Taking Easter Seriously
Freedom is the ability of every person to make personal choices without a government permission slip -- to exercise free will. Free will is the natural characteristic we share in common with God. It is His unconditional gift to us. He created us in His image and likeness. As He is perfectly free, so are we. We are free to become saints or monsters.
When the government takes away freedom -- whether by fiat or legislation -- it steals a gift we received from God, it violates the natural law and the Constitution, and it prevents us from seeking the truth.
Freedom is the essence of humanity. No one can achieve happiness or truth without it. Government negates freedom.
We know from events 2,000 years ago this week -- in the Roman Empire police state of Judea -- that freedom is also the essential means to unite with the truth. To Christians, the incarnation and the perfect manifestation of truth is Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
To believe in Jesus is to take Easter seriously.
Taking Easter seriously means accepting that on the first Holy Thursday, Jesus attended a traditional Jewish Passover Seder where He performed two miracles so that we could stay united to Him. He transformed ordinary bread and wine into His own body, blood, soul and divinity, and He empowered His disciples and their recognized successors to do the same.
That Jewish Seder was the first Catholic Mass.
The next day -- the first Good Friday -- the Roman government crucified Jesus because it feared that by claiming to be the Son of God, He might foment a political revolution. He did foment a revolution, but it was in the hearts and minds and souls of men and women.
Taking Easter seriously recognizes that Jesus had the freedom to reject His horrific death, but He exercised His free will to accept it so that we might know the truth. The truth is that He -- and we who have faith and hope and perform good works -- would rise from the dead.
On Easter, that "far-off divine event," as Tennyson wrote, Jesus rose from the dead. By doing that, He demonstrated to us that while living, we can liberate our souls from the slavery of sin because, after death, we of faith, hope and selfless good works can rise to be with Him.
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