for some people.

For one thing, we superior minds of the 21st century don't have to believe in such fairy tales.  We know that when people die they're dead, to think otherwise is simply to cling to stories which make us feel better about our ultimate fate.  Only the weak need to dream about eternal life.  The strong die and like it.

What a pernicious lie the world and the devil have foisted on us!  Death is nothing but our mortal enemy in every sense of the term.  Death, despite what we've been led to believe is not a "natural part of life."  It is the end result of the poison of sin in the creation.  God is God of life, death is His greatest foe.  In the resurrection Christ defeated this foe and though it still rails against life in all its forms, death itself is dying.  We need not fear it, or much less embrace it.  It has no power over us.

Our culture however has given week and feeble death much power.  We live in a culture of death.  If you really think about it, death is at the root of all our cultural ills.  Life is rejected at every turn.  For this reason people still don't want to hear about a Jesus who died and was buried and then in his flesh rose again, beginning the ultimate defeat of the last enemy, death.

During these 50 days, and really our whole lives as Christians, we must devote ourselves to the destruction of death.  We must live, abundantly and eternally, in a culture which is obsessed with death.  This really is the crux of our faith.  For if we have not been made alive in Christ what is the point?  If we don't accept that our lives are eternal and await our own bodily resurrection, then all we do really is in vain.  If we only have Christ for this short life then we are utterly pitiful.