People today sometimes talk about Easter as if the great message is that there really is life after death after all. That’s a very modern perception, which would occur only to somebody who had been brought up with the secularist denials of life after death. If that’s where you’re starting from, Easter is still good news.

But for the early Christians, that was not their issue. They knew if they were God’s people they would be raised from the dead. For them the issue was, is Jesus the Messiah or is he not? Had God’s kingdom been decisively launched or hadn’t it? The answer was yes, he was, and yes, it had; and here we go.

The dominant note in the early Christian worldview was joy, because something has happened, as a result of which the world really is a different place. They’re living out of that; they don’t really care if they get put in prison or beaten up or whatever because something has happened that now determines who they are.

from U.S. Catholic, July 2004