The new life

THAT’S what Easter actually means. With Christ’s resurrection, with his
triumph over sin and death, through the Cross, we actually have a new life.

We are not anymore enemies of God, alienated and cursed, condemned to eternal death. We are now children of his, his people, living members of Christ’s mystical body!

That is, as long as we do our part, learn to correspond to his love, since as St. Augustine once said, while he created us without us, he cannot save us without us. That’s just how it is, my friend.

And this is simply because we are men, we are persons, with intelligence and free will. Things that happen in our life, while always under God’s loving and all-powerful providence, are also things for which we just have to be responsible.

That’s the reason why Our Lord had to do so many complicated things to save us. Yes, what a complicated plan of salvation he undertook! This is to show us the way for which we too can be responsible for our own salvation.

The second person of the Blessed Trinity had to become man, he truly shared the condition of man, even in our weakened nature. He respected the way we are and was willing to recreate that wounded nature of ours by showing us the only way.

He had to be born poor, he spent 30 years of hidden life subject to Mary and Joseph and to all other human authorities. He worked hard, with his hands, as a carpenter. We are told that he did all things well.

Then he started his public life, preaching about the Kingdom of God, about repentance, about the beatitudes. He did some miracles, but only to highlight his divinity and his mercy.

Then he culminated all these by dying on the Cross. He could have chosen another way, a more comfortable one, after all nothing is impossible with him. But he chose the Cross.

That was the most painful, most humiliating kind of death! No other death can approximate the cruelty of his death. To die by the tsunami or by poisoning, already very ugly in their human form, cannot compare with his death.

This is to show the enormity of all the malice of all men, from Adam and
Even to the last person to be born in this world. He was willing to carry all the burden of our sins, to be the lamb to be sacrificed, the ransom to be paid.

This is also to show how much he loves us. He accepted his death calmly, peacefully, with only the human whimper of pain of a son to his father. His love is not passive or formalistic. It was, it is total and active always, going all the way.

This is also to show us how we can truly recreate ourselves, by learning how to love, all the way to its most demanding part—to learn how to suffer, how to forgive.

May we learn how to suffer, how to embrace and love the Cross, not just tolerate it, but to love it. Suffering, in whatever form, should be for us the invitation to identify ourselves with Christ, the surest sign of loving.

This is the new life that our Lord is giving us with his resurrection. If we only can be better Christians, by learning how to correspond to his love!

He had given us his sacraments and doctrine, he has given us nothing less
than the Church—over which the gates of hell cannot prevail, he assured us—to make sure we can always be with him.

This new life wants us to be more consistent to the teachings and life of Christ himself, a legacy entrusted to the Church. Let’s not get entangled with the mistakes and weaknesses of the men that comprise the Church—that’s us.

We just have to try to go deep in our knowledge of Christian doctrine, to be more determined to develop the virtues, to be more concerned with the others.

The Church has issued the Compendium of the Social Doctrine, a book that clearly spells out our Christian duties towards others in all levels of our life, and I wonder if people are studying it.

That could be one specific project we can do these days to truly possess that new life that Christ has won for us through the Cross.