A Perspective on the Ultimate Challenge

By Michiel Peeters - Embracing Life’s True Meaning and Overcoming the Fear of Death Through Faith in Christ’s Victory

In a world where the inevitability of death casts a long shadow, the message of Christ's resurrection emerges as a beacon of hope, challenging the dread that accompanies our natural desire to live. This homely delves into the profound impact of acknowledging death’s defeat through Christ’s victory, exploring how this pivotal event reshapes our approach to life, fosters deeper commitments, and ignites a transformative hope that has propelled believers for centuries.

We are born with a desire to live. But there is an anxiety within our hearts: we have the desire to live while we are in a condition of death. Despite progress, goodwill, and dominion over the things of the world, man has death. When we look around, we see that life is failing every moment. The prospect of any significant or small endeavors to animate and liberate humankind or just ourselves is full of emptiness if there is no announcement that the dominion of death has been destroyed, that the last enemy of man, the real enemy of man, has been overcome. 

One can try to forget about this enemy—this is currently the usual way of coping. Being superficial, we can try to see death as far away or abstract. Still, to forget death, one must censor many aspects of life because life is "deficient" wherever we consider it attentively. Everywhere in nature, there is disintegration caused by death. By censoring death, one censor's life; to censor death, one must live less and less. Is this attractive? 

But when one does give credit to his desire to live, the more one does that, the more one is appalled by the inevitable disintegration: "Ex appetitu naturae surgit timor mortis," said St Thomas Aquinas: the more we follow our natural desire, the more we fear death, are scandalized by it, death puts itself as life's major problem, as that which stands between man and his fulfillment. 

We can commit ourselves radically only when this problem is solved. Christ is risen. 

This man—whom we have run into, whom we have come to know in a companionship, whose fascination we have experienced—conquered death. Christ is the man who conquered death, the first who was raised from the dead. 

Now, all humanity can look at this man with confidence. 

What made Paul and the first Christians move, what gave meaning to their lives and work, was a new hope. Thus, we understand the gathering of people around Jesus: it was a fellowship in the name of hope—namely, the hope of overcoming death, of victory over death. Christ's victory is his resurrection. This was and is the definitive announcement. The world still has to walk to accomplish, but the ultimate has already happened. 

No man is by himself capable of this proclamation. Only by God's grace is Paul what he is, and so is every Christian. And only thus can it be said that the Gospel is salvation: it is salvation because Christ is risen. As Christians, we can only proclaim that Christ is risen. We are witnesses of Christ's resurrection (witnesses because the announcement has convincingly reached us; especially convincing because we recognize Christ acting and changing people, and he can do so because he is risen and present.) 

Life no longer fails, and no other name is given from which one can obtain life but Christ. Improving the world, overcoming conflicts, and creating better structures can be splendid forms of humanism, but they do ’t qualify the work of Christians. The latter has a radical point as its end and characteristic: Jesus Christ, risen. In this sense, Christian discourse is new, irreducible to a discourse of mere social, civil promotion: anyone, if humanly alive, authentic, and honest, can talk about social justice, peace, racism and sustainable development. We, too, can talk about it, and rightly so, but what makes the essence of our attitude new is the foundation that Christ has risen. 

This foundation of our hope summons us, diversifies us from the environment and makes us tireless builders.

Unrevised notes and translation by the author.