Letter of April 21, 2006 - Easter Weekend

Easter! Victory of Life Over Death
The Most Reverend, Carl F. Mengeling, Bishop of Lansing
On this Easter of 2006 our voices join with the countless voices of two millennia in the Church’s joyous hymn, "This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad."

"Thus the Church sings and rejoices today. The mountain has been scaled, the victory has been won. Christ, the Light and Redeemer of the world, has subjugated Satan, the prince of darkness, the tempter and enlightening and radiating beams over a world steeped in sin and death. Now is accomplished that for which we prayed during the Advent season, "Come, Lord, to save us!" Now is fulfilled the redemption which was begun at Christmas. The peace of Christmas now becomes the happiness of Easter and the jubilation of the resurrection. Easter, the "feast of feasts", the "solemnity of solemnities", as the liturgy calls it, is the pinnacle of the entire Church year. The great pope, St. Leo (461), wrote: "Among all the feasts which are celebrated in our faith, Easter is the greatest and most sublime, and all other feasts of the Church attain their worthy only in their relationship to it."

I extend my Easter joy to you, dear reader and encourage you to share your new life in our Risen Lord to everyone. We rejoice in the ‘amazing grace’ of our Lord at work in us during Lent. We have died to the old Adam in us and risen with the NEW ADAM to life in Christ.

We rejoice even more as we welcome 1,000 catechumens and candidates into the Church this Easter. Our Lord has mysteriously drawn them into the family of the Church through a network of believers. That too is ‘amazing grace’. Now we will be their loving companions as we journey together with our Risen Lord to eternal glory.

The saintly writers of the early Church are nothing but joy and optimism in their Easter messages.

Sixteen hundred years ago, the Patriarch of Constantinaple, St. Gregory Nazianzen’s (+390) said in the Hagia Sophia, "The Pasch of the Lord! This is for us the Feast of Feasts, the Festival of Festivals. It is as far above all the rest as the sun above the stars. Christ is risen from the dead. Rise with him! Death is defeated, the old Adam discarded, the new has come. If anyone lives in Christ, they are new. Be renewed in the Risen Lord."

In the same Fourth Century, St. Gregory of Nyssa (+394) said in his Easter homily: "The reign of life has begun. The tyranny of death is ended. A new birth has taken place; a new life has come; a new order of existence has appeared; our very nature has been transformed. This birth is not brought about by human generation, by the will of man, or the desire of flesh, but by God who raised Jesus from the dead."

Pope St. Gregory the Great (+604) gave this homily in St. Peter Basilica in Rome: "There are two lives: one we knew, the other we did not know. One is mortal, the other immortal. One is linked with human weakness, the other to incorruption. One is marked for death, the other for resurrection. The Mediator between God and Man, Jesus Christ came and took on himself the one and revealed to us the other. The one he endured by dying; the other he revealed when he rose from the dead."

Dear Friends - To all of you I proclaim good news of endless joy: Jesus Christ is risen from the dead! Death no longer has the final word. Happy Easter!