He is Risen! He is Truly Risen!
On behalf of Fr Simon, Deacon David and myself, I wish you all a very happy and holy Easter.
This is the greatest feast of the Church’s year, when Mary Magdalene and the Apostles find the empty tomb on that first Easter Sunday. From this moment on, nothing is ever the same again and we cannot live as if it is. The course of history has been changed forever. Christ, after His most terrible Passion and Death on the Cross has burst forth from the tomb and conquered death, sin and Satan. He is the first of a new humanity, and His Resurrection guarantees our future resurrection, since when we were baptised, we were baptised into His Death and Resurrection (Rom 6:3).
There can be no doubt the Resurrection really took place. The witnesses to it were very reliable ones, among them even Roman soldiers. Neither was the JESUS the disciples saw a ghost. He ate and drank with them to prove that he had really risen and was true flesh and blood, and the Gospels describe numerous appearances of JESUS after His Resurrection. Had He appeared only once or twice, we might conclude they were perhaps hallucinating. But He showed Himself many times, and on one occasion to more than five hundred people (1 Cor 15:6). Many of Our Lord’s former opponents converted and became believers. Furthermore, almost all of the Apostles were martyred for preaching the Resurrection. Had they been trying to deceive people, they would never have given their lives for something they knew to be fake. Indeed, it was the fact of the Resurrection that gave them the strength to testify to JESUS and His Divinity.
On this greatest of feasts, let us thank Our Lord for the great victory of the Resurrection and for His giving us a share in it. Each of us can now truly cry out in the words of today’s psalm; “I shall not die, I shall live!”
Fr Paul Gillham IC
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