The Hope of Resurrection
Sunday, April 5, 2026
Easter Sunday
Father Richard Rohr explains how the resurrection offers us hope, especially in challenging times:
I often wonder why so much of human life seems so futile, so tragic, so short, and so sad. If Christ is risen, why do people die before they begin to truly live? Why has there been nonstop war? Why are so many people imprisoned unjustly? Why are the poor oppressed? Why do we destroy so many of our relationships? If Christ is risen, why is there so much suffering? What is God up to? It really doesn’t make any logical sense. Is the resurrection something that just happened once, in his body, but not in ours?
I believe the resurrection of Christ is saying that the final judgment has already happened. It’s nothing we need to fear. It’s nothing we need to avoid or deny. God’s final judgment is that God will have the last word! Easter reveals that there are no dead ends; ultimately, nothing is going to end in tragedy and crucifixion. Of course we look around us, at history and at life in its daily moments and it seems, “No, that isn’t true.” And yet, ever and again, here and there, more than we suspect, new life breaks through for those who are willing to see and to cooperate with this universal mystery of resurrection.
We’re so lucky in my part of the world that Easter coincides with springtime. If this applies to you, I hope you’re going out and seeing the leaves and the flowers being reborn after months of winter. I went out early this morning to see the Easter sunrise. Sure enough, the sun rose as it always does and peeked over the horizon, just between two mountains. It appeared not so much like a sunrise but as a groundswell. The light was coming from the earth. It was coming from the world we live in. It was coming not from the top, but from the bottom. It seemed to say that even all of this, which looks muddy and material, even all of this, which looks so ordinary and dying, will be reborn.
Easter is the feast of hope. This is the feast that says God will have the last word and that God’s final judgment is resurrection. God will turn all that we maim and destroy and hurt and punish into life and beauty.
What the resurrection reveals more than anything else is that love is stronger than death. Jesus walks the way of death with love, and what it becomes is not death but life. Surprise of surprises! It doesn’t fit any logical explanation. Yet this is the mystery: that nothing dies forever, and that all that has died will be reborn in love.
So, to be a Christian is to be inevitably and forever a person of hope. God in Christ is saying this is what will last: My life and my love will always and forever have the final word.
The Easter Story
We Are All Rising
Monday, April 6, 2026
CAC staff member Mark Longhurst recounts the Easter story which revealed the good news of Jesus’s resurrection—and our own:
Each year Easter is, for Christians, a celebration of the rising of Christ, but this rising is far more than one person’s death-defying divine act. The resurrection of Christ is expansive: Jesus the person rises and launches God’s resurrection movement that brings everyone and everything along with it.
It starts with a body or, rather, a body’s absence. Mary Magdalene and other women are at the tomb before sunrise to preserve Jesus’s body with spices (Luke 24:1). A rolled-away stone ensures they can enter the tomb easily, but the body is missing. Two men—angels—stand near them wearing clothes that dazzle like the very lightning of the sky. They point out the befuddled obvious: “He is not here” and the more shocking, “He has risen” (24:5).
Jesus Christ rises first on Easter morning to the women. [In Luke’s Gospel] shortly after, he will make appearances to two disciples on the road to Emmaus (24:13–35) and to disciples gathered in Jerusalem (24:36–49), but it’s the women who first see the empty tomb and believe. Jesus Christ rises to Mary Magdalene, the devoted disciple extraordinaire, to Mary the mother of James, to Joanna, who—Luke chapter eight tells us—is married to the manager of Herod’s household himself, and to the other women who were with them at the tomb (24:10). You could even say that the women are rising with Jesus. They are the first to witness the empty tomb, the first to herald a new message of hope, the first to glimpse a renewed world where love is stronger than death….
The implications of the empty tomb are not seen by those looking for an eyewitness investigative account of what did or did not happen. Only those whose hearts bear the capacity to love can see the resurrection and dream a new way out of no way. The men lack this consciousness—Luke says they “did not believe them” [See 24:10–11]. It’s to Peter’s credit that he follows his awakening heart, still bruised from his threefold betrayal of Jesus, and runs to check the tomb himself. Perhaps he hopes for a last-ditch chance to demonstrate his faithfulness. Perhaps out of aching desperation, Peter is rising, too….
Jesus rising, however, is only the beginning or “first fruits” of resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:20). In Jesus Christ, God’s resurrecting movement has begun, and it sweeps everyone and everything up within it. Dying and rising are a central pattern and truth of reality—and so to talk about Jesus’s rising is somehow to approach the weighty paradox of death and life evolving together at the center of the universe. Mary, Joanna, and the other women are rising, Peter is rising, I’m rising, you’re rising, and the universe itself is rising.
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Individual Reflection: Where in your life right now does resurrection feel more like something you believe than something you’re experiencing?
Group Discussion — choose one:
- What in you is still waiting to rise?
- Where have you seen love outlast death?
- What would it mean to cooperate with resurrection rather than just hope for it?
