The narrative of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is not only about personal salvation. It speaks about a revolutionary life that confronted injustice, exposed hypocrisy, and stood with the poor against the powerful of the world. The cross was not simply a religious symbol; importantly it was an instrument of political execution used to silence a voice that challenged the rationality of power of its time. The narrative of the resurrection, then, is not only a miraculous narrative that exists in the realm of ideas, but significantly, it is God’s miracle of declaring the truth that emerges from powerlessness, that life triumphs over death, and that the struggle for justice cannot be silenced by injustice.

Just like the Filipinos, Jesus lived under an empire that oppressed the poor and protected the powerful. In that situation that Jesus proclaimed the reality of the Kingdom of God, announcing a new social order where the hungry are fed, the poor are lifted up, and the oppressed go free. The powerful were threatened by this popular emerging reality, the reason he was crucified. Empires do not crucify harmless people. The image of the Kingdom of God mobilized a memory that exists in the future. They crucify those who hold such conviction because they know that the present order is a house built on a sand.

The passion of Jesus demonstrates the cost of believing and imagining the incessant and stubborn reality of the Kingdom of God. He was betrayed, falsely accused, tortured, and killed by the alliance of political and religious power—just like the revolutionaries of our time. The same still happens today whenever those who defend the poor are silenced or attacked. But the resurrection event witnesses to the undying truth that God stands with the oppressed, not with the oppressors.

Our movement affirms that the resurrection of Christ is alive among the people, made visible by those who courageously challenge and resist empire. This includes those who have taken up arms in defense of the people and the land, such as the New Peoples’ Army, offering their very lives in the struggle for justice. The task of confronting empire at its roots remains urgent and faithful to the Gospel’s liberating promise specially at this time and place we found ourselves in. The reality of the Kingdom of God impels us to join God’s invitation towards a revolutionary life.

At the forefront of this struggle is a revolutionary movement grounded in the life and teachings of Jesus, an expression of faith that is lived out in service to the people. It seeks to address the deep-seated injustices of a broken and oppressive system, so that a new life may emerge: a just social order marked by the restoration of dignity, equity, and peace.

Central to the revolutionary tasks is to call for genuine land reform. The stark inequality in land ownership, where those who till the soil and feed the nation remain landless, is not merely an economic issue but a moral one. It is a grave injustice that has sustained decades of exploitative relationships between landlords and peasants, entrenching rural poverty, deepening social unrest, and recreating the human as less dignified.

As one of the country’s most fundamental problems, this unjust structure demands transformation. If land reform is truly for the people, it must be understood as part of God’s redemptive vision, the “new heavens and the new earth” where land is stewarded for the common good, shared justly, and made to serve life, dignity, and the flourishing of all.

For us Filipino, this message of Christ killed by the empire remain true, and painfully real. Our country continues to suffer under the imperialist control, corruption, and fascist bureaucrat capitalism. The growing US war on aggression in Iran and the presence of many EDCA sites in the Philippines and Balikatan exercises are constant threat that our land will again be used for war that is not ours, that the sovereign in this land are not its people but the same people that orchestrate wars. But what also remains to even more so fundamentally true, is that, the Risen Christ is also rising among the revolutionaries.

The suffering of the people is not an abstract reality; neither is our struggle. It is shared, embodied, and urgent. Together with the revolutionaries of our time, our struggle unifies, pulsates, rhymes, and sings. A lifelong commitment shaped by history, driven by hope, and resolute in confronting and dismantling death-dealing empires.

In the face of these realities, we are called to intensify our collective efforts to arouse, organize and mobilize our constituencies and to firmly uphold the National Democratic Revolution. This means advancing the revolutionary armed struggle in the countryside as the principal form of struggle, while strengthening the revolutionary mass movement both legal and underground in the cities and rural areas as a necessary and inseparable form of resistance to confront the evils of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism. Above all, we are reminded that only through the united struggle of workers, peasants, youth, and all oppressed sectors can genuine freedom and liberation be achieved.

The revolutionary Jesus does not call us to comfort, but to courage. He does not call us to silence, but to a steadfast and costly commitment. He does not summon us to remain within the safety of our sanctuaries while the poor suffer beyond their walls; he calls us to go where the struggle is, where life is most threatened and hope most contested.

He calls us to go where the struggle is.

This is the challenge to Filipino Christians today: Go to the countryside. Listen to their stories. Stand with them in their fight for land, justice, and dignity, and together with the people, advance the protracted people’s war.

Easter reminds us that the crucifixion was not the end. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s declaration that death do not have the final word. The powers of empire tried to silence Him, yet life triumphed over death, truth over lies, and hope over fear.

So the question of Easter is not only “Is Jesus alive?” but also how do we witness to the reality of the resurrection in our own time and place. He is very much alive among the revolutionaries, those who move heavens and earth–He is alive wherever people stand for justice, defend human dignity, and struggle for genuine liberation- to wage a people’s protracted war, a national democratic revolution, with a socialist perspective is set up, until the Kingdom of God is a lived reality.

Long Live Christian revolutionaries.

Raise the Red flag of the people’s democratic revolution!

Defeat imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism!

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