Easter Sunday Homily, 20 April 2025 - Fr Paul Rowse, OP

Alleluia, the Lord is risen; he is truly risen, alleluia!

May he who rose from the dead for you show you the way into all-life!

We’re inclined on our side to conceive of death as an event.  A date of death appears on notices, certificates, and headstones.  That makes life, our life, into a span of time: perhaps many years or many fewer.  That, in our minds, death is only an event means we carry on within a time-bound and essentially linear view of life: we are conceived and born; we live and die.  But for as long as time and life go together, we’re going to find that death beats life.  Death ends life because time runs out.

But on God’s side, death is not only an event but is also an impasse, an obstruction.  This is because of his eternity, sure, but also because of his perfect plan for all-existence: God intends for all things to grow to perfection, with only an barrier such as death preventing that growth.  Time is useful to God but, like us, it is his creation: if he can break the impasse, then we might truly live.  For him who is the source of all life, death interrupts a more perfect sequence: in God, we were meant to be conceived and born, to live and to live on and to live well.

And then God’s Son suffers death; the human life of God’s Son ends with the event of his death on the cross, freely accepted for great love of us.  We know that God doesn’t die: so when the Son of God died, we know his divinity entered the realm of the dead.  The picture to have in the mind is of the co-eternal Son standing among and with the souls of his dead ancestors and their contemporaries: between Good Friday night and Easter Sunday morning, we see God among the dead, Life himself in the midst of death.

Then, on the third day of his death, there is the resurrection.  Gloriously so, Jesus returns to life.  He used the event of death to remove the obstruction and provide a way for all of us to live on and to live well.  So, we are celebrating that God’s perfect plan for all-existence is no longer hindered in us.  His life-giving love for you is unchanged, revealed in the way you can see towards God-given perfection.  From today, death no longer ends life; death is not just an event.  It has become a way into life, eternal life.

And so, if we can see a way through, we must ourselves take it.  We begin to live for heaven while still here on earth: and that by repentance, forgiveness, and baptism, faith,  good works, and virtue.  This is the way of the Lord Jesus, the way of life, the way through to life.  So, there is time: we can still make our lives over to God to be re-made by him.  Do nothing therefore to block the way again.  Do everything you must to keep moving towards God.

For we cannot remain here; we must go on.  We must live, and live on, and live well.  To him who has shown us the way into life be all glory and honour for ever and ever.

Amen.  Alleluia!