We see in the Book of Genesis that God created a perfect world, free of any defect or imperfection. Clearly, however, we do not live in such a world today. Reflecting on the human condition might leave us with bleak thoughts. Our lives are beset with sorrow. Society is in the grip of destructive forces. The natural world tends toward decay. Our brief journey upon the earth ends in death. But there is much more to our story than such despairing thoughts. The message of Easter gives us true hope, true meaning.
The Fall of humanity had marred all of the world. But the death and resurrection of Christ changed the course of human history and set in motion the transformation of the entire universe. The restoration and renewal brought about by Christ has three aspects: our personal salvation, the healing of society, and the remaking of the natural world.
The Fall had ruptured our personal relationship with God, cutting humanity off from God's grace. But through his sacrifice upon the Cross, Christ took upon himself the punishment for our sins. He atoned for all of humanity's wrong-doings. By doing so, he opened up the possibility of salvation for all of us. When we are baptized into Christ, our sins are washed away and we become a part of the mystical Body of Christ.
Christ is God Incarnate - God himself who took on human nature and became one of us. Through the incarnation, God established the closest possible union between himself and humanity, between the Creator and created reality. When we become a part of the mystical Body of Christ through baptism, we are invited to enter into the closest possible union a human being can have with God. Through this union we become partakers of God's divine life, of the boundless, eternal love that is at the heart of the Holy Trinity.
However, while we are still alive, we will always face the danger of losing our relationship with God. Baptism washes us clean spiritually, but we can still mar our souls with new sin when we fail to center our lives on God. That is one reason we need the Church. We need the Sacraments and prayer life of the Church to stay grounded in God's love. We need the community of believers urging us on, supporting us in the good that we do and challenging us when we do wrong. To stay connected to God's healing, life-giving love, we need to develop a personal prayer life that we maintain daily and we also need to gather with the community of believers at least weekly to be united with God at Mass.
The communal dimension of our faith also highlights the fact that the grace of Christ does not just restore us individually but heals society as a whole. We do not have to study history and sociology long to see that without God society is marred by great evil and plunges into terrible dysfunction. We see generational patterns of sinful behavior, which become established as disordered social norms. Fallen society is characterized by a cycle of violence, where evil-doing is met with even greater evil-doing, with escalating degrees of revenge and hate as history unfolds.
The grace of Christ breaks through the evil of fallen humanity. Through Christianity, we learn to see all human beings as made in the image f God. We learn to treat each other as the children of God. When we are fully grounded in Christ, we are able to love one another with God's love. Christ's message of forgiveness helps us to stop the cycle of violence. We begin to return good for evil and love for hate, as Christ had taught and had himself demonstrated throughout his life.
Society is healthy only to the extent that it is grounded in Christ's love. Historically Christian nations functioned well only when they lived out the beliefs that they professed. Today, as Christianity is pushed out of our society more and more, we see a rapid increase of dysfunction and social decay. People are more anxious, more depressed, and far less happy. For generations, opponents of Christianity have claimed that by thrusting off Christ, people would feel a new sense of freedom and joy. But instead we see that the result of Christ's absence is slavery to self-destructive behavior and a profound existential despair.
To heal society, we need to bring Christ back into everyday life. We need to base our lives entirely on the teachings and the love of Christ. We need to be channels of Christ's grace so that his healing love may spread to everyone around us. Thereby, we can transform and heal society one relationship at a time.
Our work of societal healing is in anticipation of the universal restoration of the social order that Christ will bring about after his Second Coming. At the end of time, Christ will return to judge the world and to gather into his kingdom all those who have embraced his love. In the New Jerusalem, as Christ's kingdom is described in The Book of Revelations, Christ's love will reign, filling all hearts completely. In that heavenly society, all interactions will be an expression of Christ's infinite love. Humanity will function as God had meant us to be - loving each other with his love.
When Christ returns, he will also restore the order of nature. The perfect natural order that God had created was marred by sin. The Fall of humanity introduced physical suffering and death. But through his death and resurrection, Christ conquered death. When Christ returns, he will raise all people from the dead. In the current order of things, our body dies and decays, but our soul lives on. At the Second Coming, we will be raised to new life and receive new bodies. Our spiritual soul and physical body will be reunited. Our new bodies will be perfected, no longer subject to the vicissitudes of our current temporal existence. We will no longer suffer, get sick, or age. We will no longer be subject to death. All those in the New Jerusalem will be perfected, living eternally in the light and infinite love of the Risen Christ.
Envisioning our perfected state in Heaven, in the New Jerusalem, might be a challenge for our imagination. But God has given us an example of what perfected humanity looks like: the Blesses Virgin Mary. Our Lady was never tainted by sin of any kind. She lived her life in perfect conformity to the will of God. At the conclusion of her earthly life, Christ took her body and soul into Heaven, welcoming her into the perfected, resurrected reality that has been prepared for all of us.
To envision Heaven, therefore, let us focus our thoughts on Christ's Holy Mother, who is the spiritual mother of all of us, of all believers. Not only is she the image of what we strive for, but she is also our guide. The Blessed Virgin Mary has one goal and one goal only, to take all of us to her Divine Son, so that we can live in his infinite love for all eternity. This Easter, therefore, let us turn to our Holy Mother and ask her to take us to Christ.
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The readings for Easter Sunday, Cycle C, are:
Acts 10:34a, 37-43
Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23
Colossians 3:1-4
or 1 Corinthians 5:6b-8
John 20:1-9
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: Dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site of the Resurrection of Christ by Zoltan Abraham (c) 2016.