Here’s a good question for us to ask ourselves:

Am I living my life as if Jesus really is alive? 

…Or am I sort of living my life as if Jesus is dead?

This is really the hinge of everything isn’t it? Literally everything hangs upon our honest answer to that question:

Am I basing my entire life — and every aspect of my life — on the fundamental claim that Jesus really truly is ALIVE? That the Resurrection actually happened? Is that the lens through which I see absolutely everything else at all times?… or am I sort of living my life like a “practical atheist?”

A practical atheist is someone who might very well go to Church every Sunday… who, when it comes to everything Catholicism claims to be true, will say “Yes, I believe ALL of that!”… A practical atheist is someone who might know when to sit and kneel and stand and knows all the right responses to say at Mass… but… when it comes to normal, every day stuff… when it comes to quote-unquote “real life” — the way they navigate work, school, social interactions, dating, their free time, their money etc… the practical atheist acts as if Jesus was dead, buried, and totally irrelevant.

And this can be really subtle, guys… like so subtle that you don’t even notice you’re doing it.

I remember when I was working as a graphic designer after college… I had just undergone a really deep conversion. I had experienced God’s love for me in an entirely new way, and I was learning so much about my Catholic faith. I was devouring as many theology books as I possibly could. But I remember one day, I came home from work and I realized: I had just worked 8 hours and I did not pray once. I fact, I hadn’t even thought about the Lord a single time during my entire day at work…

I was engaging in… at least to some degree… practical atheism!

And I think this is way easier to do than we care to admit. The laundry HAS to get done… the bills HAVE to be paid… the taxes HAVE to be prepared… the kids HAVE to be taken to this that or the other thing…

And before ya know it, we’re operating as if Jesus was not alive.

That he’s dead.

And that all those Catholic beliefs are not relevant to “real life.”

All of this brings us to our second reading this weekend from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Paul does NOT mess around in that passage, does he? …He lays it all on the line, he makes the full implications of our beliefs perfectly clear and says: 

“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain and you are still in your sins.”

In other words, if Jesus is dead — if the Resurrection is a cruel joke — then EVERYTHING else is just a waste of time. Nothing in this life has any meaning if Jesus is not raised from the grave.

Then St Paul pushes it even further, and I love this line: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.”

If Jesus is not alive… if he’s just another dead guy in history who said some comforting religious stuff and taught some basically good things about how to be a nice person… then Christians are the most PATHETIC people on the planet! 

All those martyrs? — They died for nothing!

All those saints who prayed every day, forgave their enemies, gave money to the poor? — They wasted their lives!

All those celibate priests? — They gave up marriage and kids and grandkids for absolutely nothing!

“If for this life only we hoped in Jesus…if Jesus stayed dead… then we are the most pathetic people of all.”

On my silent retreat back in January I re-read the classic book “He Leadeth Me” — written by Fr. Walter Ciszek. 

If you don’t know anything about this man’s story, Fr Ciszek was a Catholic priest who was arrested in Soviet Russia and spent like 23 years in a Siberian labor camp. At one point in the book, he described what it was like being among the other prisoners in the gulag — And he described how everyone around him was pretty much just doing anything they could simply to survive… competing and vying for food and water, fighting and imposing their will over the other prisoners. All in the desperate attempt just to live till tomorrow… for what purpose? Who knows…

Survival was the lone goal.

And Fr Ciszek said that he realized that if he wanted to stay Christian and not lose his faith at this labor camp…if he was going to live out his vocation as a priest and proclaim the Gospel… then he was going to need to act differently. 

He couldn’t just focus on surviving and competing…He couldn’t resort to that sort of practical atheism…

“Each day to me,” he said “should be more than an obstacle to be gotten over, a span of time to be endured, a sequence of hours to be survived. For me, each day came forth from the hand of God newly created and alive with opportunities to do His will.”

That is just amazing. 

Even within the heart of some of the worst suffering ever to be devised — a communist labor camp where human dignity was trampled and destroyed on a regular basis — Fr. Ciszek knew that he needed to live for something more. Something bigger and better. He needed to live believing and behaving as if Jesus really was alive. That was the only way he could make it out of that camp with his humanity and his faith intact…

And so he committed to doing just that. And he became like that tree we heard about in our first reading from the prophet Jeremiah — a tree that was “planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: it fears not the heat when it comes; its leaves stay green; in the year of drought it shows no distress, but still bears fruit.” 

I bet we can relate to his experience, right? That feeling of just being happy to get over obstacles… of simply enduring a sequence of hours to be survived…

Life is hard. And the fact is, this world pressures us at just about every turn to settle for practical atheism…to give in to that “survival mentality.”

But we need to live for more. We need to rise above all that.

Because Jesus really is alive.

And that changes the ball game. That makes life worth living! That makes life truly “blessed” even when we find ourselves to be poor, when we are hungry, when we are weeping, when we are hated and excluded and insulted for the sake of the Gospel.

If Jesus is dead, then those experiences will be too much. They will cripple us. They will defeat us and make us give up.

But if Jesus is alive… if He has already conquered the world…and if he’s ALIVE IN US NOW… then we can dare even to “rejoice and leap for joy on that day, [for] behold our reward will be great in heaven!”

Last weekend, I was at the Diocesan Youth Conference in Richmond, and I was asked to tag-team a talk with my brother priest, Fr Armando. And one of the things we did with the kids who came to our talk was to declare this truth — that “JESUS IS ALIVE.”

We had the students all stand up and yell that at the top of their lungs over and over — “JESUS IS ALIVE.”

Why? — Because we forget it so so easily! We can go a whole day without remembering that Jesus isn’t just a historical footnote… an irrelevant relic of the past. 

No, he is TERRIFYINGLY, SHOCKINGLY, BEAUTIFULLY ALIVE.

So I’d like to do that with you guys here, too, if it’s ok. Let’s just declare that truth… Let’s dispel any practical atheism that’s in our hearts, let’s counteract all those times in our lives when we acted like Jesus was dead and irrelevant!

So on the count of 3… we’re just gonna belt it out three times:

JESUS IS ALIVE… JESUS IS ALIVE… JESUS IS ALIVE.

You ready?

Ok…

And we know these words are powerful!

I’ve heard testimonies of people being healed… being converted… receiving breakthrough deliverance…just by speaking them out loud and affirming their truth! So let’s really mean it when we say them:

1…2…3… 

JESUS IS ALIVE.

JESUS IS ALIVE.

JESUS IS ALIVE.

Amen!!!!

And now, once more, we turn our attention towards this altar… where we do not receive the dead body of Jesus… No! We receive the LIVING Body and Blood of Christ. The Resurrected Jesus!

In this most holy Eucharist — Let’s say it together:

JESUS IS ALIVE.