In the Liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, the season of Easter goes from Easter Sunday right up to Pentecost.  Easter is by far the most important Feast in the Church’s liturgical year. For the Passion, Death and, above all, the Resurrection of Christ are at the very centre of our faith. Indeed it is the resurrection that makes the Gospel truly Good news. Were it not for what we celebrate at Easter, there would have been no point at all in celebrating Christmas.

What makes the resurrection so profoundly significant is that it promises the ultimate consummation of the desire that animates and motivates all religion: the desire for total union with the divine. In the resurrection we have the assurance that one of us, a fragile, mortal human being, has passed through the gates of death and is now totally and for always at one with the ultimate mystery of love and life which lies at the very heart of things and that not just in a purely mystical or spiritual way but in his very body – our fragile human flesh.

The risen Christ is the One who, because he is still one of us, gives a new meaning, a new value and a new hope to everything that we are and everything that we do. Christians have sometimes tended to see the material world as simply the stage on which we rehearse our part for the real life of heaven, something of little value or significance. But that kind of other-worldliness sells the mystery short. The incarnation extends the presence and action of the divine into the humblest depths of our own physical being with all its myriad connections and dependencies on the material world around it. That is why Saint Paul talks of the whole of creation ‘groaning in labour pains’ and ‘waiting with eagerness for the children of God to be revealed’. (Romans 8/19,22).

As Christians, we are entitled to believe that because we are united with the Risen One, through faith and baptism, our love, our work, our touch, ensure that all that is most beautiful, most unique, most precious in the material world around us will become part of a universe made new in Christ. It is true that the Gospels talk of a world that will pass away. But that world which will pass away is the world in the sense that Saint John uses the term: describing everything that is hostile to the Divine. And the world becomes hostile to the Divine when it becomes the plaything of men and women who, imitating Adam and Eve, are simply seeking to usurp the role of God – usually without having taken much trouble to read the job description!

The Paschal mystery of Christ’s Passion, Death and resurrection assures us that nothing we ever have tried to do, no love that we have ever tried to give, will be completely lost or wasted, and that even the evil we have done or suffered can be redeemed. All things will pass away, to be sure, but to be harvested not annihilated, so that their true value and worth as reflections of the infinite wonder and beauty of their Creator can finally be made plain. We read in the first letter of John: “My dear friends, we are already God’s children, but what we shall be in the future has not yet been revealed. What we know is that when he appears we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is.” (1 John 3/2).  The fullness of hope extends this promise to the whole universe, which through the power of the risen Christ and the outpouring of his Spirit, is constantly being drawn toward and made ready for the final triumph of God’s kingdom. And so throughout the whole Easter Season we do well to rejoice and sing  ‘Alleluia, Praise the Lord’.