Episcopal Press and News

The Presiding Bishop's Easter Message

Diocesan Press Service. March 1, 1963 [VIII-1]

Easter tells us quite clearly that the Christian Church is founded not on an idea, but on a Person. We do not go to Church on Easter Day to affirm our conviction that death is not the end of life. Worship is not made of this and surely this is not the substance of the Christian faith. At Easter we are confronted not with an idea, but with a fact: the fact of the Lord Jesus Christ who died for us and who "rose again to become goodness in us."

Here then, as we sing so often, in Jesus Christ is the Church's one foundation. In Him, God took action to bring us all back to himself and to reconcile us to one another. Through His life and death and resurrection Christ has opened for us the gate of everlasting life which means that He has opened up new possibilities of life now.

But a gate leads nowhere for us unless we walk through it. The fact of Christ means nothing in our lives unless we have some understanding of what the fact means and respond to it. Easter then, when we celebrate it as Christian people, is a festival as wide as all creation and as personal as my own thoughts and desires. What God did in Jesus Christ He did for the whole created order; He was reconciling the world to Himself. Here is the focus and center of all our attention: "Maker and Redeemer, life and health of all."

But then I realize this was for me, that Christ lived and died and rose again to open up new possibilities of life for me. And so the only response that has any meaning is my own personal commitment of faith: "My Lord and my God." This is the way out of self-centeredness and the narrow and constricted way that leads to death. This is the way that turns us from ourselves toward the world. This is the way that leads to eternal life now!