When Jesus says at his death, “It is finished” (also translated “It is accomplished”), he refers not only to his earthly ministry, but to the purpose for which man and woman were created: to love God and neighbor wholeheartedly for as long as we live. With Jesus’ victory on the cross, the human race is created anew.

Still, Jesus rose from the dead, and his resurrection adds something mysterious to that victory. Betrayal, abandonment, conspiracy, torture, execution—none of this had a lasting effect on him. While all the sin, malice, anxiety, and futility of human history are piled on him, Jesus rises before dawn on Easter Sunday unburdened. His body bears deadly wounds but glories in life.

Jesus lives beyond human limits. He forgives those who failed him. He defies the constraints of space and time, appearing when and where he pleases. In his ascension, even as he departs from his followers, he remains with them still, and always will. Jesus’ resurrection enlightens us by revealing how ephemeral our worries really are. No worldly consequences, however grave, can outweigh the gift of divine life that awaits us beyond death.

Abortion advocates pretend to feel compassion for mothers in distress, arguing that they should be able to choose abortion as the best escape from their burdens. But human life and the human calling are not about evading distress or burdens. Otherwise, there’d be no such thing as family or neighbors, all of whom are sometimes burdensome, some always so! Though they may change the course of our earthly lives, these burdens become the stepping stones to human maturity. The true response to our calling, we come to understand, is in loving compassion for the weak, and solidarity with the burdened.

Secular prolifers rightly observe the evils of abortion. It destroys a human life; corrupts the moral life of those who collaborate in it; instills a habit of throwing inconvenient people away; stunts the growth of future generations; and distorts our law and politics as we seek rationalizations for withdrawing legal protection from an entire class of human beings. But even these terrible curses don’t last forever. Like the burdens on mothers in distress, they provide us with an opportunity to assume our shared responsibility for the welfare of these women as well as for our entire society. We thus win an occasion to model what a world without abortion could look like.

Even we religious prolifers could take a cue from Jesus’ resurrection. If his torture and murder retain no hold on him, we have no cause for the joyless moralizing attributed to us, not always unjustly. Saint Paul asks and answers rhetorically: “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? By no means!” And yet where sin increases, grace abounds. Even though abortion signals failure—not only on the part of abortionists, but also, we bystanders, who might have actively done more to prevent it—we have no cause for despair. Our mission is neither to condemn nor to remain aloof, but to announce the good news of life as a gift and a calling from God.

God has loved us into being. Jesus by his death on a cross has fulfilled God’s purpose for us:  that we love him wholeheartedly in return. Jesus in his resurrection assures us that he can recover all we have failed to do: the love we failed to receive, the love we failed to give. There will come a day when aborted children, their mothers, the abortionists, and prolifers will stand together, marveling at how God is saving us all. Even as we persevere in our earthly cause for legal protection for the unborn, let us not forget the promise of the resurrection.