Easter Sunday 2025
Have you ever had an experience so powerful, so beautiful, or, even, so tragic that you weren’t able to find a way to tell the story of what happened or to describe your own feelings?
Sometimes—and this is especially in the life’s most important moments—words fail.
Some things just can’t be put into words.
The limits of our language can also keep us from adequately expressing the truth, beauty, and goodness of God. This even applies to our celebrations in these holy days… how can we possibly put into words that all our hopes—and the hopes of the ages—have been fulfilled in the murder of One who has become the source of an unflickering Light that casts out all darkness and of endless life that has destroyed death itself?
Because our words fail, Christians have found ways to express these truths in art, music, and in the symbols of the Mass and the other sacraments. But even then, no matter how beautiful the song, painting, church building, or the ritual might be, even these will never be enough.
These limits of language, art, and ritual were not news to the first Christians. They also struggled to understand and express everything that happened that weekend in Jerusalem. Because of this, their experience of Easter wasn’t enshrined in abstract philosophies or complicated doctrines (those would come later).
So, then, we might ask: How did they testify to the world that Christ had truly risen?
They proclaimed the Resurrection of Jesus by the way they lived their lives.
They didn’t just passively remember Jesus and the mysteries of his life, they experienced him: Jesus was a living, redeeming, actual Presence among them.
Mary Magdalene meets the Risen Christ (John 20:1-9)
Those first Christians proclaimed (sometimes at their own peril): “Christ lives in me!” They understood that the only way to truly celebrate the mystery of Easter was to live Christ.
What makes their witness all-the-more powerful is that the Resurrection wasn’t a dramatic event. In fact, none of the Gospels even tries to describe what happened on that first Easter. The evangelists simply tell us that it happened. The spiritual writer Henri Nouwen reflected on the simplicity of the Resurrection:
It was an event for the friends of Jesus, for those who had known him, listened to him, and believed in him. It was a very intimate event: a word here, a gesture there, and a gradual awareness that something new was being born… Mary Magdalene heard her name. John and Peter saw the empty grave. Jesus’ friends felt their hearts burn in encounters that find expression in the remarkable words: ‘He is risen.’ All had remained the same, while all had changed.
We know that all had changed by looking at the lives of those followers of Jesus for whom nothing could ever be the same.
The is why it’s so important that we will hear from the Acts of the Apostles every day of the Easter Season. Luke’s chronicle of the work of Peter and the Apostles in Jerusalem, of the death of Stephen, and of the missionary efforts of Paul, Barnabas, and Silas is an extended testimony of how the Resurrection had changed the lives of Jesus’ followers and of how the faith, hope, and love of those believing men and women began to spread like a fire.
They carried light into the darkest places of the human experience. They could do this because the light of the Risen Christ had illuminated the dark places of their own hearts and minds. They didn’t have everything figured out and theirs was an imperfect, all-too-human faith, but their Easter experience empowered them to proclaim that Jesus was truly alive!
Where does all this leave us?
Have we lost the wonder and awe of our spiritual ancestors because we know the story too well?
Has dynamic faith been replaced with dull discipleship?
Easter reminds us that we have been re-created for love, for joy, for zeal, and for gratitude.
We have been granted the freedom to be truly alive.
Like the first Christians, we, too, have to unpack that experience, discerning resurrection grace and life in the many little miracles of our day-to-day lives. And that’s what we will do during the 50 days of the Easter Season.
But for today, let’s remember that—just as it was for Peter and Mary Magdalene and the others—living Easter means living life in the sure knowledge that everything has changed and that something of God and of heaven—something holy—is growing within us.
Christ is alive in us!
Seek. Hope. Pray. Love.
And, above all else… Live!
O God, who on this day,
through your Only Begotten Son,
have conquered death
and unlocked for us the path to eternity,
grant, we pray, that we who keep
the solemnity of the Lord’s Resurrection
may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit,
rise up in the light of life.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.
This homily was prepared for Easter Sunday Masses at St. Teresa of Calcutta Parish in North Lake, Wisconsin, and Our Lady, Queen of Peace Parish in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
