“They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him” – John 20:2

The Gospel of John provides an account of the resurrection of Jesus. Bishop Robert Barron writes that John describes the early morning on the first day of the week. It was still dark, just as it was at the beginning of time before God said, “Let there be light.” But a light was about to shine, and a new creation was about to appear. The stone had been rolled away. That stone, blocking the entrance to the tomb of Jesus, stands for the finality of death. When someone we love dies, it is as though a great stone is rolled across them, permanently blocking our access to them. And this is why we weep at death, not just in grief but in a kind of existential frustration. Undoubtedly, the first disciples must have thought a grave robber had been at work. But the incredible Johannine irony is that the greatest grave robber had been at work. God had opened the grave of His Son, just as the prophet Ezekiel said, “I will open your graves and have you rise from them.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser reminds us that one of the tasks of Easter is to rekindle the creed within ourselves. In essence, we are saying that God is ultimately still in charge of this universe, despite any indications to the contrary. Immediately upon experiencing the resurrected Jesus, the earliest Christians spontaneously voiced a one-line creed: “Jesus is Lord!” That does, in fact, say it all. When we strain to hear the voices of Good Friday; when we affirm that Jesus has been raised from the dead; when we shout to the heavens that Jesus is Lord of this world, we are saying everything else within our faith as well. To celebrate Easter is to affirm that all of this is true. Amen, amen!

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