Sisters and brothers, especially those of you experiencing pain and sorrow, your silent cry has been heard and your tears have been counted; not one of them has been lost!… The resurrection of Jesus is indeed the basis of our hope. For in the light of this event, hope is no longer an illusion…. That hope is not an evasion, but a challenge; it does not delude, but empowers us.
—Pope Francis (1936–2025), “Urbi Et Orbi,” Easter, 2025
Father Richard shares how we can receive the miracle of new life by embracing our own difficulties and “deaths” as Jesus did.
Death is not only physical dying. Death also means going to the full depths of things, hitting the bottom, going beyond where we’re in control. In that sense, we all go through many deaths in our lives, tipping points when we have to ask, “What am I going to do?” Many people turn bitter, look for someone to blame, and close down. Their “death” is indeed death for them because there is no room for growth after that. But when we go into the full depths and death of anything—even, ironically, the depths of our own sin—we can come out the other side transformed, more alive, more open, more forgiving of ourselves and others. And when we come out the other side, we know that we’ve been led there. We’re not holding on; we’re being held by a larger force, by a larger source that is not our own. That’s what it means to be saved! It means that we’ve walked through the mystery of transformation.
The miracle of it all—if we are to speak of miracles—is that God has found the most ingenious way to transform the human soul. God uses the very thing that would normally destroy us—the tragic, the sorrowful, the painful, the unjust deaths that lead us all to the bottom of our lives—to transform us. There it is, in one sentence. Are we prepared to trust that?
Jesus’ death and resurrection is a statement of how reality works all the time and everywhere. He teaches us that there’s a different way to live with our pain, our sadness, and our suffering. We can say, “Woe is me,” and feel sorry for ourselves, or we can say, “God is even in this.”
None of us crosses over this gap from death to new life by our own effort, our own merit, our own purity, or our own perfection. Each of us—from pope to president, from princess to peasant—is carried across by unearned grace. Worthiness is never the ticket, only deep desire. With that desire the tomb is always, finally empty, as Mary Magdalene discovered on Easter morning. Death cannot win. We’re finally indestructible when we recognize that the thing which could destroy us is the very thing that could enlighten us.
Friends, the Easter feast is a reminder to all of us to open our eyes and our ears and to witness what is happening all around us, all the time, everywhere. God’s one and only job description is to turn death into life. That’s what God does with every new springtime, every new life, every new season, every new anything. God is the one who always turns death into life, and no one who trusts in this God will ever be put to shame (Psalm 25:3).
| APR 23, 2025 The Resurrection Means Matter Matters |
 Gnosticism is an ancient heresy that is still very much alive today. The Gnostics were false teachers in the early church who were deeply influenced by Greek philosophy and knowledge that exalted the spiritual and condemned the material. They taught that intangible things like the souls, spirits, and wisdom were divine, while the physical world, bodies, and matter were inherently evil. When this Greek understanding was mixed with Christianity, it led to some troubling ideas—chiefly that Jesus’ incarnation was just an illusion because God, who is spirit, would never inhabit something as evil and corruptible as a human body. Of course, with no body, Jesus could not have died on the cross, and if he never died, there’s no reason to believe in his physical resurrection. The Apostle John was targeting this Gnostic heresy when he wrote that every spirit that does not acknowledge that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh “is the spirit of the antichrist” (1 John 4:2-3). Not only did Gnosticism deny the core message of the gospel, it also permitted all manner of sexual immorality and debauchery. After all, if our physical bodies don’t matter because God is only interested in our immaterial souls, then neither does what we do with them. Today, Gnosticism remains a common false teaching among Christians, although it manifests very differently. Many Christians still assume God cares only about souls and spirits, and that the physical world and our bodies don’t ultimately matter. This subtle form of Gnosticism is often reinforced with unbiblical visions of the afterlife occupied by disincarnate spirits in a celestial heaven. And within evangelical communities, Gnosticism has been supported by “purity culture,” which spotlights the dangers of sexuality and implicitly communicates the inherent evil of the body and its desires. Taken together, this focus on “saving souls” and avoiding the “temptations of the flesh” has made pop Christianity into a kind of neo-Gnosticism that celebrates the spiritual and condemns the physical.But this understanding contradicts everything the New Testament says about Jesus’ ministry and his miracles. If he were only concerned with saving souls, why did Jesus spend so much time healing bodies? And if physical matter isn’t part of God’s redemptive plan, why does the New Testament aggressively and repeatedly emphasize the physical resurrection of Jesus? Yesterday, we saw that his resurrection is identified as the “first fruits” or the prototype for the rest of God’s salvation. Paul says that our bodies will also be raised, transformed, and glorified like his when Christ returns. And the physical creation itself will share in this glory and be set free from its captivity to death and decay (Romans 8:20-21). In other words, the physical reality of Jesus’ resurrection is why we believe in our physical salvation and the physical salvation of the world. Put simply, the bodily resurrection of Jesus means matter matters.This has huge implications for our lives and callings as Christians. It means we must reject both the overt and subtle forms of Gnosticism that infect our faith, like the tendency to celebrate vocations that care for souls and focus on heaven, and dismiss vocations that care for bodies and the earth. And uprooting the assumption in many Christian communities that God cares about the next world but has given up on this one, or that a spiritually mature Christian must transcend their body and its weaknesses to occupy a realm of ideas, theology, and knowledge alone. Too many of us live as if God created the heavens and the earth and then retired into full-time ministry. The resurrection reveals that God cares about all of his creation—both the material and the spiritual—and he is redeeming all of it. DAILY SCRIPTURE 1 JOHN 4:1-3 JOHN 20:24-29 WEEKLY PRAYER from Hippolytus of Rome (170 – 235) Christ is Risen: The world below lies desolate Christ is Risen: The spirits of evil are fallen Christ is Risen: The angels of God are rejoicing Christ is Risen: The tombs of the dead are empty Christ is Risen indeed from the dead, the first of the sleepers, Glory and power are his forever and ever. Amen. |
