Celebrated this previous Sunday and throughout the week in the Catholic calendar, Easter is the celebration of Jesus Christ’s victory and the fulfillment of the promised voiced by the prophets of the Old Testament. After passing through agony in the garden and suffering on the cross, Easter is the joyous commemoration of the empty tomb, of Jesus accepting the burden of sin in death and yet triumphing over it with life. The power of Easter in Christian theology derives from Christ’s resurrection making possible the faith of an eternal life that has become a cornerstone to the religion.
One of the most significant features of the celebration of Easter in Christianity is it recognizes that only because of Easter Sunday are the events of all of the ministries of Jesus and of Old Testament priests and prophets mattered. If Jesus’ death had been permanent, then what would have been the point? All of Jesus’ ministry, whether it be preaching the form of an upright life or preparing his apostles to be the stewards of his legacy as done during the events of the Last Supper, would have been without meaning. Even if the blood of the lamb nevertheless cleansed humanity of its sins and fundamentally changed the relationship between humanity and its Creator, it would have been a moot point.
If Christ had not risen from death, there would have been little to redeem. If death is permanent, even to the son of God, then why does redemption matter? It is only once Christ broke the chains of death and made possible ever-lasting life that his revolution between God and human acquired meaning. The events of Easter Sunday and the resurrection are hence the lens by which all events leading up to it must be perceived.
Without the two, the very idea of God Himself taking human form, walking and preaching among mortals, all so that he can die on a cross as a sacrifice is almost pathetically comic. It may be a great act of love, but it would have all been in vain. However, with Easter Sunday, all of this is transformed into an act affirming the life-giving nature of redemption and hence ensuring redemption would be something that mattered throughout the ages.
This may seem to be merely the concern of the religious, but here we see the fundamental gulf that lies between the Christian, as well as many other theistic religions, and the atheistic world views. According to the Christian, the peril of death has been conquered and the eternal horizon of life has been opened by the events of Easter. However, the atheist still views the final state of humanity as death when that day of human extinction finally comes. Without the promise of the resurrection, there is just death and the annihilation of consciousness waiting for us. Once this happens, the slate of human history is whipped clean along with it all deeps for good or ill.
When there is nothing but death to look forward to, what is the way to live if not with egotistical abandon? Without Easter morning, everything is simply transient, shadows and dust all destined to dissolve into nothingness. There is no value ascribed to anything that can last through time.
In this world, there is no real reason not to live utterly for one’s own self and no reason not to be willing to sacrifice the wills of others towards that end. Surely, we can choose to live in a world in which we decide sensations like pleasure and pain have value and in which we do not make others a tool of our own devices. Indeed, such actions may be beneficial towards our own aims, but they will never be based on anything more than a futile attempt to preserve life before the final winter.
There is nothing a saint in this world can respond to the greatest tyrant’s questions about why he lives in such a manner with any statement that is not a fantasy. We can pretend humans are dignified beings with rights, but without Easter he is simply a very adaptable animal, with no more innate dignity than a household dog. PETA certainly has a point in this world about how we treat animals, but really what they ought to call to mind is not why we treat animals so badly, but why we treat Homo sapiens so well. When the moral slate is swept clean by death, nothing matters so the individual person might as well do everything he can to enjoy life even when that means to sacrifice others towards one’s own ends.
Easter ends this. To the Christian, death has been conquered and no longer poses this threat to humanity. By breaking open the finality of death, Christ’s resurrection makes possible a world in which death does not mean the nullification of every human choice to come before. Of course, the atheist can reject Easter as just another fantasy by which we attempt to ascribe meaning to the world in order to escape the fact of death. Even if it were to be a glorified thought experiment, it still provides an interesting contrast by which we can understand the properties of a world in which life is but a moment of time. We can see in that situation there is no permanent value on which to base our lives, but every moral choice is fundamentally a choice unsupported by anything other than the manner by which we want to live. While that may seem to be emancipating, what it means is that there is no reason not to live as an amoral tyrant willing to sacrifice anything to one’s own end.
In the end, Easter is the defining moment in Christianity in which the events both in the Old Testament and Jesus’ ministry reach their fulfillment. Without it, even Good Friday would have been in vain. It is only Christ’s resurrection that freed humanity from the chains of death and created a world in which the opportunity of redemption matters. It is a moment that liberates humanity from death and makes possible value lasting through the anchor of a moral life. Even if one does not believe in the possibility of ever-lasting life, Easter is still an interesting holiday because it provides an opportunity to think about what the finality of death means for the possibility of morality.
Harrison Searles is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
