EASTER

CHRIST'S VICTORY OVER DEATH

Taken from Our Savior and His Love for Us
by
Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P.

"And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins." -----1 Cor. 15:17

ON PENTECOST, as the Acts of the Apostles record, Peter, enlightened and strengthened by the Holy Ghost, said to the jews: "Jesus of Nazareth . . . being delivered up, by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, you by the wicked hands of men have crucified and slain. Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the sorrows of Hell, as it was impossible that he should be holden by it." [Acts 2:22-24.] On the following days Peter repeated it: "The Author of life you killed, Whom God hath raised from the dead, of which we are witnesses." [Ibid. 3:15.] "Neither is there salvation in any other." [Ibid. 4:12.]

Thus the Resurrection appears to Peter and to the other Apostles as the definitive confirmation of our faith in Christ. And remarkably enough, the great adversaries of our Lord had anticipated this. Without knowing it, they served the designs of Providence in a most astounding manner. Just as Caiphas the high priest had said during the Passion: "it is expedient that one man should die for the people," [John 18:14; 11:51.] so, as St. Matthew reports, [Matt. 27:62-66.] the chief priests and the Pharisees remembered that jesus had said: "After three days I will rise again." Thereupon they "made the sepulcher sure, sealing the stone, and setting guards." [Ibid. 27:66.] It was these guards, the soldiers, who were struck with terror at the moment of the Resurrection, at the sight of the Angel from Heaven, [Ibid. 28:25.] and it was they who told the priests and Pharisees what had happened. [Ibid. 28:11.]

The Resurrection of the Savior was the decisive sign of His Divine mission. Peter and the Apostles never tired of affirming it. St. Paul said the same thing in his First Epistle to the Corinthians [15: 3-11.], about the year 55: "For I delivered unto you first of all, which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures: and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures: and that He was seen by Cephas; and after that by the eleven. Then was He seen by more than five hundred brethren at once: of whom many remain until this present, and some are fallen asleep. After that, He was by James, then by all the Apostles. And last of all, He was seen also by me, as one born out of due time . . . For whether I, or they, so we preach, and so you have believed." Then Paul adds: "If Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain . . . for you are yet in your sins." [Ibid 15:14-17.]

What does Paul mean by these last words? He means that if this is the case, your faith in the risen Christ, which faith is the basis of justification, [Rom. 4:25.] is vain and false and consequently our sins have not been forgiven.

He also means, as St. John Chrysostom remarks: if Christ is not risen, we have no guarantee that God has accepted His death as redemption. Thus nothing has been accomplished, and the work of salvation is yet to be done.

To help us grasp the inner meaning of these words of St. Paul, as understood by St. John Chrysostom and many other interpreters after him, let us bear in mind what our faith in Christ must be if we are to be saved. We shall then understand how His victory over death is the great sign of His victory over sin and over the spirit of evil.

What We Must Believe About Christ's Victory Over Sin

We must first of all believe in the existence of God, the Author of grace and supreme rewarder. Next we must believe that Jesus, the Son of God, is the Savior, the "Lamb of God . . . Who taketh away the sin of the world." [John 1:29.] We must fervently believe in the truth of His words: "Come to Me, all you that labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you." [Matt. 11:28.] I will refresh your souls by extricating them from sin, by giving them the life of grace, the seed of eternal life.

This act of lively faith should be not only a speculative certainty, but a deep and perpetual conviction which transforms all we have to do or to suffer each day. This act of faith often remains too feeble within us. If in the midst of our troubles we remain depressed, introverted, it is because we do not have enough faith and confidence in Jesus Christ, our Savior.

