Every Easter, Christians celebrate in special ways the resurrection of Christ. But if you asked most Catholics what exactly the resurrection is, what would they respond? How many Catholics would be able to give an answer? Perhaps not many. So let us explore the theology of the resurrection.
The Catholic Church teaches that the human being is composed of a physical body and a spiritual soul. The two are intimately connected. In fact, the soul is the animating principle of the body. When the body dies, we do not cease to exist. Our individual self-reflective identity continues to live on in our soul, which exists eternally.
But what exactly happens after death? The Catholic Church teaches that we enter one of three possible states after we die. If we have fully united ourselves with God in the course of our lives, loving him with our whole being and accepting his love entirely, then we go to Heaven immediately after death. Since in Heaven we are eternally united with God's love, Heaven is a place of absolute joy, peace, and contentment.
By contrast, those who reject God's love completely are eternally separated from him after death, in a state of being we call Hell. Many wonder how an all-loving God can allow Hell to exist. But, we might say, Hell is the by-product of love. For love to be meaningful, we have to have the freedom to accept it or not. God created the world out of love to share his love with us. In order for us to be able to accept his love meaningfully, we need to have free-will, which means that some will and some will not accept his love. Some will choose eternal separation from his love and will thereby experience eternally the opposite of Heaven, no joy, no peace, no contentment.
The third state of being immediately after death involves those who had not rejected God's love completely but who have not united themselves with God's love fully in this life either. They are connected to God's love, but they are not yet ready to enter Heavenly glory. Before they can be in the immediate presence of God, they need to go through a process of purification, through which they can open their being completely to God's love. We call this cleansing process Purgatory. Purgatory is not eternal. When the soul has been fully purified, the person can move on to the glory of Heaven, which will then be the eternal state of the soul.
But what about the resurrection? The Church teaches that our current physical world will not continue eternally but will come to an end. At the end of the world, Christ will return and remake the world, transforming it into a perfected realm imbued with his love and glory, which is described in The Book of Revelations as the New Jerusalem or the New Heaven and Earth.
When the world is remade, all human beings will also be resurrected. Our physical bodies will come back to life and will be reunited with our souls. In our culture, we see three different depiction of the physical body coming back to life after death. One is what we might call revivification, which is the stuff of Zombie movies. In this scenario, the dead body is given the power to move around but still retains its state of decomposition. The second depiction is what we can call resuscitation, when a dead body is restored to regular human life.
Resurrection is clearly not the first of these options, the Zombie-like revivification of a corpse. Nor is resurrection the second option, mere resuscitation. When Jesus raises the dead in the Gospels, he does not yet resurrect them. He returns them to ordinary biological human life. In the case of Lazarus, Jesus restores the body from any corruption that had already set in, given that Lazarus was in the tomb for four days, but Jesus gives him the kind of body we all have on this earth.
By contrast, in the resurrection, we receive a glorified body. As we see from the resurrection narratives, the resurrected body of Christ is still physical. He is able to eat with the disciples. He invites Thomas, who is initially doubtful, to touch his wounds. At the same time, his resurrected body also transcends the restrictions of our physical world. He can appear and disappear. He can enter the room despite the locked door. In the resurrection, our physical body is perfected and is reunited with our soul.
For those who have embraced God's love and have chosen to be eternally united with God, the resurrected body will create a sense of completion. The wholeness of our being is restored, which deepens our experience of the joy, peace, and contentment of Heaven. We will no longer grow tired or hungry. We will not age or get ill. We will never die again. We will live eternally imbued with God's infinite love, absolutely fulfilled, fully at peace, in unending joy.
||
The readings for Easter Sunday, Cycle B are:
Acts 10:34a, 37-43
Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23
Col 3:1-4 or I Cor 5:6b-8
Jn 20:1-9
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: The Empty Tomb of Christ by Zoltan Abraham (c) 2016.