Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Those four words have been the heartbeat of the Church for two millennia, proclaimed in cathedrals and whispered in prisons, sung at dawn by monks and shouted in joy by new converts stepping out of the baptismal waters. They are the words that change everything — not only about what we believe, but about who we are and how we are to live. The resurrection of Jesus is not a coda to a tragic story. It helps us to understand the whole story, in a way that rewrites ours.
I find myself returning, every Easter, to the scene the Church gives us in John's Gospel this morning. Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb while it is still dark — and finds the stone rolled away. She then runs. Peter and the Beloved Disciple then run.
There is something gloriously undignified about the image of two grown men sprinting through the early morning streets of Jerusalem because something has happened that — despite Jesus’ multiple prophecies that he would rise on the third day — dramatically defied their expectation.
The Beloved Disciple reaches the tomb first, peers in, and sees the burial cloths lying there. Then Peter enters, and John tells us something quietly extraordinary — he saw and believed. He did not yet fully understand, but he believed. The empty tomb and the burial cloths were enough for love to outrun grief, and faith to outpace explanation.
That same invitation is extended to us this morning. We, too, are asked to enter — to step past what we think we know, past our doubts and our losses and our unanswered questions — and to believe. The tomb is empty. Jesus is not there. He is risen, and the world has not been the same since.
The Church exists because those first witnesses could not stay silent, and because every generation since has found, in their own encounter with the Risen Lord, the same irresistible impulse to share what they have seen.
You and I are part of that long, unbroken chain of witness. Together, through the work of The Pontifical Mission Societies, we are part of how the news of Easter morning reaches men and women who have not yet heard it — in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the river communities of the Amazon, in the ancient cities of the Middle East, in Africa, Asia and every corner of the earth.
Christ has not just risen, but is very much alive, and journeys with us in time. The world is not the same. Neither are we.
I pray that, this Easter, God will fill you with a joy that does not fade, and that the Risen Lord will make himself known to you in the Holy Eucharist, in his Church, in the faces of those you love, and in every unexpected moment of grace that awaits you in the fifty days of the Easter Season that lie ahead.
Happy Easter!
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