Today, on this glorious Easter Day, we celebrate life - restored, renewed, affirmed, powerful. The message thunders down the ages - Jesus lives!

Jesus has risen from the dead to a new kind of life, not His divine life as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. This new life of Jesus is His human life, the life that began in the womb of Mary, the life He handed over to His Father on the cross. Jesus has risen from the dead as a man, a new man.

Many times in the Gospel Jesus restored life to a dead person, for example, the young woman to whom He said, "Young woman I say to you, get up!" Or Lazarus who on Jesus' command came out of the tomb alive. All of these people died again.

The life of Jesus we celebrate today is an entirely new life, a newly created life, one that never existed before. Jesus did not rise to the same human life He lived before the cross. It is a completely different kind of human life, without weakness, without sickness, without end, eternal life.

Today we also celebrate our own new life. This is our destiny, this is God's promise, we will live again as Christ lives now in glory.