"Why do you search for the living One among the dead? He is not here; he has been raised up." (Luke 24:5-6) On this first Easter Sunday of the new millennium, that is still the good news at the heart of the Christian gospel. We are Christians because we believe God has sent the Son in Jesus Christ, to live and die and be raised up to life, so that all might have forgiveness of sins and eternal life in his name and power. In this Holy Year we celebrate the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus because of what he was born to be -- Savior -- and what he was born to do.
Jesus is risen. But then what? The heavenly messenger in Mark's Gospel continues the good news of the Risen Jesus: "He is going ahead of you to Galilee, where you will see him just as he told you." The life of the Christian is now a matter of meeting Jesus throughout life, not only in Galilee, but everywhere, and all the time.As Catholics we believe we meet Jesus in prayer, in worship, in the Mass and all the sacraments, in the teachings of the Church, which both comfort and challenge us, just as he did. We meet Jesus in everyone for whom he died and rose: the young and old; the sick and healthy; the rich and poor; the friends and strangers, the old-timers and newcomers; the helpful and needy.
Easter is most of all a feast of life -- Jesus raised from death to life and all of us sharing that life, now and forever. Only God can give life, and he generously shares that power with us, his creatures. We can give life only in cooperation with the Creator, but down the ages, on our own, we have learned more and more deadly ways of taking life away. As our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, has taught us, humankind has developed a culture of death. We have learned how to kill in a womb or on a gurney, in a gas chamber or in a mine field.
This Easter, on this Feast of Life, human and divine, let us dedicate ourselves to the culture of life, to the work of resurrection. When we respect and protect and foster life we meet and venerate the Risen Christ, who died and was raised because of the Father's ardent love for all his human children.