by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace
First of all, I share with Sister Marie in extending to all of you, in my own prayers and wishes, that you have a most blessed and joyful Easter. And I thank you for the greetings that many of you have already passed on to us. But now, as we try to listen deeply to our Scripture lessons today, I hope a couple of things will happen.
First of all, I hope that we’ll get a deeper awareness of the extraordinary event that this resurrection of Jesus means, or is. It’s unique in all of history. It never happened before, and yet I think sometimes we celebrate Easter and we share in all of the joy and the excitement that it can bring, but we don’t have that deep awareness of how extraordinary this is. If you listen to today’s Gospel, for example, Peter and John, Mary Magdalene, the three people mentioned, none of them had any clue that Jesus was raised from the dead. They simply had not understood because no one could have imagined this. It had never happened.
See, in the Gospel, you might say, “Well, what about Lazarus? What about the daughter of Jairus the centurion or the Jewish rabbi?” Well, they were resuscitated. Their life was restored the way it had been before, and that’s very different. What happened to Jesus is unique: A whole new way of life — a human person transformed into a new way of life, different from anything that had been experienced or could be experienced….