This morning during our Eucharist we will be invited to renew our baptismal promises. Even if we were here last night at the Easter Vigil, it doesn’t hurt us to do so a few times – even every day as part of our personal prayers. We spent the forty days of Lent praying, reflecting, and doing works of charity and penance precisely to ready ourselves to reaffirm these promises on this Day of the Lord’s Resurrection.
Our faith, the faith professed at Baptism and renewed at Confirmation, rests on the Resurrection, rests on God’s Promise fulfilled.
St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians (15:14): If Christ is not raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is vain. Let’s ponder this a bit this morning. The Resurrection as the cornerstone of Faith.
If Christ is not raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is vain. Vain, of course, in this context means ‘empty’ or ‘futile.’ Paul means that if Christ was not raised, then he would have been another very good man, an extraordinary prophet – but just a prophet – put to death as many others. His resurrection, however, indicates something else.
The Lord Jesus, Son of God, was not resuscitated as he resuscitated Lazarus. The Lord Jesus raised his friend Lazarus after three days in his tomb as a sign of his divine authority and a promise of the resurrection, but Lazarus would someday die again and await the final resurrection of the Last Day, a resurrection like Jesus’ own.
The Lord Jesus was not simply brought back to his old earthly life. The accounts of the Resurrection make this mysteriously clear. Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize him at first. It is the same Jesus raised from the dead, yet He is changed too, His human body, real, His own, but glorified – now belonging more to the realm of God than of the flesh. He says: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. Risen from the dead with his own true human nature, body and soul, once again united to his Divine Person and Nature, is already being taken up completely into the glory of God – as we will see on Ascension Day.
So, the Lord Jesus’ Resurrection is not a simple coming back to earthly life. He is still fully man, the Jesus the apostles knew, but his human nature is being glorified, no longer bound by space or time. Other appearances of the Risen Lord that we will hear over the next few weeks will show him passing through locked doors. One moment, He is here in Jerusalem; then on the road to Emmaus; in Galilee. No longer bound by the limits of space or time.
I said that our faith rests on the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus. The Son of God’s resurrection in the flesh testifies clearly to his authority and identity as Son of God. In our first reading, St. Peter preaches: “They put [Jesus] to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses … He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead … everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” It says in the Old Testament Law, “Cursed is he who dies on a Tree.” Jesus was put to death by the authorities because they thought he was a blasphemer, making Himself out to be equal to God, claiming to forgive sins. So, they hung Him on the Cross for breaking God’s law. Yet He rose from the dead, innocent and vindicated, in the power and glory of God.
So, God’s Promise to us was fulfilled in Jesus and his Resurrection. And those first eyewitnesses, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Peter, John, the apostles, Paul, and others have joyfully handed on this faith to us in the Scriptures and through the living Tradition of the Church from one generation to the next.
Jesus’ Resurrection then says that He is who He said He is. And that means that his Promise to us will be fulfilled as well. Because his Resurrection is the beginning of a new Creation, where sin and death will be overcome by his Sacrifice and the grace of his Cross. You and I, believing in Him, baptized in his Name, belonging to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are being taken up every day into that New Creation, members of his Sacred Body, the Church.
We too await our own resurrection, where we will share body and soul, in Christ’s Resurrection. Our nature will share in his glory, and we hope to be body and soul in heaven. That’s His promise to us: I will raise you up on the last day. Death may intervene and separate soul from body for a time, but our bodies will share mysteriously in the fate of our soul – in its glory or its punishment.
Our faith rests on the Resurrection. Not only does it affirm who Jesus is but it affirms who we are. It’s a temptation in today’s overly rationalized culture, for all its worship of the body and health, to think that eternal life will be just spiritual. The body left in the dust. But our faith teaches us that we will eventually be raised body and soul so that – like Jesus – we will be fully ourselves in glory. All that we experienced in this life – body and soul – will be raised up with us: our joys, our sorrows, our wounds, and our memories. Our life in this world is important, the decisions we make are important: our acts of love, our acts of treachery. This life and all we learn and experience, our relationships, our family, are important and will not be lost. Life here, with faith, is already the beginning of eternal life. We will not be lost, absorbed, or disappear into God. We will be ourselves, but in a loving communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Angels, and all those sharing in the life of God … all Saints.
It is with great joy, then, this morning, that we renew our promises to God in faith and to stake our life once again on his Promise. He has been faithful to us. With his help we can be faithful to him every day.
Dear friends, I wish you and your families a blessed Easter as we rejoice in the faithfulness of God, who is our Life, our Resurrection, our Joy and our Peace.
Most Rev. Stephen A. Hero
Archbishop of Edmonton
St. Joseph’s Basilica
April 5, 2026
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