Jesus Christ is alive! Alleluia!

Jesus said, “Peace be with you!” We need Peace, Peace in our hearts, Peace in our mind, Peace in our whole being, especially now that there is tension in the Middle East.

Have we ever wondered why, when we say the Creed, we profess our belief not only in Jesus’s death but also in his burial?

“For our sake, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried.”

It is because his burial is central to the story and not merely the next step after his death, as though we were mentioning something in the Creed that really should be taken for granted and didn’t actually need to be mentioned.

Rather, Jesus’s burial, his placement in the tomb at the hands of Joseph of Arimathea, brings to a conclusion the sequence of events associated with his death and serves as proof that he had really and truly died.

“Dead and buried” is the expression that we often use when we want to say that something is conclusively over and done with — not just dead, but buried too. And saying that the place of burial was empty was a way of saying that burial no longer applied to Jesus, and thus death no longer applied to him either.

As we go through the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we discover something quite astounding, which has puzzled the readers of the Gospels for centuries: there is no story of the resurrection!

There is no description, not the slightest hint of a description, of Jesus’s actual resurrection itself. Nor, for more than a thousand years, did any artist ever try to depict what Jesus’s resurrection might have looked like.

Meanwhile, Filipino-Chinese businessman Herman Tiu Laurel, president of the Manila-based Asian Century Philippines Strategic Studies Institute (ACPSSI), said the re-opening of oil exploration talks between the Philippines and China seems to be “very late in the day.”

He described it as a potentially severe oil and gas supply crisis linked to the conflict pitting the United States and Israel against Iran.

Tiu Laurel said China was concerned about the Philippines’ consistency in previous agreements, citing what he described as policy reversals and “flip-flopping” since initial engagements in 2013.

He also pointed to the Philippines’ termination in 2022 of a joint exploration agreement reached in 2018 between Xi Jinping and the previous administration.

According to Tiu Laurel, former Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. announced the unilateral termination of the agreement during the transition from the Duterte administration to that of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Tiu Laurel said that abandoning the agreement could lead to tensions.

He added that the current administration should provide assurances of “sincerity” if it intends to pursue talks with China.

Happy Easter to all!