wfn.org | Easter Message from the Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop

[Daphne Mack <dmack@dfms.org>]

99-013
Easter Message from the Presiding Bishop
Resurrection happens not only to Jesus but to us as well, and not 
only to us but to the whole creation. Resurrection is not a theological 
proposition but a fact of life. For Mary Magdalene and the other women 
who came early to the tomb with their spices, resurrection was an 
assault upon everything they knew; it was the overturning of all order 
and predictability. It thrust them forward beyond the pots and jars of 
ointment they carried, and the time-honored rituals of burying the dead 
they had learned from their mothers.  Suddenly and without preparation 
they were assaulted by the angelic declaration, "Why do you look for 
the living among the dead?" Why indeed? And yet our pale and ordinary 
days and our low expectations are constantly being challenged by an 
expansion of life, an enlarged vision that will not fit easily within 
our immediate and limited frame of reference.  

The power of God working within us can do infinitely more than we 
can ask or imagine, and altogether passes our understanding. For this 
reason resurrection and the freedom it brings can be strangely 
unwelcome. We would rather stay with the predictable, the defined, the 
perspectives which make sense and fit with life as we understand it. God

in Christ will have none of that. Resurrection undid the fear-bound 
apostles huddled behind locked doors. It turned a denying Peter into a 
herald of the Risen One able to embrace what formerly he had shunned and

called unclean. It transformed Paul, the obsessive persecutor, into an 
apostle of the very one he had vowed to eradicate from the consciousness

of his people. 

Resurrection knows no bounds, honors no limitations, it simply 
happens: "The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, 
but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is for 
everyone who is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8). To be born of the 
Spirit is to be a son or daughter of the resurrection, not just for our 
own sake but for the sake of the world and the whole creation which, as 
Paul tells us, is groaning in travail waiting for God's liberating 
intervention. 

So why are we waiting when, by virtue of one baptism into Christ, 
we have been caught up into Christ's resurrection life and ongoing 
ministry of reconciling and transforming mercy? May we-each one of us 
who claims Christ as our savior-be emboldened by the Spirit to be for 
one another ministers of all that the risen Christ intends and desires, 
even when our own small worlds and fragile reality are stretched to the 
breaking point and beyond. May those who have borne witness to the power

and force of resurrection before us-Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul-and 
those of our own day support us with their example and prayer, and may 
Christ, as the poet G. M. Hopkins wonderfully expresses it, ever "easter
in us,
be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east." 

Frank T. Griswold 
Presiding Bishop and Primate

http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/ens