Brief synopsis of the readings: Our first reading is normally taken from the Old Testament but during Easter we will read primarily from the Acts of the Apostles, the account of the earliest days of what we now know as the Christian Church. Here Peter speaks to a crowd and recounts the ministry of Jesus, and also how he was arrested and crucified. But, he went on, Jesus rose on the third day. The risen Jesus then commissioned his followers to preach to everyone a salvation through the forgiveness of sins. John’s Gospel recounts how Mary Magdalene came to Jesus’ tomb but found the stone removed from the entrance. Fearing that Jesus’ body had been stolen she ran to Peter and told him. Peter and the other disciples ran back to the tomb where they found the burial cloths but not Jesus. Peter understood what happened but the others “did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.”

Do you remember where you were when….? There are certain events in our lives that we will always remember. For my parents’ generation it was the JFK assassination (1963). My generation remembers President Nixon’s resignation (1974). And of course, we all know where we were on 9/11 (2001).

But if you asked people in Jerusalem around the time of Jesus where they were when Jesus rose from the dead, you’d mostly get blank stares. As Christians we believe this is the focal point of all human history, and we even base our calendar on this event (“in the year of our Lord, 2025”). But much like his birth, Jesus’ Resurrection was done quietly, almost secretly. As a matter of fact, even the first witnesses to the empty tomb had a hard time understanding it at right away. For most of Jesus’ earliest disciples they needed to reread Scripture (that foretold Jesus’ return), talk to each other, and listen to the Holy Spirit.

It worked. We can see ourselves as a series of concentric circles: Jesus (of course) at the center and then the Twelve (often called the 12 Apostles), who were handpicked by Jesus. Next are the Apostles, those who witnessed the Resurrected Jesus; they consisted of everyone who saw Jesus between the Resurrection and when Jesus ascended in Heaven. Finally, all those who have followed Jesus, even to the present day. We are those disciples. By the way this is all brilliantly explained in Priesthood: A History of the Ordained Ministry in the Roman Catholic Church by Fr. Kenan Osborne, OFM.

Since the Resurrection, Easter has become a time of great joy and celebration, to say nothing of chocolate rabbits and dyed eggs. It’s so much more, but in a way that we often don’t expect. Most large events begin as cataclysms and send shock waves from that point. But Jesus’ rising from the dead did the opposite: it started small and grew over time. As we’ll see in the readings for the next two months, Jesus followers recognized this truth and spread it, first in Jerusalem, then in the area, and eventually around the world. Or to quote Sir Winston Churchill, Easter wasn’t beginning of the end so much as it was the end of the beginning. Jesus promised that he would return and most of those around him expected that to happen fairly soon.

And so, 2,000 years later we still wait and this can make this season difficult because we know in hindsight that we’ll be here for a while. We’ll read idyllic accounts of how all the members of the early church agreed on everything and there was no conflicts. While we know that it couldn’t have been that simple we can still be tempted to hearken back to those days and even try to recreate them.

We are, however, a forward looking faith. While we might think of that magic morning as the apex of our redemption it’s not. Every time someone hears about God’s plan of salvation we get closer to the summit God has for us. In the same way that the apostles grew in their recognition by rereading their Scripture, learning from each other and being open to the whispers of the Holy Spirit, they passed that message along.

I’ve been blessed to have taken many roles in my life and I count my time as a Director of Religious Education and Youth Minister as one of my proudest. Nobody ever came up to me and asked me to tell them about Jesus, but I was able to work with children and adolescents in ways they may never have expected. We shared Scripture, we talked about how passages from those books informed their lives and listened to prompting from the Spirit. Frankly they also observed how I was living my life and my discipleship and that recognition (that I was being watched) impacted some of my decisions. In perhaps the greatest gift of all I have no idea how I impacted most of them. Mostly I tried to show that our best days weren’t behind us but were yet to come and they had a role in that. All educators live with the reality that we teach and preach all the time, but like scattering seeds, the harvest often belongs to someone else. If you’ve ever had the experience of seeing a former teacher years later and expressing your gratitude to them, you know what I’m talking about.

In the coming weeks we’ll read much about the early Church, both from the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospels. As we journey through Easter this year, let us not look back with wistfulness and nostalgia but with the joy and determination that we continue the journey that started on the morning with the empty tomb. As we move on from the sugar high of chocolate rabbits and Peeps let us not try to “make Christianity great again” but instead try to make Christianity better than it’s ever been before.

We make Easter great by making today great.