Easter Morning – 20 April 2025
One of my favourite lines out of the Church Fathers writing nearly 2000 years ago is from the 3rd century Clement of Alexandria. He wrote simply: “Christ our Lord turns all our sunsets into dawns.” It is Christ our Lord who turns all our sunsets into dawns.
This day we proclaim that dead ends have given rise to new possibilities. Where diminishment and decay might be expected, there a new invitation is always available. A new possibility has dawned into the world. The future is given to us as a pure gift. And by how more powerful a way does the Christian Tradition express this than situating the Resurrection on the first day of the week at dawn. For dawn symbolises new beginnings, and in Christ we are always at a new beginning.
We are not proclaiming a resuscitated Jesus. We proclaim a risen Christ. The mystery of Resurrection that we proclaim this day is not about mere resuscitation. As Pope Benedict wrote some years ago,
Jesus’ Resurrection was about breaking out into an entirely new form of life, into a life that is no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming, but lives beyond it ‑ a life that opens up a new dimension of human existence . . . In Jesus’ Resurrection a new possibility of human existence is attained that affects everyone and that opens up a future, a new kind of future, for [us].”[1]
This means then, in the words of Pope Francis, that
Christ’s resurrection is not an event of the past; it contains a vital power [which permeates the] world. Where all seems to be dead, signs of the resurrection suddenly spring up. It is an irresistible force. . . . On razed land life breaks through, stubbornly yet invincibly. However dark things are, goodness always re-emerges and spreads. Each day in our world beauty is born anew, it rises transformed through the storms of history. Values always tend to reappear under new guises, and human beings have arisen time after time from situations that seemed doomed. Such is the power of the resurrection . . . .[2]
It is the power to turn all our sunsets into dawns. We are people of the dawn. The Resurrection rouses us from the sloth of slumber into the freshness of wakefulness. Resurrection life, then, is about living our lives as people who are awake. “I have never yet met a person who was fully awake,” wrote the American philosopher, Henry Thoreau, “how could I have looked them in the face?”[3] “And so, as he went on to write,
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. \
We never live quite fully awake but the Risen Christ whose life bursts forth at dawn leads us into greater and greater wakefulness in life and stirs us to create our life and our world anew. No matter the past, we can keep stretching out into new horizons, “stretching out to what is ahead, [always with] a readiness for a fresh start.”[4]
This is the joy of this Easter morning. For, yes, Christ our Lord has turned our sunsets into dawns.
[1] Josef Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 244.
[2] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium. The Joy of the Gospel. Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World (24 November 2013), 276.
[3] Henry Thoreau, Walden, (Signet Classics, 1960), 65-66
[4] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 87.
