The Living amongst the Dead

"But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel; and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" Luke 24: 1-5 

For nearly 2,000 years now, men and women have lived and died for the belief that Jesus the Christ died, was buried, and on the third day rose again. The Resurrection, and thus Easter, lies at the very heart of the Christian life. Those who fail to believe in the Resurrection, fail to truly understand who Jesus is, and in so doing they fail to be able to have a relationship with Him as He hopes for. It is impossible to know Jesus if we do not believe in the Resurrection, as the angels so clearly point out "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" If we fail to believe in the Resurrection, we will begin to believe that He is dead, and if we believe He is dead, we will not find Him.

This simple failure to believe in the Resurrection is much more common in ourselves, though, than we may think. We don't have to publicly renounce the Resurrection of Christ to fail to believe in it in our own lives. For instance, how often to we remind ourselves that His heart still beats, His hair still exists, He even still has fingers and toes. So often times in our lives, we fall into the trap of making Jesus into a theoretical person, or a storybook character. When we pray, we forget we are talking to One who has ears just like we do. We instead make Jesus into a purely intellectual reality, which is the ultimate temptation to all of those who pray. The devil wants us to look amongst the dead for Him so that perhaps we might fall in and become dead ourselves. But we must recognize that He is alive, that He does still have His body, and that He then shares His body with us in the Eucharist.

To love Jesus, then, is to love someone who still lives, to be united to a living Person. In our relationship with Him, we do not follow a corpse. Many people today do follow corpses when they follow Buddha, or Marx, or even the American founders. These leaders are great men and women from the past who while alive did magnificent things, but in the end died and became dust. As Hamlet so rightly says of Caesar, "O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!" Unto dust these men have returned. Their ideas linger, but we cannot have a relationship with ideas the way we have a relationship with other men. No, that requires life.

Now, in one fashion we can say that we can have a relationship with men who have died, for their souls linger on. But Christ desired that we have a closer relationship with Himself, and He desired that this relationship should draw us into a New Life. So, He led the way, and defeated death and rose again, taking on new life. For, the Resurrection did not simply reanimate Christ's body. He did not simply become alive again, as some people do when they die for a time and are brought back to life with medicine. These people will die again some day; they have not conquered death, only delayed it. But Christ Himself conquered it, vanquishing it once for all so that it now has no power over Him. His Resurrected Body is not bound by the limitations of death; it can now do such things as vanish into thin air as it did for the apostles going to Emmaus, or enter locked rooms as it did with the Apostles.

The Resurrected Christ lives a true life - one that is not afraid of death. And when we love Him, He invites us to become partakers of this same life. We are called, in our relationship with Christ, to experience the Resurrection. Of course, in this life this experience of the Resurrection is only a foretaste; we are still destined to die. We are called to follow Christ into death and trust that He will raise us. But before death, we can participate in the Resurrected life of Christ by openly accepting His graces that He won for us through His Passion and Resurrection. We can come to know Him, to love Him, to dwell in His resurrected life. And it is this foretaste, this dwelling in His Resurrection, that He will use to raise us on the last day.

This Easter season, let us always remember that the Resurrection is not just another story found in the Gospels. Let us recall that Christ is not like George Washington or Caesar, great in their own right but dead in the past. Instead, this Easter may we become more and more convinced in the present reality of the Resurrection. May we place all our hope in it and draw from it all of our joy. Let us avoid looking for the living amongst the dead.