March 31, 2026 // Columns

Looking Forward to the Resurrection of the Dead

Ken Hallenius

At nearly every Sunday Mass and on solemnities throughout the year, we pray the Nicene Creed, a summary of key tenets of the Catholic faith. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation gives me the conservative estimate that I have professed the creed around 2,500 times since I first sounded out the words in second grade. And that number doesn’t include the simpler and earlier version called the Apostles’ Creed, prayed most often as part of the Rosary. I can’t even begin to guess how many times I’ve prayed that one on my beads over the years.

In these relatively brief summaries, we name some of the highest truths that we believe, especially those surrounding the Blessed Trinity. Neither of the creeds is exhaustive; they both mention baptism, for example, but don’t discuss the Eucharist, which the Second Vatican Council called “the source and summit” of our Catholic faith. Of course, it makes practical sense that not everything we believe in would be explained in detail every time we come together to pray. Even the Catechism of the Catholic Church is only a summary of our beliefs, and that runs more than 800 pages of densely printed text.

As my old Latin teacher told me a million times, “Repetition is the mother of learning.” Consequently, the truths that the Church recites together week after week are the truths that we are invited to reflect upon most deeply. At the top of the so-called “hierarchy of truths” is God Himself. Both the Nicene and Apostles’ creeds are structured around understanding the Blessed Trinity.

The creeds invite us to reflect upon what we mean when we say that God is one, in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God the Father created the heavens and the earth. God the Son, through whom all things were made, took human flesh and suffered, died, and rose from the dead. God the Holy Spirit is equally God with the Father and the Son and is the Lord and giver of life.

The Blessed Trinity is the highest and most important truth of our faith. It is also the most difficult to comprehend, because it’s unlike anything we can experience directly through our senses or understand by human reason. How can something be both three and one? Every attempt to explain the Trinity falls infinitely short of reality. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that no matter how detailed our explanation might be, the difference is infinitely greater.

But God Himself, in His mercy, bridged that gap. We could never come to know the truth about God’s inner life without God telling us about Himself. Through the prophets, and most importantly through His own incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ, God revealed Himself to us in order that He might draw us to Himself.

Week after week as we recite the creed, we repeat that which we have come to know about the Blessed Trinity – to inspire deeper reflection on God’s self-revelation and to draw us deeper into the mystery of God.

There are other truths we pray in the creed, beginning with those about the Church being one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. We profess the power of the Sacrament of Baptism to forgive sins. And we say that we “look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

In the Easter season, it is this last part of the creed that is particularly fresh in my mind, because we have just experienced its full reality. At the Easter Vigil, the high point of our entire liturgical year, we rejoiced as our newest brothers and sisters were received into the Church through baptism and profession of faith, becoming one with us in Christ Jesus. They were washed of their sins in the baptismal waters and sealed with the Holy Spirit through anointing with the sacred chrism. We then celebrated our full communion in Christ by sharing in the Eucharistic sacrifice.

St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, proclaimed at the Easter Vigil, assures us that baptism has real power to save because it configures us to Christ Jesus. “We were indeed buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.”

Throughout the Easter Season, we hear the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ appearances to the disciples after His resurrection, how it took the disciples some time to comprehend what they were seeing with their own eyes. Eventually, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the disciples were transformed from men cowering behind locked doors in an upper room to apostles sent to the ends of the earth to baptize and proclaim the forgiveness of sins.

And we are the heirs to that proclamation of the Gospel. When we proclaim in the creed that “we look forward to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come,” we affirm the truth that we who have through baptism been buried with Christ will, like He was on that first Easter Sunday, also be raised from the dead to a new and glorious life.

Let us live today and every day in the assurance that we can experience even now the newness of life that is our inheritance as disciples of the Lord Jesus. That is something worth repeating, over and over.

He is risen! Happy Easter! Alleluia!