Resurrection of Jesus - CathNews New Zealand https://cathnews.co.nz Catholic News New Zealand Mon, 21 Mar 2016 04:04:29 +0000 en-NZ hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://cathnews.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/cropped-cathnewsfavicon-32x32.jpg Resurrection of Jesus - CathNews New Zealand https://cathnews.co.nz 32 32 70145804 Your musical guide to Holy Week https://cathnews.co.nz/2016/03/22/musical-guide-holy-week/ Mon, 21 Mar 2016 16:13:41 +0000 http://cathnews.co.nz/?p=81422

For 1.2 billion Catholics around the world, this week marks the single most important week of the year: Holy Week. Holy Week - which culminates with Easter Sunday - enters into the heart and soul of Christianity, which is the death and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago. As Fr. Robert Barron Read more

Your musical guide to Holy Week... Read more]]> For 1.2 billion Catholics around the world, this week marks the single most important week of the year: Holy Week.

Holy Week - which culminates with Easter Sunday - enters into the heart and soul of Christianity, which is the death and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago. As Fr. Robert Barron puts it: "Without the Resurrection, Christianity collapses. It's the standing and falling point of the faith. Therefore, to deny the Resurrection is to cease to be Christian. You might pick up bits and pieces of Christianity here and there, and you might follow Jesus as a wise spiritual teacher, but without the Resurrection the whole thing falls apart."

Of course, when the historical figure of Jesus comes up (and it is the mainstream position among historians that Jesus did, in fact, exist), many try to do just that - reduce Jesus to another wise spiritual teacher, like a Socrates or Confucius. But can you imagine if your teacher or mentor said something like "I am the way, the truth, and the life"? But this man did; and so he was, as CS Lewis noted with his "trilemma", either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. (Some add legend, or mystic - but these falter too.)

But was Jesus who he said he was? That is the question; and it all hinges on this news of Resurrection, an event that billions of Christians around the globe - backed by a heap of historical and philosophical evidence - still profess to this day.

But just what happened that week? And why has it mattered so immensely to so many down the centuries?

To answer that, here is a day-by-day musical guide to Holy Week. Each day (and its corresponding verse in Matthew) is followed by a song by Josh Garrels and a meditation from the Catechism of the Catholic Church - gems that both reveal, in their own way, the power and glory of the week that changed the world.

Palm Sunday: Jesus Arrives in Jerusalem (Mt 21:1-11) Continue reading

Sources

  • Aleteia, from an article by Matthew Becklo, a husband and father, amateur philosopher, and cultural commentator at Aleteia and Word on Fire.
  • Image: Et Resurrexit
Your musical guide to Holy Week]]> 81422 Searching for Sugar Man a prophetic Easter yarn https://cathnews.co.nz/2013/04/05/searching-for-sugar-man-a-prophetic-easter-yarn/ Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:11:13 +0000 http://cathnews.co.nz/?p=42284

Searching for Sugar Man is a strange story. On the face of it, a documentary about a musician famous in one country and completely unknown in his own. Within the layers it becomes an Easter tale. David Letterman called it jaw droppingly fascinating and that about sums up this movie about Sixto Rodriquez, a musical political from Read more

Searching for Sugar Man a prophetic Easter yarn... Read more]]> Searching for Sugar Man is a strange story. On the face of it, a documentary about a musician famous in one country and completely unknown in his own. Within the layers it becomes an Easter tale.

David Letterman called it jaw droppingly fascinating and that about sums up this movie about Sixto Rodriquez, a musical political from Detroit.
Rodriquez made a few albums in the 70's, which bombed in the United States. Unbeknownst to him, one of those albums went platinum in South Africa as his music helped galvanise anti-apartheid activists.
But he remained a mystery man; his fans believed he was dead and even stranger, that he had killed himself during a concert. In reality, he'd gone back to hard manual grafting and studied for a degree in philosophy.
By the end of the movie my friends and I were stunned, bewildered, jaws dropping like Letterman's. Somehow in the telling of this story, one reality shifts and another appears. It becomes a prophetic yarn, an unpalatable truth.
Imperceptibly, the illusion that we are just bodies wrapped in skin, existing in one place and one time, accessible and known to others as a neatly tied package and to ourselves as a slightly more askew version, melts away.
We are not that. Not ever, however much we might want to delude ourselves, perhaps to make life a bit less fraught and slightly more manageable. Despite our best efforts it seems instead that we are inter-connected in some inexpressible, unconscionable and uncontrolled way beyond our physical body.
Under these circumstances getting to know our own self is a life's work, to know someone else, impossible. The layers within and between us are arranged differently and in some strange way, not even visible. We stumble at the start, searching for a doorway.
The direct approach, however appealing, is limited. Instead, it is story or a set of stories that act as portals or doorways to the human person. We tell them to ourselves, gossip them amongst our friends and recite them at family gatherings. Continue reading
Source

Sande Ramage is an Anglican priest and blogger.

Searching for Sugar Man a prophetic Easter yarn]]> 42284 A message of consolation that still endures https://cathnews.co.nz/2012/04/10/a-message-of-consolation-that-still-endures/ Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:31:55 +0000 http://cathnews.co.nz/?p=22603

The Christian faith faces many challenges - but that is what it is for. Easter is a unique expression of hope, of regeneration and of the triumph of life over death. It is not necessary to be an active Christian to gain some measure of inspiration and reassurance from this great festival that, for two Read more

A message of consolation that still endures... Read more]]> The Christian faith faces many challenges - but that is what it is for.

Easter is a unique expression of hope, of regeneration and of the triumph of life over death. It is not necessary to be an active Christian to gain some measure of inspiration and reassurance from this great festival that, for two millennia, has annually brought a sense of renewal to our society. There is no time at which Christianity - reduced, marginalised and beleaguered as it may nowadays appear - so subtly influences humanity as at Easter. That influence is benevolent and welcome, emphasising as it does the duties of respect and service to others. Yet, in recent years, a small but vocal secularist lobby has sought to represent Christianity as somehow undesirable, even threatening, and to exclude it from the public square.

That is why the senior Catholic churchman in Britain, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, is calling upon Christians to "wear proudly a symbol of the cross of Christ", in response to attempts to ban the cross in the workplace. Why should the symbol that, from the spires of cathedrals to modest village churches, has dominated our landscape for so many centuries now be proscribed? It is the defining symbol of our culture; no other emblem so comprehensively expresses the historical identity of Britain and Europe. The bemusement of Christians was understandable when David Cameron, at his Easter reception for churchmen in Downing Street, welcomed a Christian "fightback", while his own Government is pursuing a case at the European Court to enforce the ban on the cross at work. Yet the fact that the Prime Minister felt it incumbent on him as leader of the nation to deliver an Easter message highlights the enduring presence of the Christian faith at the heart of our shared national psyche. Continue reading

Sources

A message of consolation that still endures]]> 22603