We begin here with a compact catechesis on the Paschal Mystery and how it impacts the believer:
20. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the heart of our faith and the basis of our hope. Saint Paul states this succinctly by the use of four verbs: “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:3-5). Christ died, was buried, was raised and appeared. For our sake, Jesus experienced the drama of death. The Father’s love raised him in the power of the Spirit, and made of his humanity the first fruits of our eternal salvation. Christian hope consists precisely in this: that in facing death, which appears to be the end of everything, we have the certainty that, thanks to the grace of Christ imparted to us in Baptism, “life is changed, not ended”, [Roman Missal, Preface I for the Dead] forever. Buried with Christ in Baptism, we receive in his resurrection the gift of a new life that breaks down the walls of death, making it a passage to eternity.
Commentary:
Those four verbs are reminiscent of the old Memorial Acclamation A, one of the smallest creeds–and one of the most powerful–ever voiced in the liturgy: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. It was pilloried as an invention, but it gets to the root of Christian belief and hope. “Appeared” continues to be a hope for the modern Christian. Perhaps we don’t think of that vision always as Jesus coming to us, but we do reflect on our final existence as beginning with the believer coming home to the Lord.
If death is a “passage to eternity” then it is merely a continuation of the pilgrimage we’ve begun by following Jesus. Pilgrimage, remember, is an explicitly stated theme of the 2025 Jubilee.
You can check the full document on the Vatican website here.
Catholic Sensibility 