The Apostles were the first to feel on certain days before Pentecost the weakness of their faith. One day during a storm on lake Genesareth Our Lord said to them: "Why are you fearful, O ye of little faith?" [Matt. 8:26; 14:31.] They became even more conscious of their frailty during the Passion. Indeed, they had been enraptured by the sublime teaching of the Master, they had seen Him perform miracles, raise Lazarus from the dead, cast out devils, walk on water. Three of the Apostles had even been present at His transfiguration on Mount Tabor. But they also saw Him sad unto death at Gethsemane, and later they saw Him insulted, scourged, spit upon, and even Peter went astray for a moment to the point of denying three times that he knew Him.

What we must believe and what those at the foot of the Cross were called on to believe was that the agonizing Jesus was the Savior of souls precisely because of His agony, far more than He had through His sermons and His miracles. Agony means combat, and Christ's agony was the great combat against the spirit of evil, a combat in which Jesus was completely victorious . . .At the moment of the "Consummatum est," Mary made the greatest act of faith that was ever made on earth. She did not cease for an instant to believe that her crucified Son was the Savior of all men. Participating in the Virgin's great faith were the holy women near her, also, St. John, the good thief, and the centurion. In varying degrees they all believed that the work of salvation was consummated in this annihilation of the Victim chosen from all eternity to carry the burden of our sins in our stead.

But few were those who believed it in that supreme hour, for the great majority could not bear the death of Christ . . . What it was necessary to believe then and what we must believe still is that the object of derision, regarded as the offscouring of humanity, before whom men wagged their heads mocking, is in reality the strength and the life of souls. the one Who has overcome the world. What we must believe is that the hour of darkness and shame, when viewed from above, is also the glorious hour of salvation, the most fruitful of all for souls.

At that hour many disciples-----as we can see from the words of the disciples of Emmaus-----felt themselves weakening, and this can happen to anyone in the face of persecution and hatred. Yet we must believe that the crucified Christ, Who seemed totally defeated, was victorious over sin, that He is the one "Who taketh away the sin of the world." This mysterious and hidden victory needed to be confirmed by a tangible and overpowering proof that would rekindle the confidence of the disciples. Divine Providence had decided from all eternity that this would not be merely another miracle, but the Resurrection of the Lord. What is the reason for this? Because of the very close relation between sin and death. This is one of the great truths of revelation.

Christ's Victory Over Death, the Sign of His Victory Over Sin

In the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul reminds us that death entered the world as the consequence of sin and that, as Adam was the representative of the human race for its perdition, so Christ is the representative and head of humanity for its salvation and He is the the inexhaustible wellspring of grace: "By one man sin entered into this world and bu sin death . . . If by the offense of one, many died . . . if by one man's offense death reigned through one: much more, they who receive abundance of grace and of the gift and of justice shall reign in life through one, Jesus Christ . . . Where sin abounded, grace did more abound . . . The wages of sin is death. But the grace of God, life everlasting in Christ Jesus our Lord." [Rom. 5:12-20; 6:23.]

In the actual plan of Providence if Adam had not sinned, if there had not been this disorder, this ruin, this moral corruption which consists in the separation of the soul from god, then there would not have been this ruin, the physical corruption which consists in the separation of the body from the soul. Death is the consequence and the punishment of sin.

Doubtless man is mortal by nature, as the animals are. Yet, through grace the first man had received for himself and his descendants the privilege of immortality, provided he should remain faithful to God. As genesis records it, when the Lord placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and preserve it, He said: "Of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat. But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt dies the death." [Gen. 2:16 ff.]

This was but a gentle testing of man's submission, a light brake on the exercise of his free will, to make him realize that he had a master, though a most merciful one.

The devil, on the other hand, told him: "No, you shall not die the death . . .your eyes shall be opened and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." [Gen. 3:4-5.] That is to say: you will be able to rule yourselves, with no need to obey. The devil himself had said, "I will obey."

What happened immediately after the sin of disobedience and pride? As Scripture records it, "the eyes of them both were opened." They acquired the knowledge of good and evil: not the knowledge that enables one to conduct oneself wisely, but the knowledge that is nothing but bitter experience of evil committed and its profound difference from goodness and from the holiness they had just lost for themselves and for their descendants . . . they realized how the devil had lied.

