Sunday of the Resurrection / Easter Sunday (Year C) - 20 April 2025
20th April 2025
“The greatest of all feast days is Easter Day, the day of the Lord’s Resurrection, because today assurance was given to us to obtain eternal and immortal life in soul and body. Christ gave it to us through His resurrection, which is the cause and the assurance of our resurrection.” - St. Vincent Ferrer
A reflection on today by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J Sheen:
"The world was wrong and Christ was right. He Who had the power to lay down His life had the power to take It up again; He Who willed to be born, willed to die; and He Who knew how to die knew also how to be reborn, and to give to this poor tiny planet of ours an honour and a glory which flaming suns and jealous planets do not share the glory of one forsaken grave.
"The great lesson of Easter Day is that a Victor may be judged from a double point of view; that of the world, and that of God. From the world's point of view, Christ failed on Good Friday; from God's point of view Christ had won. Those who put Him to death gave Him the very chance He required; those who closed the door of the sepulchre gave Him the very door which He desired to fling open; their seeming triumph led to His greatest victory. Christmas told the story that Divinity is always where the world least expects to find it, for no one expected to see Divinity wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. Easter repeats that Divinity is always where the world least expects to find it, for no one in the world expected that a defeated man would be a Victor, that the rejected cornerstone would be the head of the building; that the dead would walk and that He who was ignored in a tomb should be our Resurrection and our Life.
"Unroll the scrolls of time and see how the lesson of that first Easter is repeated as each new Easter tells the story of the Great Captain, who found His way out of the grave and revealed that lasting victory must always mean defeat in the eyes of the world. At least a dozen times in her life of twenty centuries, the world in the first flush of its momentary triumph sealed the tomb of the Church, set her watch and left her as a dead, breathless, and defeated thing, only to see her rising from the grave and walking in the victory of her new Easter morn.
"In the first few centuries thousands upon thousands of Christians crimsoned the sands of the Coliseum with their blood in testimony of their faith. In the eyes of the world Caesar was victor and the martyrs were defeated. And yet in that very generation while pagan Rome with her brazen and golden trumpets proclaimed to the four corners of the earth her victory over the defeated Christ – ‘Where there is Caesar, there is power,’ there swept from out the Catacombs and deserted places like their leader from the grave the conquering army chanting its song of victory: ‘Wherever there is Christ, there is Life!’ Who today knows the names of Rome's executioners? But who does not know the names of Rome's martyrs? Who today recalls with pride the deeds of a Nero or a Diocletian, but who does not venerate the heroism and sanctity of an Agnes or a Cecelia? And so, on Easter Day, I sing not the song of the victors but of those who go down to defeat.
"‘Speak, History! Who are Life's victors? Unroll thy long annals and say,
Are they these whom the world called the victors, who won the success of a day?
The martyrs or Nero? The Spartans, who fell at Thermopylae's tryst?
Or the Persians and Xerxes? His judges or Socrates? Pilate or Christ?’"
(The Moral Universe)
Easter Blessing Prayer for Families
Almighty God, who through Your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord’s resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by Your life-giving Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. 🙏💐💖