Everything we hold dear in our Faith is based on the Resurrection. As St. Paul said: "If Christ be not risen from the dead, we are still in our sins".

Few skeptics would dispute the evident fact that the disciples of Jesus collapsed when he was arrested. Men do not readily confess to cowardice, and the story that the disciples twice fell asleep when they should have been keeping watch, and "all forsook him and fled" when Jesus was arrested, is not the sort of thing which Evangelists would be expected to invent.

Seven weeks later we find these, timid, broken men risking imprisonment and death in the name of the one whom they had forsaken in despair. How can we explain this psychological revolution?

There is only one explanation that fits the facts – the explanation given by St. Peter: "This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we are all witnesses."

This great miracle of the Resurrection has always been regarded by the Catholic Church as the greatest of the miracles of our Divine Lord. Apart from its consequences, it proves more clearly than any other miracle the Divinity of our Lord, and, therefore, it confirms every other miracle. It confirms His teaching, puts the prophecies of our Lord beyond dispute, and establishes beyond all possibility of doubt, the Divinity of His mission, and the Divinity of His Person. The Resurrection, in itself an incontestable proof of Christ’s Divinity, so amply confirms and ratifies every other miracle, that we may say God’s omnipotence was exhausted to satisfy the incredulous minds of men that God really was amongst them, that He died for them, and saved them.

The Resurrection of our Lord from the dead is the foundation of our Faith; it is the source, too, of all Christian morals, because it proves the future resurrection of men from the dead; it, therefore, establishes the truth, that there is future existence.

Now, it is this future existence that makes life and the duties of life so solemn and awful for us; for our existence in eternity shall be happy or miserable, according as our lives upon earth are holy or unholy; take away that future life, and you take from men all responsibility, you destroy the very notion of virtue. You give the vicious unlimited power to work evil; you take from the virtuous all their consolation and all their hope.

If, as St. Paul says, we do not rise again, if our hopes are to be confined to this world, then, indeed, we are the most wretched of men. For whatever we do is of no avail. Prayer is profitless, for there is nothing to pray for. To what purpose do we watch, and fast, and mortify ourselves, if there were no reward, no risen God to welcome us as His disciples, for that we bore our crosses faithfully for Him. Therefore, it is in our final Resurrection that all our hopes are laid, and the Resurrection of our Lord on this great solemn feast of Easter is the pledge of the Resurrection, and the future life of every soul that He saved.

As St. John Chrysostom so aptly stated, "In every business or action, the hope of a future result is the motive which actuates us; for he who ploweth, ploweth that he may reap; and he who fighteth; that he may conquer. Take from man the hope of resurrection, and there is no longer piety or virtue."

(In case you did not know this fact, Easter is an old Anglo-Saxon word that refers to the Teutonic goddess of spring)