Easter morning always has a particular freshness about it. Even for those who know the liturgy well, who have heard the Gospel a hundred times and are accustomed to the ebb and flow of Holy Week, the day arrives with something unmistakably new. Today, the Church announces a fact that changed the world: Christ is risen.
That claim remains as startling now as it was at the tomb. Much to the chagrin of our secular brethren, it is not a mere pious metaphor, nor a religious way of saying that spring has come round again. It is the central truth on which all Christian hope depends. The Resurrection is the answer the Church gives to death and despair, to sin and to all the exhausted cynicism of the age. It is the reason Christians can look squarely at a troubled world with true hope.
