Easter Day 20 April 2025
Readings: Acts 10.34-43; 1 Cor. 15.19-26; John 20.1-8
Theme: Christ is risen! Alleluia.
Happy Easter!
May the Lord bless you all on this great feast of the resurrection.
As St Paul says in our second reading today, if Christ has not risen our hope is in vain. In other words, this is the key doctrine of the church upon which all other beliefs about Jesus rest. It is because Jesus has risen that our faith in him is justified. But how are we to understand the resurrection of Jesus and what does it mean for us?
The resurrection of Jesus is a new beginning. The creation had been subjected to sin and death and so through the resurrection of Jesus, the intention of God the Father for his creation is now fulfilled. No longer will death have the last word. Death itself has been transformed through the death of Jesus into a new beginning. This is why St Paul uses the language of Jesus as the second Adam. As he puts it in our second reading, ‘death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being’; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.’ In other words, we are to understand the resurrection of Jesus as the overturning of the old order of sin and death to which the creation had been subjected. Through the resurrection a new day is dawning and it is the first day of eternal life which never ends.
If this is what the resurrection means, then what are the implications for us? Again, St Paul gives us the key idea here. He uses the ‘Adam’ and ‘second Adam’ motif to explain what this means for us. It is because Christ is the new Adam that just like the first Adam the whole created order will follow the pattern set out in the second Adam, the Christ. Just as Christ has been raised from the day, so too will we in due course be raised from the dead in our glorified bodies. Christ is, as St Paul puts it, ‘the first fruits’, he is the indication of what is to come for all of us who belong to Christ. In other words, when Jesus returns, he will raise the dead to life, judge us, and then hand over the kingdom to the Father when God will be all in all. There is a lot going on here and so it is good for us to go through it step by step.
The first thing to note is that we die. This is obvious, but it is important to start with that. The Scriptures tell us that we like Christ will fall asleep until he returns to awaken us. When we die we do rest in peace, as we often say at the death of a loved one. This bodily rest awaits the return of the Lord to awaken us to the final judgment. Following this judgment, trusting in the loving mercy of God, we shall be resurrected with our transformed bodies and enjoy paradise for all eternity. This is when heaven and earth will become one and the new creation will be complete. Jesus is the beginning of this process. He is the ‘first fruits’ of this New Creation who has preceded us and shows us how this will be.
Over the coming weeks our Scriptures will intimate some of the characteristics of this resurrection and they provide for us a model of what we should hope for. The Gospel that we have today from John narrates the story of the resurrection of Jesus as Peter and John follow Mary Magdalene to the tomb and observe that the stone guarding the entrance of the tomb had been removed. There are a number of points that give us clues to what is going on in this scene. One, which it is easy to overlook, is the fact that Mary Magdalene misidentifies Jesus as the gardener. This is not an incidental detail, because it is meant to return us to the garden of Eden. Jesus is the keeper of the new garden which is the New Creation, the new paradise which has been inaugurated in his resurrection. In other words, this burial scene in the garden is a new Genesis. It is a fresh beginning in which the whole of creation will be restored and reconciled with God again. A second detail in the Gospel is that of the way that Mary addresses Jesus. She calls him ‘Rabbouni’ which is Hebrew for ‘teacher’. In other words, Jesus is the one who answers the question what happens to us when we die. We do not answer this fundamental question for ourselves, because it is dependent on the Lord. The Lord is the one who awakens us from the bodily sleep of death in the Lord’s own time. We do not know when this will be. We only know that it will be and that that will be the end of time.
As we celebrate this most central of Christian beliefs, we should realize what it means for us here and now in our lives. The bodily death that we will all experience will come to an end when Jesus returns. Our mortal bodies will indeed rest in peace awaiting their glorious transformation in the resurrection and until then we shall be awaiting his final coming when the just will arise to eternal life. This is why how we live our lives now has eternal significance. When Jesus opens our eyes we should hope to see him so that he will take us by the hand and lead us to our eternal home in the New Creation. That is what the resurrection of Jesus means for us. It means hope in our lives lived with him for all eternity in the paradise of the new garden of Eden, the glorious New Creation inaugurated by the resurrection of Christ.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.