By Fr. Roy Cimagala *
THE secret, of course, of having our death as a way to our
resurrection is to die with Christ. Only with him can our
resurrection, our victory over sin and death, take place after our
death. St. Paul encapsulated this most wonderful truth of our faith
when he said, “For if we have been united with him in a death like
his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like
his.” (Rom 6,5)
No wonder then that Christ culminated his redemptive work
with his passion and death on the cross. Only then would his own
resurrection take place. Christ made this point clear when after being
rightly identified by Peter as ‘the Christ of God,’ he proceeded to
talk about his passion, death and resurrection.
“The Son of Man must suffer greatly,” he said, “and be
rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be
killed and on the third day be raised.” (Lk 9,22)
We have to deepen our belief that with Christ’s
resurrection, sin and death have been definitively conquered, and a
new life in God is given to us. We are now a new creation, with the
power of Christ to conquer sin and death and everything else that
stands in the way of our becoming true children of God.
And so we have every reason to think that we can live
forever in Christ over whom death no longer has dominion. In spite of
whatever, we have every reason to be happy and confident, as long as
we are faithful to Christ.
We just need to realize more deeply that Christ is alive and
wants to live his life with us, because we are patterned after him.
Let us not miss this most golden opportunity.
We therefore have to learn how to keep him alive in our
minds and hearts. We have to learn to feel in an abiding way the new
life, the new creation he has won for us through the cross.
And this can mean that we have to go through the daily
process of dying and rising with Christ. In other words, our earthly
day-to-day life should be the precious time of rehearsal for the final
and crucial moment of our death. Our death should be a dying with
Christ so that we too can rise with him.
We need to be aware of this very important significance and
purpose of our life here on earth, and to act on it accordingly.
Everything that happens in our life can and should be related to this
significance and purpose of our life. Nothing in our life, whether
humanly good or bad, right or wrong, is irrelevant to our life’s
purpose.
We should be wary of our tendency to degrade our life’s true
and ultimate meaning and purpose. That happens when our understanding
of our life’s purpose and our reactions to the different events of our
life are derived simply from our human estimations of things, as from
our senses and emotions alone, or from some sciences or philosophies
or ideologies or superstitions.
With these attitudes and frame of mind, we put ourselves
vulnerable to despair and helplessness, since we would not be able to
cope with all the trials and challenges of life. We would be tying the
hands of God who knows how to resolve even our most unsolvable
predicaments. We should go through our earthly suffering and death, so
that we can resurrect with Christ!
* Chaplain Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
