Easter: A chance for re-engagement with the Risen Christ

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 16, 2026

During Lent this year, I emphasized the need to not consider the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as a mere motive of credibility, that is, an attractive concept or circumstance which might predispose us to accept the Christian religion (see The Resurrection: Mere attraction to truth is not enough). Rather the Resurrection is the basis of our faith, and the fundamental fact that conditions our spiritual existence.

During the Easter Season, therefore, it makes sense to reexamine the claim of the Resurrection more closely. This is something I have done off and on throughout my adult life. For example, when I was a professor at Christendom College I edited and published an apologetics book called Reasons for Hope which included chapters on a number of key points of Catholic belief, the most important of which was, logically, the Resurrection. That chapter is in our library: The Resurrection and Divinity of Christ.

After developing CatholicCulture.org, I also wrote three brief posts on the Resurrection in 2006:

• Resurrection Theory I: Did the Disciples Steal the Body?
• Resurrection Theory II: Did Our Lord Die or Swoon?
• Resurrection Theory III: Were the Disciples Seeing Things?

And ten years later I wrote the “Why Be Catholic?” series, which included: Why Be Catholic? 4: Resurrection, so we might say I have covered the topic thoroughly enough. Nonetheless, today I find myself in another Easter season in which the vast majority of people in the world, including even huge numbers of nominal Catholics, habitually ignore this most important event in human history.

Other ways to look at it

After all, even a great many of us Christians do not face up to the reality of the Resurrection, or at least not often enough. The Resurrection is not just another spiritual or organizational talking point. The Resurrection changes everything.

For this reason, it can be examined in many different ways. It is important to note, for example, that Christ’s disciples bore witness to this remarkable event to the point of joyfully shedding their blood—which people don’t do for either a spiritual theory or a good story. But it is also significant that the Catholic Church has gone on to replicate this dying and rising in her own history. Again and again, earthly powers have sought to diminish, neutralize and destroy the Church, and yet she revives and perseveres and time after time. Despite minor variations from one period to another, she does not become a different sort of institution with a different sort of structure or a different set of fundamental operational methods and beliefs. She does not water down her claims to make herself more palatable to the secular world. You will look in vain for anything like this perennial “obtuseness” in any other facet of human life or culture or history. The Church as a whole is simply not desperate about dying—and when any Catholic leader does betray that sort of desperation, his next step will always be to pretend the Church does not teach what she really does teach, in order to try to gain credibility with the world. And of course this never works.

And then there are the countless carefully investigated miracles associated with the members of the Catholic Church from Christ and the apostles right down to the present time. I am not referring here only to the undetected miracle re-presented each day throughout the world at Mass but to every other type of investigable miracle from the profusion of spiritual and even supernatural achievements by the Church’s saints, to the astonishing cures of the most diverse debilities and diseases, to the dancing of the sun itself. The Catholic Church, both in Heaven and on earth, is good at miracles, of which the Resurrection is not only the archetype but the ultimate proof and guarantee.

There is so much evidence for these remarkable occurrences that the only way to ignore or deny them is to keep our minds resolutely closed. Instead of saying, quite reasonably, “I will not believe these remarkable claims without evidence”, huge numbers of people simply insist that they will not believe them because they already know within their own minds that they cannot be true—or, perhaps more accurately, because they do not want them to be true lest they should have to change their lives. After all, many of us have our own hidden reasons for refusing to look at the facts, reasons which even in our own lives oscillate between confusion and sin.

This is hardly the “scientific method”. Worse still, it is not the mark of an open heart. It is the greatest folly to hope to understand reality by ruling out those possibilities, without investigation, which go beyond our own experience or challenge our own presuppositions.

Even emotionally, we must come to grips with the Resurrection. We must make allowance for those times when we have been touched by hope and joy in the very midst of misery. This is so not only because these realities fill the lives of the Church’s saints, but because it is a rare soul indeed who has never experienced such a startling contradiction in his own life—a sharp juxtaposition, an inexplicable change of mood, a shift in perspective which does not deny human reality, but simply transcends it.

Finding what is missing

For there is much more to life than we commonly see, and if we hide ourselves from our sad emptiness through constant sensory stimulation, fearful of being unplugged, of being alone or quiet or reflective, we will simply crowd out the questions which otherwise constantly demand our answer. Who am I? Why am I here? And, if I am called to something more, Who does the calling? There is no point in going through life without a sense of purpose, indeed a sense of mission. There is no point in assuming without serious question that there is no hope that lasts beyond the current moment, no joy that last beyond the present stimulation.

For what is so often missing in our lives is meaning, and unless we accept the challenge of finding out what our lives mean, and what they are for, we cannot fully engage ourselves in any purpose worthy of our very being—a being that no matter how far and fast we run always turns on us and demands to know what it all means. And that is the question the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ was designed to answer, once and for all.

Indeed, blessed in every way are those who have not seen, yet have believed. But it is only the Resurrection itself that answers this unique and remarkable need within us. I mean the need to understand our own purpose, to face in the right direction, to find that Someone whom we can trust absolutely, and to respond to Him when He calls.

It really is as Jesus said it was. Too often we close our ears and shut our hearts. That is why, in the Gospels, Our Lord is recorded as repeating no fewer than six times: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are heavy of hearing,
and their eyes they have closed,
lest they should perceive with their eyes,
and hear with their ears,
and understand with their heart,
and turn for me to heal them.
      Mt. 13:15

Whether we have refused to open our hearts to the Risen Christ, or have simply begun to take Him for granted yet again, we must assure Him now that we will throw the door wide…if only He will knock just one more time.