The Claim That Changes Everything
By John Graveline, Director of Parish Life
April 12, 2026
“His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered these things had been written of him and had been done to him.”
John 12:16
Easter Changed Jesus’ Disciples
Easter is not a one-day event and now it’s time to get back to normal. “Easter is not simply one feast among others, but the ‘Feast of Feasts’, the ‘Solemnity of Solemnities’ . . . the mystery of the Resurrection, in which Christ crushed death, permeates with its powerful energy our old time until all is subjected to him.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1169; see also no. 1085) We get a sense of this reality liturgically throughout the 50-day Easter Season.
We sometimes are so used to hearing the story of Jesus, particularly the Easter accounts in the Gospels, that they gradually lose the ability to shock us. Our central Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth truly died on the cross and was raised to a new, transformed, eternal, bodily life. When his closest disciples first saw him after his resurrection, they “were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. [Jesus] said to them . . . “look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” (Luke 24:37-39) We do not simply claim that Jesus was a wise teacher who spread love and taught us to be good, moral people (he was and did); but that he is the eternal Son of God, made flesh, who death could not hold, and now lives again nevermore to die.
This is an astounding historical claim. It is no mere spiritual myth or pious story. In fact, all of Jesus’ apostles who ran cravenly from his cross on Good Friday were tortured and put to death in the most gruesome manner rather than recant this declaration before human political authorities. To see their teacher and friend die in a most violent and humiliating way, and then to experience him alive again, his body bearing the wounds of his tor-ture, changed everything. The teachings they heard and the miracles they witnessed during Jesus’ mission as an itinerant preacher all needed to be re-thought and re-interpreted in light of his resurrection.
How Has Easter Changed Us?
The resurrection of Jesus Christ changed everything for his first disciples. Which raises the question: how has the resurrection of Jesus, our celebration of Easter, changed us? What has it made us re-think? If we are not different post-Easter than we were pre-Holy Week, why not? What do I see differently because Jesus rose from the dead? What difference does it make if Jesus truly rose from the dead? A little over a year ago, Gregg Zank, who leads our Saturday morning men’s group, used his 3D printer to make some keychains for the guys. They simply said, “So What?” It was to remind us as Catholic Christian men that if our faith doesn’t change us, move us from sideline spectators to active participants in God’s story of salvation and re-creation in Christ, then so what? What does it matter whether Jesus died on the cross or rose from the dead if we don’t see concrete changes in our lives?
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his . . . if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.”
Romans 6:3-5, 8
Even if we believe that Jesus really rose from the dead, it is not merely another historical fact from the past, like the signing of the Declaration of Independence or Wright brothers discovering how to build flying machines. It is a living reality that we participate in sacramentally through Baptism. Baptism is not merely a ritual that demonstrates that since our parents were Christian, I’m a Christian, or even a solemn ritual that gives a public witness that I have personally chosen to believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior. As St. Paul wrote, Baptism is our participation in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection, making us a new creation, an adopted daughter or son in the Son. Once again, if this is true, then how is my life different? How has this reality changed how I relate to those in my household, my workplace, my community, my country? How does it change how I understand and react to the fortunes and misfortunes of life? How does it change how I show compassion to the weak, the poor, the lonely, and the vulnerable?
Near the end of this Easter Season, we will hear Jesus give his disciples what has come to be known as The Great Commission, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20) But how can we respond to Jesus’ commission if we do not know or cannot articulate what difference Jesus—his teachings, his death, his resurrection—has made in our own lives? We have time. This Easter Season, let us pray and open ourselves up to the Holy Spirit, giving God permission to heal us, change us, transform us so that we can truly say at the conclusion of our celebration of Easter that we have been changed so that we can go out to transform the dark corners of our world that so desperately need the Light of Christ. (John 1:4-5)
John