We are finally here. We’ve been preparing our hearts for weeks. We’ve abstained from meat and fasted. We’ve prayed and given alms. We’ve given things up. And now the day has arrived. So we go to Mass and perhaps are struck with a question we’d never admit, “So why did we do all this again? What are we celebrating? Why does the Church call for 40 days of celebration for this day?”

But that’s a great question. So, what is Easter? Why should we care?

A somewhat complete answer would fill many books, but in brief, Easter is a celebration of the day humanity and all the universe was saved. To understand this, though, we have to rewind the clock to the beginning of all things. God created all that is, and he created it good. He made the stars, the planets, the sun, the moon, the earth. He made the seas and all in them, he made the land, the plants, and all the creatures. He made angels and he made human beings. He made all of them good.

But, obviously, something happened. Because we look around and all is not well with the universe. Something has gone terribly wrong. When God created angels and human beings he gave them a special gift, a gift that no other beings in creation were given: we were given the gift of a free will. This gift allows us to choose, because God wanted us to choose to follow and to love Him. He didn’t want to force us to follow and to love him. Sadly, mankind fell after the great deceiver, out of envy, preyed upon our first parents, tempting them and leading them into sin. We read in scripture the utter depravity that man fell to (read Genesis or Judges to see what I mean–and these were the people who tried to be righteous). The world, under the rule of the deceiver and his minions, was brutal place.

God would not tolerate his beloved creation falling to the temptations and torments of the deceiver. He chose a people, Israel, as his own and taught them his ways. He gave them commandments. He saved them from slavery in Egypt by leading them through the Red Sea and the Desert of Sin into the Promised Land. He taught them to make a sacrifice of atonement, where they were reminded that sin has no place among them and belongs only with the one who tempted our first parents. Despite all this, death and sin could not be conquered, and God’s beloved children kept falling further and further away from him.

So he sent his Son. Jesus, the Son of the Father, fully God and also fully man, was born into this world, and in doing so united God to our human nature in a new way never expected. He lived a righteous life, not only following the laws of Israel, but reliving their history. He was exiled from his homeland, and then brought out of Egypt and back to the Promised Land. He was reviled by those around him and by the powerful. And this eventually led to his death by the torture of crucifixion.

If things ended there, then we would have little cause for celebration. But, of course, there is more to Jesus’s death then the torture of the cross. I will mention just two of these things. When Jesus begins his public ministry, he goes to John the Baptist to be baptized. John sees Jesus and exclaims, “Behold! The Lamb of God!” St. Paul, in Galatians 3, reminds us that God’s curse is on a man who is hung on a tree. (see Dt 21:23) What curse is this? The curse of sin and death.

Putting this all together in the context of the sacrifice that was happening in Jerusalem on the day Jesus died, Jesus, acting as the Christ who was anointed by the Father and acting as the great high priest, offered himself as the Passover Lamb of the Exodus to free God’s children from slavery to sin.

But that is not all. In the Atonement Day sacrifice, there were two goats. One goat was slaughtered and offered to God and its blood was sprinkled on the people to make them a part of that offering to God. The high priest then laid hands on the head of the other goat and confessed all the sins of the people. The goat was then sent to the wilderness–the domain of sin–to remove the sin from the people of Israel. (see Lv 16) Christ offered himself as both goats. He was offered to God and the people said “may His blood be upon us and our children!”–that is, us–in Matthew 27:25. He also took the sins of the whole world upon himself and he descended into Hell with them. He then left them with the deceiver, where they belong, and also left the power of death with the deceiver as he rose again.

After all this work of re-creating human nature by destroying the power of sin and death, Christ spent the seventh day resting until he returned to this earth, victorious, to invite his disciples to follow him into the new Promised Land of Heaven.

So what is Easter celebrating? Christ’s victory and our salvation. We are joined to Christ when we through the waters of baptism, and if we choose to remain within Christ by following him, sin has no power of us. While death may, for a brief moment, claim our bodies, it cannot hold us. It could not hold Christ and he lives within us, so how could it hold us? Easter celebrates that not only are we called to eternal life, but that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and that way was opened today, on Easter Sunday.