Apostleship of Prayer

As we pray this month that we may never grow tired of proclaiming the Resurrection of Jesus by the way we live our lives, we reflect today on Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa’s commentary for the Gospel of Easter Sunday. Fr. Cantalamessa is a Capuchin Franciscan who has been the Pontifical Household preacher since 1980.

[T]he strongest argument that Christ is risen, is that he is alive! He is alive not because we keep him alive by talking about him, but because he keeps us alive, he communicates the sense of his presence to us, he makes us hope. “He touches Christ who believes in Christ,” St. Augustine said, and the true believers experience the truth in this affirmation.

Those who do not believe in the reality of the resurrection have always advanced hypotheses that it be treated as a phenomenon of autosuggestion; the apostles “believed” to see. But this, if it were true, would constitute, in the end, a miracle no less great than the one that people try to avoid admitting. Suppose that different people, in different situations and places, all had the same hallucination. Imaginary visions usually come to those who intensely expect and desire them, but the apostles, after the events of Good Friday, did not expect anything else.

Christ’s resurrection is, for the spiritual universe, what the initial “Big Bang” was for the physical universe, according to one modern theory: such a massive explosion of energy impressed on the cosmos that expansion of energy that continues even today at a distance of billions of years. Take away from the Church faith in the resurrection and everything stops and shuts down, as when the electrical current goes out in a house.

St. Paul writes: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the death, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). “The faith of Christians is the resurrection of Christ,” St. Augustine said. Everyone believes that Jesus died, even the pagans, the agnostics believe it. But only Christians believe that he has also risen, and one is not a Christian unless he believes this.

Today’s Reading’s:  Acts 5:27-33; Psalm 34:2,9,17-20; John 3:31-36