Happy Easter

Bishop Scott Bullock
Easter Sunday
April 20, 2025

Once again Happy Easter to all of you, to all your loved ones, family and friends, far and wide. It’s the day for supreme joy for our faith when we celebrate the victory that Christ has won for us and how we share in that. God bless you and all your family in this season of new life. 

In my own family, I was thinking back to a time for my aunt and uncle in the 1950s. My Aunt Gerry was preparing to give birth to her first child when she was suddenly and surprisingly that she could no longer hear. It surprised everyone. Of course I wasn’t around at the time. As a result, from that point on, she was unable to hear anything, including the voices of her five children who were born throughout her marriage.  She was never able to hear their voices as children or as they grew through all the activities and even then, they become adults until the miracle of technology, some 25 years ago allowed the possibility for cochlear implant in the ear of my aunt that held out some hope, maybe, after four decades, she might be able to hear again.

The surgery was completed, time was taken to allow for the surgery to heal and then came the moment of truth. At her doctor’s office, bandages were removed and her daughter, Mary, was brought into the room and stood behind her mother. Mary said to her mother, “Mom, can you hear me?” And, for the first time ever, the mother was able to say to her daughter, “Yes, I hear you.”

Now is that not an example of the resurrection? A surprising outburst of new life in a place that was never expected. However, because of her condition, the hearing did not last for long, and she slowly began to have a fading of that. Yet, there was that one shining moment, one shining period when hearing was restored and my aunt’s relationship with her family was forever changed.

Some fifteen years ago, my Aunt Gerry died. In faith, we believe she now hears and sees and relates to her family and to her God in ways she was never able to do in this life. This is indeed the meaning of the resurrection. The resurrection is about a reunion, a restoration of relationships that might be thwarted by limits in this life and, ultimately, by death.  

Resurrection is about overcoming all the “deaths” in our lives and removing any obstacles between ourselves, others, and certainly our God. When death seems to put up that definitive block between ourselves and others, the resurrection is the truth of a definitive and long-lasting reunion between ourselves and our God.

We can see that at work already today in today’s Gospel for Easter with St. Mary Magdalene, featured in the Gospel as she is caught in one of those blocks of life that plague us all, and all of humanity. In the Gospel, we’re told that Mary Magdalene, “On the first day of the week, came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb.” 

While it was still dark. The Gospel writer, John, is a master of imagery of light and darkness with its multiple meanings at the same time. For example, in the ninth chapter in the Gospel of John, the evangelist relates the healing of the “man born blind,” whose sight was restored through a new vision in the presence of Lord almighty, who restored a spiritual vision as well, as man is able to say: “I do believe Lord” after which he worships Jesus as God. So the man can see both physically and with the eyes of faith.

But here in this day’s Gospel, on Easter Sunday, with Mary Magdalene, the saint goes out while it’s still dark, both in her natural surroundings of course, but also crippled by grief and death of her Lord. A time of dark confusion. Magdalene would have known about Jesus’ promises, that he would be crucified and then would be raised, but now she remains in the darkness of grief. Jesus has passed from her vision. She’s blinded by grief in death. She fails to find the body of the Lord in the now open tomb, and she is filled with confusion, races to the disciples, and announces, “They’ve taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him.” 

He has become completely lost to her — both in death and now even in his buried body. But into this darkness, into this place, the power of the Holy Spirit comes and will come with the light of presence of a radiant, resurrected Lord!

So, the resurrection, we hear during these next weeks of Easter joy, we’ll begin with Jesus, thought dead by his disciples, would be restored to them in surprising and many reunions between them all — at the tomb for Peter and John, on the road to Emmaus, in the breaking of the bread, and certainly at the seashore.  

But the reunions are just beginning, aren’t they? When he ascends to heaven and sends his Holy Spirit into the midst of his people, and the resurrection then only spreads wider, and more and more are gathered into the body of believers, the Church, and given the hope of unending life where death and division is forever gone and we have the sure and certain hope to be restored, forever, in union with our God and those we love.

This foretaste of the eternal Lord in the Holy Spirit, discovered in the same faith that the man born blind was able to profess, reaches its fulfillment for all of us in eternity, when confusions and fears of this world, the Lord dispels them and he reveals to us his victory over death when by a perfect vision of the Lord in that eternal life, together in that great reunion of the saints, will love in the heavenly home. In a home that’s been prepared for us since before we were each born.

So then I invite you brothers and sisters, to see with the eyes of faith, what Easter morning has revealed to all the world: reunion, final and complete, between God and all of us, his precious children! And so, look once again whenever we gather at the Eucharist — he’s alive and offering his life to us for us to share. So, let’s receive his life and with it receive the promise of eternal life that it offers.  Because he lives, we forever have the way to union and reunion with our God and all those we love — for He is the resurrection and the life.

This promise, we know with a sure and certain faith, is indeed just a foretaste. See, then, with vision cleared, with any impairments of vision, hearing or any other senses, both bodily and spiritual are now removed, and can see with eyes of faith that through the resurrection of Jesus, our resurrection is assured. Our meeting with the risen Lord in the Eucharist is but the beginning then, when we will enjoy in eternity a clear vision of the fullness of life that that same Lord will give us in that unending dwelling place, the eternity that has been shown to all, all the world through the Risen Lord!