Their souls seemed dead within them. For in tasting evil through their pride, they had lost Divine life and God's friendship. their souls had withdrawn from god Who gave them life, and God had withdrawn form them. In consequence, they lost mastery over their passions. The emotions, until then subject to right reason and to the will, revolted, just as the will had revolted against God. Finally, inasmuch as the soul ceased to be under God's dominion, the body ceased to be under the soul's governance . . . God withdrew from the body its wholly gratuitous privileges of impassability and immortality. Man had preferred nature to grace, and nature's threadbareness was apparent. The human body, thenceforth subject to natural laws, was exposed to winds, inclement weather, pain, sickness, and death. Until then man had dominated death. The Lord now said to Adam: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou was taken: for thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return." [Gen. 3:19.] The Church reminds us of this every Ash Wednesday.

Death of the body, the consequence and punishment of sin, was also the symbol of sin. For mortal sin is, as it were, the death of the soul. Loss of the life of grace was followed by the loss of physical life. Horror of death should inspire us with a horror of sin, through which death came into the world.

Immediately after the fall of Man the Lord promised a Redeemer, when He said to the serpent: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head."
[Gen. 3:15.]

As all the prophecies specify, Jesus eminently represents the posterity of the woman. On Good Friday he conquered both sin and the devil. But this hidden victory, won by the One Who might have seemed to be vanquished but Who was really a victim for us, was to be manifested by an overwhelming sign. Here we can see the supernatural logic of these mysteries according to the plan of Providence. It was highly fitting that this great sign should be the Resurrection of the Savior . . . There is every evidence that the victory of Christ over sin is far superior to His victory over death. The former is the very essence of the mystery of the Redemption. The latter is but a sensible sign of the inward and invisible supernatural mystery. The symbol derives its value from the grandeur of the thing symbolized . . . But this victory was so mysterious, so hidden, that it escaped even the majority of the Apostles themselves, and so it needed to be made manifest by an incontestable sensible sign . . .

The Apostles were made to see the light. The Savior's death had left them broken, crushed. They were going to return to their earthly occupations and forget the kingdom of God. From the day they knew of the Resurrection, their faith faltered no more . . . In the midst of their torments they put all their trust in the glorious Christ, as St. Stephen had done . . . and they trod the same path as he to eternal life.

This mystery of resurrection continues in the Church in a certain sense. Jesus made the Church in His Own image, and if He allows her to pass through terrible tribulations, He enables her to rise up again and to be more glorious after the mortal blows of her enemies . . . This is what happened during the persecutions of Nero, Diocletian, and Julian the Apostate. From the blood of thousands of Martyrs sprang up thousands of Catholic churches.

The Church likewise triumphed over the great Arian and Pelagian heresies, which were the occasion of immortal works by the Greek Fathers and St. Augustine.

During the early Middle Ages, the barbarians spread desolation everywhere, but the Church was able to conquer and convert them . . . In the 15th and 16th centuries it might have seemed to some that the Church would perish under the blows of the pagan Renaissance and of Protestantism. Large areas of England and Germany were lost to Catholicism. However, at that very moment there arose in Europe a galaxy of Saintly founders and reformers: the Church was established in India, where St. Francis Xavier renewed the prodigies of the Apostolic era . . .and true reform was organized at the Council of Trent.

The French revolution set out to destroy the Church once more. Priests were massacred, religious orders suppressed, and altars profaned . . . little by little the dispersed religious orders were re-established, Saints like the Curé of Ars called back into being all the vitality of the Church, and the missions of the Orient, Asia, Africa, and America made astonishing progress.

Thus it will be until the end of time . . ."I am the resurrection and the life. . . If any man thirst, let him come to Me and drink . . . and I will raise him up on the last day." [John 11:25; 7:37 ff; 6:40.]

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