Catholic Transcript Online

To be a human being means being subject to death. St. Augustine, more than 1,500 years ago, wrote: "From the first moment that we find ourselves in a mortal body, something happens within us which steadily leads us toward death …" (De Civitate Dei) And in our own times, the atheistic German philosopher Martin Heidegger, described man simply as Sein zum Tode ("Being-to-death"). Heidegger differed radically, of course, from Augustine’s analysis of the ultimate meaning of the human being and the phenomenon of death.

The key to this meaning is Easter – or, more precisely, Jesus’ Resurrection. Through the Resurrection we discover that although in a biological sense death may be seen as natural and even necessary, there is in physical life "a spiritual center which aspires to eternity, and from this point of view to die is not natural but illogical, because it means expulsion from the sphere of loving, destruction of that connecting element which is the desire of eternity." The citation is from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now the Holy Father; the words form part of a conference he presented as a Lenten Retreat to Pope John Paul II and members of the Roman Curia in 1983. (See Journey Towards Easter: Crossroad, 1987.)

Trying to understand this requires our returning to the Sacred Scriptures, which include two different kinds of Resurrection data. One, Cardinal Ratzinger calls "confessional"; the other, "narrative." Perhaps the most ancient confessional passage (really the most ancient text on the Resurrection) is Luke 24:34; namely, "The Lord is truly risen and has appeared to Peter." St. Paul, in First Corinthians (which precedes the written Gospels), amplifies this text with two highly instructive phrases concerning Jesus’ death; specifically, that Christ died "according to the Scriptures" and "for our sins." (15:3-8)

These two additions, Pope Benedict writes, are really theologically dense; they signify that Christ’s death was "not incongruous, but forms part of the fabric of God’s history" and "draws its logic from it." Hence Jesus’ death, while experienced in its totality, is separate from "that line of death, heavy with malediction, which derived from the dawn of consciousness of good and evil, from the presumption of equality with God which ends with the divine judgment …" No; Jesus’ death is "not an accomplishment of justice, … but is the accomplishment of a love which will not let the other go without a word, without meaning, without eternity, … a death which becomes a light for the peoples, a death in relation to the service of expiation, which seeks to bring reconciliation; a death … to put an end to death."

Such a victory over the power of death, precisely where death manifests what, according to physical laws, constitutes its most dramatic and dreaded nature, is at the very core of the Easter message. Easter means that death "does not belong principally and irrevocably to the structure of the creature," as Cardinal Ratzinger put it. And while overcoming the necessity of death is impossible through technological means, it is possible through the creative power of God, who "respects his creation, without being tied to the law of its death." (ibid.)

Faith in the Resurrection is consequently faith in the real power of the Lord, along with the hope and joy that this faith generates.

Nor does the Resurrection come to a close with the event itself. Recall that the oldest Scriptural Easter text, Luke 24:34, does not simply state that the Lord is truly risen. Coupled to this proclamation is another; specifically, "[he] has appeared to Peter." The risen Lord makes himself seen (such is the precise meaning of the original Greek) to those who do believe and who keep faith. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry explained, "What’s essential is invisible to the eye." Which means we are not alone as we inexorably move closer to death each day, day by day.

"Each one of us," St. Augustine wrote, "is nearer death a year hence than a year ago." True. But the same Augustine also wrote, on the first page of his immortal Confessions, that we were made for the Lord, and will never rest until we rest in him.