What’s up with Christians and celebrating Easter?
Every religion has its collection of beliefs and practices. There may be so many, that members often find it difficult to list them in a priority.
For Christians, this weekend’s celebration of Easter (the resurrection of Jesus Christ) can resolve this difficulty. Easter is the bottom line of Christianity. It is its most important belief and its greatest feast (even greater than Christmas).
Everything in Christianity depends upon whether Easter is true or not. In Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (Chapter 15), he says, “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ was not raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is pointless and you have not been released from your sins. … If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are of all people the most to be pitied.” Rather “bottom line,” wouldn’t we say?
As the practice of religion wanes in our culture the fear of death intensifies. Without an authentic faith in God more people consider death as the end of life, as the edge off which we fall into oblivion.
Yet, despite religions decline, there still lingers in the human heart the hope that life goes on. The history of the word’s religions indicates the persistence of this expectation. Yet, at the same time, there has always been a struggle with this great mystery. Fierce energies run loose in the world that would have us doubt our hopes of ever possessing a complete joy of life.
To Christians, Easter means far more than just the resuscitation of the corpse of Jesus Christ. We see it as representing a passage and a promise. The passage is into a final stage of life that is the ultimate in existing. The promise is that this ultimate life is offered to all people. For the One standing alive on that first Easter morning had previously explained his mission as “I have come that they may have life, and have it to its fullest (John: 10:10).” Thanks to Father Lou Guntzelman, who is a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, for these words.
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