The challenge of the New Life

THIS is the challenge of Easter. Christ’s resurrection has reopened the gates of heaven and has given us a way to enter it. With his rising from the dead, we are given a new life. We are now a new creation, a new man because the eternal curse of sin and death was undone with Christ’s passion and death.

But it’s up to us to receive this ineffably tremendous divine offer or reject it. And if we receive it, to develop and care for it, because even if God has given us everything to be what he wants us to be, we always have to correspond to that offer with our freedom, whose proper language is love.

That’s why we have to understand that Easter challenges us to correspond to the new life Christ has given us. Are we ready for it? Are we willing to accept it and to assume the responsibilities inherently attached to it?

In this regard, St. Paul gave us a relevant piece of advice: “Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new paste, as you are unleavened. For Christ our pasch is sacrificed.” (1 Cor 5,7)

These words certainly have reference to the Jewish feast of the Passover when the Israelites were delivered from bondage. It was a practice that involved purging the old leaven they had and offering a spotless lamb as sacrifice.

This Passover feast has become a precursor of Easter when we are supposed to cleanse ourselves from our old man to receive the new life offered to us by the risen Christ, the new paschal sacrifice that is most pleasing and acceptable to God.

Easter or the resurrection of Christ, the fruit of the cross, replaces and perfects the old sacrifice. It has the power to forgive us of our sins, and not just to cleanse us externally, which was what the old sacrifice could only achieve. The spotless lamb is replaced by Christ, the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

We can take Easter as the occasion to be more aware of the need to purge ourselves of the old leaven. We have to be aware that through the year, whether intentionally or unintentionally, we acquire many kinds of the old and undesirable leaven.

We have the leaven of the world, for one, that may be represented by the new technologies and other new worldly things that can be very exciting, but can only feed, if we are not careful, our self-indulgence and self-centeredness, instead of enhancing what is proper to us—our love for God and love for neighbor.

This leaven can so mesmerize our intelligence or our feelings and emotions and our entire bodily organism that it can become an addiction, desensitizing us to our need to be with God and with others always. Nowadays, many people especially the young are hooked on drugs, sex, games, etc. Withdrawal from them has become almost impossible.

Our other worldly concerns and affairs, like our business and politics, can also produce such old leaven that can give us certain perks and advantages and convenience, but just the same can only swell our ego. This is actually a very formidable foe because this kind of mindset is the mainstream at present.

Of course, we have the usual leaven of the flesh that can lead us to a variety of anomalies like pride, vanity, greed, envy, lust, sloth and the like. But what is important to realize is that our process of dying to ourselves, which is what purging the old leaven would mean, should simultaneously correspond to our need to rise with Christ, imitating him, identifying ourselves with him in all things.

We can only purge ourselves of the old leaven to the extent that we leaven ourselves with Christ, increasingly knowing, loving and serving him, that would always redound to knowing, loving and serving others, and everyone else.

We need to spread this good news around because many are still ignorant of it, or if not completely ignorant, are still at sea as to how we can purge ourselves of the old leaven and leaven ourselves with Christ.

Actually the leaven of Christ is presented to us as the unleavened bread of life, meaning purged of worldly and bodily leaven. And as Christ himself said, to get this leaven of his, which is unleavened of worldly things, we need to deny ourselves and carry the cross.

We need to love the cross to be able to have the new life offered to us by Christ.