Easter is a feast of faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and in his being also the first born from the dead. Jesus rose from the dead two thousand years ago. Others will rise from the dead when Jesus returns in glory. What he is now, we will become then. What and who is the risen Christ? What does he tell us about our future?

Like us, Jesus was truly a human being because he was born of a human mother, the Virgin Mary. From Mary’s womb he emerged fully human, like us in all things but sin, with a physical human body. From the garden tomb, where his body had been placed after his death by crucifixion, he also emerged a man, but no longer entirely like us in his body. Having passed through a fully human life and the ultimate barrier, death itself, he emerged transformed, possessing what St. Paul calls a “spiritual body”—a body truly his, truly human and physical, but transformed in ways that Scripture does not detail.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, St. Paul says that God provides all living things—plants, animals, humans, and even the heavenly bodies—with the kind of body appropriate to them. Even death can be a way of fashioning an appropriate body. The apparently dead seed in the ground rises in a new, leafy and fruitful body. Paul applies this insight to the human body risen from the dead: “What is sown in the earth is subject to decay; what rises is incorruptible. What is sown is ignoble; what rises is glorious. What is sown is weak; what rises is strong. A natural body is put down and a spiritual body rises.”

There is a technical distinction in St. Paul’s vocabulary describing natural and resurrected bodies. In Greek, he describes the body both as “sarx”, the result of sin and the element of limitation and corruption in our bodies, and as “soma”, a more neutral term that indicates a body capable of being transformed by spirit while remaining a truly physical body. The body’s principle of life in our time and space is “psyche”, soul. The body’s principle of life in its risen state is spirit. The risen Christ has become a life-giving spirit, Paul says, in whose likeness believers will be raised. Limitation and corruption cannot inherit the Kingdom of God and, at the Last Judgment, “sarx” will be destroyed and “soma” become incorruptible and immortal. The exact nature of “spiritual bodies,” other than the fact that they are human bodies transformed, is not revealed. They will not, however, be constrained by the laws of material nature as we know it and study it now. A risen body is incorruptible; and a person who has risen from the dead is completely free of the limits of space and time. It is this risen body of the Lord Jesus that we receive in the Eucharist.

If, according to Christian faith, Jesus is the first born from the dead, then the history of his body tells us the meaning and the nature and the destiny of ours. Just as natural life is a gift, so is risen life pure gift. But between the one and the other comes the crucifixion of the body. Jesus’ act of total self-sacrifice on the cross was possible because he had a material human body. In faith, the gift of this body’s life must be surrendered, willingly sacrificed, so that the gift of eternal risen life can be received. Many saints struggled to remain conscious up to the moment of death so that they could, in union with Jesus, willingly and freely surrender their lives into the hands of God. We rehearse this moment throughout our lives by freely surrendering ourselves, body and soul, offering ourselves to God, in the celebration of the Eucharist and in daily prayer.

The human body, in the light of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, is integral to Christian salvation. Saved as human beings, we are saved in and with our bodies. We give ourselves to one another and to God in and through our bodies. This is evident in the use of our sexuality in the covenant of marriage; it is also true for those who have received the gift of celibacy and who live now as all will live in the Kingdom of Heaven. The story is told of Cardinal Stritch that, when he was informed that the surgeons would have to cut off his arm in order to try to save his life, he responded by reminding his secretary that he had given his body to the Lord as a young man when he made his promise of priestly celibacy. He had freely placed his body in God’s hands then, and the surgeons should do what they had to do now.

Our understanding of our own bodies in the light of our faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead has moral as well as spiritual consequences. If human perfection, including the perfection of the body, is not conceived as a gift from God, it is self-destructive as an ideal. The best life in this life is not one freed from all physical constraints. Our perfection lies in our free gift of self to God and others; the experience of our own limitations contributes to our perfection because it prompts us to turn to God and to be of help to others. A “perfect” human being, someone perhaps even artificially genetically enhanced, would run a great risk of isolation and self-centeredness. This insight runs through Catholic moral teaching on embryo experimentation, cloning, artificial conception procedures, abortion, genetic profiling, assisted suicide, euthanasia and non-therapeutic genetic engineering. None of these can replace crucifixion and self-surrender as the route to human perfection. Nazism’s super-man, Marxism’s new man, even our own sense of “the good life,” all seek perfection as a human achievement. They all rage against the limits of a physical and moral order not invented by us. They all end in great tragedy, terrible destruction of human life and the temporary triumph of evil.

Easter tells us the triumph of evil is only temporary. In the resurrection from the dead of our crucified Savior and the gift of our rising with him on the last day, Christ’s victory is final and, with it, our spiritual and physical fulfillment. Happy Easter: Christ is risen!

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