The Book of the Holy Rosary: Part III, Chapter II. The Resurrection of Jesus from the Dead
“You wish to be happy; I will show you, if you desire it, how you can become happy. Follow the words of the Psalm: ‘How long will ye be so dull of heart? Why will ye be in love with vanity, and seek a lie? Know ye!’ What? ‘That the Lord hath magnified His Holy One.’ Christ has come to share our miseries. He hungered, suffered thirst, weariness, He slept, He worked miracles, He suffered ill-treatment, He was scourged, He was crowned with thorns, He was disfigured with spittle, He was buffeted, nailed to the Cross, pierced with a spear, laid in His sepulchre, but on the third day, His work being finished, He rose again, and swallowed up death in His victory. Fix your attention on His resurrection, and behold how He has so magnified His Holy One as to raise Him again from the dead, and to give to Him the honour of sitting at His right hand in the heavens. He hath in this shown to you on what you ought to set your mind if you wish to be happy, for you cannot be so here. In this life you cannot be happy, nor can any one. You seek a thing that is beyond doubt very good, but this earth is not the place for obtaining it. What is it that you are seeking? A happy life! well, but it is not here. If you were seeking for gold in a place where there was no gold, any one who happened to know that there was no gold to be found in it, would he not say to you, ‘What are you digging for? Why do you turn up the ground, and sink a shaft into it, to make yourself a way to where you will find nothing when you have got there?’ What would you answer any one who might speak to you in this way? ‘I am seeking for gold;’ and would not he reply, ‘I did not say that what you were seeking for is not good, but that, in the place where you are searching, it is not there to be found.’ Just in the same manner when you say, ‘I wish to be happy,’ undoubtedly you are seeking for a very good thing, only it is not to be found here. If Christ had found it here, then you might find it too. Listen, and attend to what He found here. And, indeed, what else should He have found here, besides such things as abound and are plentiful.
He partook with you of all that is to be found in the abode of your misery. Here He drank vinegar with you, and tasted gall. See what it was that He found in your abode! And now He has invited you to His royal table, the table of the angels, where He is Himself the food of His guests. Coming down, and finding all these evil things in your abode, He has not disdained to share your table with you, and to promise you His own in return. And what is it that He says to us? ‘Have faith, and believe that you will come to the good things of My table; for you see that I have not disdained to taste the evil things of yours.’ Has He borne your evil, and will He not give you His own good? Certainly He will give it you. He has promised to us the gift of the life which He has to give, but He has done something besides that far more surpasses belief. He has given us the preliminary gift of His death, as if He thereby said to us, ‘I invite you to My life, where none die, where life is truly happy, where food does not perish, but both refreshes and fails not. Behold, that to which I invite you! the abode of the angels, the friendship of the Father and of the Holy Ghost, to a feast that never ends, and to brotherhood with Me. Lastly, I invite you to Myself, to My life. If ye will not believe that I will give you My life, take My death for your security.’ Only, therefore, let us, while we are living in this corruptible flesh, die with Christ by the change of our ways of life, that we may live with Christ in the love of justice, being certain that we shall not attain to a happy life until we shall have come to Him, who has come to us, and until we shall have begun to be with Him who died for us” (Sermon ccxxxi. in the Paschal Season).
On the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead depends the great Christian doctrine of the resurrection of our bodies from the dead. Let us hear, in the words of the great Doctor of the Church St Thomas Aquinas, the extent of the benefit conferred upon us by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead:—“It has been shown in the preceding pages,” says St Thomas, “that it is through Christ that we have been liberated from all that we have incurred through the sin of the first man. For through the sin of the first man not only do we derive the stain of sin, but also death, which is the penalty of sin; according to the words of the Apostle, ‘By one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin’ (Rom. v. 12). It is necessary, therefore, that we should be delivered by Christ from both; that is to say, from our guilt, and also from death. Whence the Apostle adds, ‘For if by the sin of one man death reigned through one, much more shall they who receive the abundance of the gift of grace and of justice reign in life through One, Jesus Christ’ (v. 17). In order, therefore, that He might show both to us in His own person, He willed both to die and to rise again. It was His will to die that He might cleanse us from sin; as the Apostle says, ‘As it is appointed to all men once to die, so Christ was offered once to take away the sins of many’ (Heb. ix. 27). It was His will to rise again that He might deliver us from death; hence the Apostle says, ‘Christ has risen from the dead, the First-fruits of them that sleep; for as by man came death, by Man also is the resurrection from the dead’ (1 Cor. xv. 20). We obtain, therefore, the effect of the death of Christ in the sacraments, in respect of the remission of our sin; for it has been said above that the sacraments derive their efficacy from the Passion of Christ; and the effect of the resurrection of Christ we shall obtain, in respect of our liberation from death, at the end of the world, when we shall all rise again through the power of Christ, according to the words of the Apostle, ‘Now if Christ be preached that He rose again from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection from the dead, and that Christ has not risen again?
But if Christ be not risen from the dead, our preaching is vain, and your faith is also vain’ (1 Cor. xv. 12). It is, therefore, a necessary part of faith to believe in the future resurrection of the dead” (St Thomas, Contra Gentes, lib. iv. ch. lxxix.)