This is the beauty, the great hope and the great gift from Our Father: Christ is alive and He Lives forever! This is the lesson of the Easter season.

Are we truly conscious of this mystery of Salvation? Is He truly alive for me each day, in all I do, in my prayers, in my celebration of the Eucharist? Is it really He who comes to dwell in me every time I receive His Body and His Blood? It is easier to understand that He died, because we are all familiar with death, but to believe Christ lives again is a mystery of faith that must be part of us.

Christianity is a religion for the living. It is a religion for the “resurrected.” The life of the Christian is a marvelous and eternal life, but it is a life that is born out of death. The kind of life that Jesus came to offer us is not just a natural life: all of that we had from creation. That life ends in the tomb.

The true life is the supernatural life that comes from our insertion into Christ leading us to live His own life: the divine life of His grace. It is a life freely accepted by our incorporation into Christ through our baptism, which is to die so as to live forever. Each year, our Church reminds us and leads us to consciously live this reality through the Paschal Vigil with its marvelous symbolisms.

The Paschal Candle: evoking that Christ is the light of the world. The Baptismal Water: to submerge is to die with Christ; to emerge signifies to resuscitate to a new life. The baptized is co-buried with Christ and offers himself or herself to die with Him. The Pascal Mass and Communion: participation in the Body of the Resurrected guarantees for us our own resurrection. Whenever we assist and participate in the Eucharistic celebration, we should place ourselves in God’s will. Our own lives should be a continuous Mass, with its offertory, its transformation and Communion.

“Christ, Our Lord, has been sacrificed,” sings the Church. He is the true Paschal Lamb who by His death destroyed our death and by His resurrection gives us eternal Life. This is truly the Paschal mystery. To live a Christian life is to be like Christ. For those who consciously live this reality, death will not come as an enemy or as an unknown. Death instead will be the door that will open without mystery to give us access to the real true life.

The Jews of old, like some modern persons, spoke about a “dead God.” But they were not sure they had killed Him. Pilate told the guards: “Go and secure the tomb as best you can. And they went and kept it under surveillance, after fixing a seal to the stone.” (Matthew 27: 64-66.) And yet Christ is alive. He lives forever. To those guards at the tomb and to all those who proclaim that God is dead, we shall cry loudly:

“Why search for the Living One among the dead? He is not there. He has been raised from the dead.” (Luke 24:5-6.) He is alive in us!

Let us together give thanks and praise to our Loving God. Amen!

Deacon Manny.