Pastor's Corner, April 5, 2015

Dear Parishioners and Friends,

Happy Easter everyone! Our joy this day is that Jesus has risen as he said and that by the power of the Holy Spirit Christ shares this new life with us.

What do we mean when we profess that we believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ?

The Catechism has a lot to say about the matter. First, we cannot interpret Christ’s resurrection “outside the physical order” (CCC, 643). Also, the “risen body in which he [Jesus] appears to them is the same body that had been tortured and crucified, for it still bears the traces of his Passion. Yet at the same time this authentic, real body possesses the new properties of a glorious body: not limited by space and time but able to be present how and when he wills” (CCC, 645).

Jesus truly rose, not simply in the faith of the believers, but physically from the death. At the same time, the event of the resurrection is something new in human history and revealing a new dimension of reality.

The Catechism teaches, “Christ’s Resurrection was not a return to earthly life, as was the case with the raisings from the dead that he had performed before Easter… These actions were miraculous events, but the persons miraculously raised returned by Jesus’ power to ordinary earthly life. At some particular moment they would die again. Christ’s Resurrection is essentially different. In his risen body he passes from the state of death to another life beyond time and space” (CCC, 646).

May this resurrected life, unconquerable by death, be yours.

In Christ,

Msgr. Baker