Easter changes everything

 

Pic: Moira Lynott

Easter Sunday 5 April 2026

[see, also, Blog for Easter Saturday- Where O Death is your sting?]

Meditatio:

‘ but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead’ (Acts 10:40-41)

 Commentary: It was early in the morning - cold and dark. Something extraordinary awaited the two disciples. The Gospels differ in detail, but they agree on the essential truth: the tomb was empty, and Jesus, who had truly died, had truly risen. There was no CCTV, no forensic reconstruction, no modern reporting. What we have is the testimony of those who saw, heard, touched, and were changed. And that testimony has carried the Church for two thousand years.

Easter remains a stumbling block for many today. Our rational, empirical habits of mind struggle with the idea of a bodily resurrection. The Resurrection is not a poetic flourish. It is the central fact of Christian faith. As St Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins… If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Cor 15:17,19)

Paul is blunt because the stakes are high. If Christ is not risen, then the Church collapses, the sacraments are empty gestures, and our hope is wishful thinking. But if Christ is risen –  and the witnesses insist He is –  then everything changes.

Something happened on that first Easter morning that was so overwhelming, so unexpected, that the disciples could only report it as they experienced it. Paul summarises it simply:

Christ died for our sins… He was buried… He was raised on the third day… and He appeared (1 Cor 15:3–8).

This is the faith we profess each Sunday in the Creed when we say “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” We do not claim to have measured or proved it scientifically. We entrust ourselves to a truth greater than our limited understanding – a truth revealed, witnessed, handed on, and made present in the Church.

And here is where the Eucharist gathers all of this into one moment. At every Mass, the Church proclaims the death of the Lord until He comes again. The Risen Christ is not a memory or an idea; He is present –  Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity –  feeding His people with the very life that conquered death. The Eucharist is the pledge of the resurrection, the food of immortality, the foretaste of the world where death has no sting.

Christ is truly risen — and He rises in us when our lives bear witness to His newness: freedom for the captive, mercy for the broken, bread for the hungry, hope for the weary. Without this transformation, mere intellectual assent becomes a kind of dead religion, sealed in its own tomb.

Easter invites us to leave behind our own empty tombs — the tombs of cynicism, fear, bitterness, and exhausted ideologies — and to embrace the living Lord who calls each of us by name. He is risen, and because He is risen, we need not fear the dawn.

 Collect of the Word (Church of Ireland)

Glorious Lord of life, by the mighty resurrection of your Son you overcame the old order of sin and death to make all things new in him: grant that we, who celebrate with joy
Christ’s rising from the dead may be raised from the death of sin to the life of righteousness: through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
One God, now and for ever. Amen