My congregation, the Daughters of St. Paul, was founded to evangelize with media. We love to spread the Gospel any which way we can. Not long ago, I wanted to choose a meaningful bumper sticker for the convent car. Bumper stickers are free advertising at stoplights. I thought about the most important message I wanted to convey about God, and finally came up with: “He is Risen.” (My bumper sticker is actually a car magnet with funky lettering and a victorious-looking Cross draped in a long, flowing sash.) What’s my logic here? For starters, “He is Risen” kind of takes people aback. It’s not the expected: “God Loves You”—which has caused people to scream at me: “Then why is my life so bad?!” It’s not proclaiming a certain “side” of a controversial issue. It’s a simple statement of the central truth of Christianity that often strangely gets lost in the shuffle even for Christians.

Jesus’ Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament--body, blood, soul and divinity—is certainly the greatest mystery and gift or our Faith. But the central truth that proves Jesus is God (and validates everything else He said and did, as well as the Catholic Church that He founded)…is the Resurrection. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor. 15:17-19)

How do we know Jesus really rose from the dead? A long, unbroken chain of witnesses (including extra-biblical history and accounts), as well as the power of Christ alive today through the Sacraments, the Word of God and believers. (For apologetics on the Resurrection go to catholic.com and see “Hope To Die: The Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection,” by Scott Hahn).

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Too often, Christians drift with pop spirituality and pagan culture and start to believe we don’t really know what happens after death, or that we’re reincarnated, that we become angels, that everyone automatically goes to Heaven. But we do know what happens after death. We know our soul is separated from our body, receives its particular judgment, and goes immediately to Purgatory, Heaven or Hell. At the end of the world, at the general judgment, our body will be reconstituted and reunited to our body forever in either Heaven or Hell (whoever is still in purgatory at the end of the world will go to Heaven). We know a lot about Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell from Scripture, saints and mystics. When we declare: “I believe in the resurrection of the body” in the Apostles’ Creed, it refers not only to Jesus’ Resurrection, but our own future bodily resurrection. Jesus rose from the dead so we would too. “(He) will transform our lowly body into conformity with his glorious body.” Philippians 3:21

What does the fact of the resurrection of the body mean for my life today? It means my body isn’t a thing. It’s me. It’s a temple of the Holy Spirit. I must act in accord with its great dignity. I must practice the virtues that pertain in particular to the body: the corporal works of mercy, temperance, modesty, industriousness, loving the Lord with all my strength; and avoiding sloth, gluttony, lust, anger, etc.

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What I hope my little He is Risen magnet accomplishes is the following: Perhaps you don’t believe in Jesus Christ or His Resurrection (or the resurrection of all bodies)--but you just encountered someone who does. (Maybe my magnet should read: “Ask me About Jesus’ Resurrection.”)

I proudly keep my He is Risen magnet on the car year round. Sometimes Catholics will gently kid me when they see the magnet during Advent: “Hey, wrong season!” To which I reply: “But He’s still risen!” No matter our belief system, death is the great equalizer. Death doesn’t care what we believe or don’t believe. “Death. It comes for us all, my lords,” St. Thomas More said in “A Man For All Seasons.” If we really stop to meditate on what Jesus did, the point is this: Someone came back from the dead. Someone did come back from the dead. And we will, too.