Easter Citizenship

Our political battles have become an all-out war between good and evil, between those who assert truth and those who assault it.

As a society, we can no longer say a man is a man or a woman is a woman. This comes after fifty years of saying a baby is not a baby, a pitiful effort to justify abortion.

As truth itself – and the Christian values associated with it – continue to be the object of sustained, coordinated attacks in public policy, on campuses and in Churches, people search for new meaning, starved of significance, hungering for human identity.

That hunger, inflicted by a society increasingly disconnected from its Christian origins, leads many to feast on forbidden fruits.

They believe they can chart a new path by rewriting the moral code, erasing our nation’s history and re-fashioning it in their own image, creating dozens of genders and requiring children to learn about them with greater urgency than they learn arithmetic (which they deem “racist” anyway because it has “right” and “wrong” answers), and wading deeper and deeper into the waters of trans-humanism.

Science experiments with combining human DNA with that of other species, and people are invited to see the sky as the limit for re-imagining what it means to be human.

It is like people who are dying of starvation, grasping at anything they can find to eat.

And then Easter rolls around on the calendar, and whether we recognize it or not, the answer to our hunger for meaning and human fulfillment comes across our path as if it were an Easter egg that suddenly is revealed during the hunt.

When the women were walking to the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning, the Gospel tells us “it was still dark” (John.20:1).

It was, in more ways than one. They were wondering aloud who would roll away the stone for them (see Mark 16:3). The stone represented death, the “web woven over all nations, the veil that veils all peoples” (Isaiah 25:7).

Its weigh represented the impossibility of mere human strength to bring humanity to total fulfillment, perfect happiness, and eternal life.

But the women were soon to realize that the stone had already been rolled away. Jesus Christ was risen, and they would soon see him.

There, in the Risen Christ, resides the answer to our search for meaning, fulfillment, and life.

We are not wrong in seeking to improve the human condition; we just keep missing the mark in how we try to do so.

We find the answer in the person of Jesus Christ. It is our humanity that he took upon himself in the Incarnation, and then took to the Cross, to purify it of sin and release it from the grip of death. It is our humanity that he took into the new and risen life.

“Christ, now raised from the dead, never dies again. Death has no more power over him” (Romans 6:9).

Because we “are the body of Christ, and individually members of it” (1 Cor 12:27), therefore, death has no more power over us, who are in Christ.

“He who believes in me will not thirst again” (John 6:35). “On that day you will have no more questions to ask me” (John 16:23).

The more that we and our fellow citizens realize this, the more effectively we can both understand and resolve our current political battles.

We do not need gender ideology. We do not need the Tower of Babel. We do not need a utopia built by tyranny. We do not need transhumanism.

We need Jesus Christ.

The stone has been rolled away. He has renewed humanity. He has opened the way to the endless life, which stands in no need of revision or improvement.

Indeed, it is precisely the celebration of Easter, the jubilant welcome of the Feast of the Resurrection, in which we find the guiding light for how to exercise our citizenship, and where to lead our nation.