Today is the Feast of feasts.  Without it none of the other feast days in the Church’s calendar make sense.  For, as St. Paul wrote: “If Christ has not been raised, then empty is our preaching; empty, too, is your faith. … If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all” (1 Cor. 15:  14, 19).

Easter is so important that we celebrate it with a week of Solemnities, the highest order of feasts, and with a Season of fifty days, longer than the Lenten Season.  The Lord wants to strengthen our hope with the joy of his Resurrection.

Even Christmas—the celebration of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity being born and entering human history to show us the love of the Father by sharing in our life on earth, our suffering, and even death itself—would make no sense without the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Without the Resurrection, sin and death would have triumphed.  But Jesus’ Resurrection shows us that out of the greatest evil in human history—when humanity crucified the Son of God—the greatest good came forth.  Pope Francis put it this way in his Apostolic Exhortation “The Joy of the Gospel”: “Faith means believing in God, believing that he truly loves us, that he is alive, that he is capable of intervening, that he does not abandon us and that he brings good out of evil by his power and his infinite creativity.”  The Resurrection makes it clear that sin and death do not have the final word.

This is our hope.  Jesus shows us that the goal of our earthly lives is the eternal life of heaven.  He has blazed a trail for us to follow.  Though he has gone before us, he has not abandoned us.  At the Last Supper he said, “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you” (John 14: 18). The Body of Jesus is not in a tomb but is risen and present in the Blessed Sacrament as well as in heaven at the right hand of the Father.  In the Eucharist he has made himself the Bread of Life, food for our journey.  When we receive him—Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity—in the Eucharist, we truly, in the words of various books about healthy eating, “Eat to Win.”