Easter Sunday Homily, 4.20.2025
Today is the day the Lord has made—let us rejoice and be glad! (Psalm 118:24).
I remember the well-known story of a 1988 earthquake in Spitak, Armenia. Amid the devastation that killed many, one father rushed to his son’s school and found it flattened to the ground. Despite that, he began digging through the rubble. No one believed any child could still be alive, but the father refused to give up. He dug for hours—eight, then twelve, then twenty-four—and on the thirty-eighth hour, he heard a voice: “Dad, is that you?”
It was his son. He had survived. And when asked how he had endured the fear and the waiting, the boy said simply, “I knew he’d come. My dad promised he would always be there for me.”
On Easter Sunday, we can say with that boy, “Our Father did come. He promised he would always be there for us!” This is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ for us! It is the foundation of our hope. It is the ground of our joy. It is the victory of divine love!
In our first reading, St. Peter preaches boldly: “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree. This man God raised on the third day” (Acts 10:39-40). The Resurrection proclaims to the world that hope is stronger than death. The Cross, the most brutal sign of death, becomes in Jesus Christ the throne of mercy. As I have been recently preaching: The Cross stands as the sign of the victory of love in spite of suffering. The Resurrection confirms it. Christ doesn’t rise simply to live again, but to open a new way of life—a life glorified, eternal, and shared with us.
This Christian hope is rooted in our communion with the Risen Christ. Our second reading offers the profound truth: “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above… For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1, 3). Hope is not mere optimism. Hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is a confident trust in God’s promises, rooted in our communion with the living Christ.
And this communion is not abstract—it is Eucharistic. The liturgy, this Mass, is the place where resurrection hope becomes incarnate again and again in the midst of the Church. Every time we come to Mass, we encounter the Risen One. This is why the Church calls the Mass the ‘synaxis,’ the gathering, of the Body of Christ. As I’ve often said: The God who Himself is a communion of persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—desires to be worshiped in a communion of persons – the Mass.
For this reason, if anyone here has been away from Mass for any length of time, I invite you once again to join us at this “synaxis,” this gathering together. This Mass is the space where resurrection hope is renewed again and again in the community of the Church. In the breaking of the bread, in the gathered Body of Christ, in the proclamation of the Word, we are assured: Christ is alive. He is with us. Here we do not merely remember the Resurrection—we live it.
My last several homilies have been leading up to this point: resurrection hope transforms suffering! No, it does not eliminate suffering—but it changes its meaning. Even Christ raised from the dead still had the wounds of the crucifixion in His body. But they were wounds of victory! As our Easter Sequence said today: “Death and life have contended in that combat stupendous: The Prince of life, who died, reigns immortal.” Death and life have contended! But Christ is victorious in the combat. Risen from his suffering, Christ reigns immortal. Christ did not rise instead of suffering—He rose through it.
For us too, suffering, endured in love and trust, becomes the soil in which the seed of resurrection is sown. In this soil the resurrection takes root and from which we are born into life. Therefore, Christian suffering is not meaningless; it is united to His, which gives birth to hope.
It is because of this Hope, born from the Resurrection, that we are called to preach. As Peter tells us in the first reading: “He commissioned us to preach to the people” (Acts 10:42). Resurrection hope must be shared; it cannot remain passive. It is a fire – it’s not a monument – and it beckons a fiery response. This response means going forth—not just from this church building, but into the world, into hearts, into homes to proclaim, “Christ is alive!”
A person who believes in the Resurrection cannot help but live differently— to love boldly, to serve generously, and proclaim fearlessly. We are called to be witnesses of hope. The Resurrection is not only God’s triumph over death—it is His invitation for us to rise with Him, even now. So today, remember, “This is the day” in which we have been lifted from the rubble of a world destroyed by our Father who loves us. And we receive the confidence of God’s Son, Jesus, our brother, who promised the Father would always be there for us! You are a new creation in Christ. You are risen with Him, alive in Him, and sent by Him!
Father Jarrod Lies, Pastor