Resurrection: Better than normal, better than wanting God to be dead. Happy Easter.

Happy Easter!

Islam has it that Allah is too holy to love us so much as to come into this world and die for us, the Innocent for the guilty. Better, it is said, to kill Jesus by saying that Jesus didn’t die for us, you know, that He just came down from that cross, saving Himself [?], but not us, so much not us that Muslims are directed in the Qur’an to cut down any Jews or Christians wherever they find them.

Asia also has a long history of killing God and neighbor by “praying,” you know, sitting a certain way, breathing a certain way, staring at one’s belly button in a certain way (talk about self-absorbed), and emptying one’s being of any thought, no room for God or neighbor anytime any where for any reason, effectively killing ’em all. I remember some Catholic religious sisters in upstate New York offering years of courses on how to “pray,” that is, on how not to pray in all these ways, destroying the life of God in those who went to them for such “direction.”

In Europe, we hear of the errors of Russia, their extremely violent capitalism of the state over the proletariat, which they jokingly nickname “communism.” They murder everyone, by the hundreds of millions so as to prove that they murder God. And the philosophers say, “God is dead,” even as they, pretending to have made themselves God, drop into the grave.

In these USA, we go out of our way to kill the image of God in the least of the brethren, abortifacients, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, policies that encourage cartels and kill untold numbers of people with drugs.

In Latin America, there is Pachamama, consort of the sun god, that demon idol used as the excuse to murder hundreds of millions in “sacrifice,” whereby human hearts became the main protein source for untold numbers of centuries, surely proving by such “power” that the murder of God is at hand.

When I was a seminarian attending pontifical universities in Rome it wasn’t any better being subjected to lectures on the meta-historical-resurrection of Jesus, you know, so as to say that God is dead and He stays dead, never rising, just becoming a widespread hysteria whereby we say that Jesus is dead figment of our imaginations – but Hey! – a nice figment at that. But Jesus is dead and He stays dead, they think. I’m guessing all my professors from way back in the day are today all dead.

Instead of all this, Jesus rose from the dead according to the flesh, truly rising from the dead. His glorified body, as they call it, doesn’t mean that He was any less risen from the dead according to the flesh. He even asked for a very dead fish to eat so as to prove to them that He was alive and actually with them in the flesh. Put your fingers in the nail prints, Thomas, and your hand into my side.

Jesus commanded us not to be afraid. We are not to think that Jesus is an abstraction of our imagination somewhere in outer space. Jesus repeatedly called us friends. Forget the nirvana, forget the murder of God and the murder of the members of the Body of Christ. Pray by speaking with Jesus in humble thanksgiving, plainly, as you were created to do, redeemed to do. God has made it easy for us to be one with Him. The “normal” we never knew. And better than normal. Oh happy fault that merited for us so great a Redeemer.

Jesus is risen. Jesus is truly risen. Alleluia.