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The integrity of our communion with Christ, empowered by His Resurrection, demands that we align the actions of our daily lives with the profession of our beliefs —placing ourselves on the front lines of daily challenges.
“Resurrection is not magic,” said Bishop John Persaud of Mandeville in his Easter message. It is experienced as a fuller life that emerges from having navigated the trials of the cross and death in everyday experiences, he said.
The bishop referenced Fr Ignacio Ellacuria, a Jesuit philosopher and theologian who speaks of Resurrection, not simply as an intrinsic ability of life to last forever, the Greek notion of ‘eternal life’, but the transformation of life that results from a certain way of living it, substantially and faithfully.
This “certain way” of understanding life, Bishop Persaud said, opens it to all possibilities and does not give in to shutting it down or out. It is to live to promote the constant passing over from ways of living together that are “less human and humane”.
Bishop Persaud highlighted that scripture reveals that God is the Beginning (Gen 1:1–2:3), and the End (1 Cor 15:28, Rev 21:1–7), and this process, from beginning to end, is a transformation into the kind of life we need, and God wants.
“Jesus calls this ‘way of living together’ the ‘Reign’ or ‘Rule’ of God—God’s will being done in and through all creation as it is being done in Heaven—God’s own Self. It is the presence and action of God that makes all Creation ‘groan in labour pains,’ (Rom 8:22–23) struggling to give birth to this Reign or Rule of God/Heaven,” said the Bishop.
He added, “we, too, groan” as human beings in this grand process for fullness of life—for completeness in God (Rom 8:23).
Bishop Persaud said that revelation of this process comes to human beings gradually and intensify in clarity and power, culminating in our experience of the Way of God in human ways, in the life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ (Heb 1:1–5).
