Galatians 5.16-26

1)Maundy Thursday 

2)Good Friday 

4)Easter 

24) Saint George 

25) Saint Mark the evangelist 

25)Anzac Day 

29) Saint catherine of Sienna

No. “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). [631, 638, 651]

The event of Christ’s death and Resurrection [is] the heart of Christianity, principal fulcrum of our faith, powerful lever of our certainty, impetuous wind that sweeps away every fear and indecision, every doubt and human calculation. POPE BENEDICT XVI,

The disciples, who before had lost all hope, came to believe in Jesus’ Resurrection because they saw him in a different way after his death, spoke with him, and experienced him as being alive.

The Easter events that took place in Jerusalem in the year 30 are not a made-up story. Following the death of Jesus and the defeat of their whole cause, the disciples fled (“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel”, Lk 24:21) or else barricaded themselves behind locked doors. Only their encounter with the risen Christ freed them from their paralysis and filled them with an enthusiastic faith in Jesus Christ, the Lord of life and death.

There are no proofs for the Resurrection of Jesus in the scientific sense. There are, however, very strong individual and collective testimonies by a large number of cntemporaries of those events in Jerusalem. 

The oldest written testimony to the esurrection is a letter that St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians

around twenty years after Christ’s death: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still

alive, though some have fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15:3-6). Paul is recording here a living tradition that was present in the original Christian community two or three years after Jesus’ death and Resurrection, when he himself became a Christian—on the basis of his own staggering encounter with the risen Lord. The disciples took the fact of the empty tomb (Lk 24:2-3) as the first indication of the reality of the Resurrection. Women, of all people, discovered it—according to the law of that time they were not able to testify. Although we read about the →APOSTLE John that he “saw and believed”

(Jn 20:8b) already at the empty tomb, full assurance that Jesus was alive came about only after a series of appearances. The many
ncounters with the risen Lord ended with Christ’s Ascension into heaven. Nevertheless, there were afterward and there are even today encounters with the living Lord: Jesus Christ lives.

The risen Lord allowed his disciples to touch him; he ate with them and showed them the wounds of his Passion. Nevertheless, his body belonged no longer only to this earth, but rather to the heavenly kingdom of his Father. 

The risen Christ, who bore the wounds of the Crucified, was no longer bound by space and time. He could enter through locked doors and appear to his disciples in various places in a form in which they did not recognize him immediately. Christ’s Resurrection was, therefore, not a return to a normal earthly life, but rather his entrance into a new way of being: “For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him” (Rom 6:9).

Because death is now no longer the end of everything, joy and hope came into the world. Now that death “no longer has dominion” (Rom 6:9) over Jesus, it has no more power over us, either, who belong to Jesus.