Happy Easter, dear friends. I am glad you’re here, even on this wet Easter Sunday.
I will be uncharacteristically brief; if you would like a homily of normal length, please come back next Sunday, a Sunday of mercy and better preaching. Today, I will not preach long. Easter itself is enough; the Gospel, the music, your own beauty is enough.
And I won’t even use too many of my own words; today I want to borrow the words of another, a saint’s words that are better than mine. They are the words of St. John Henry Newman, the better words he preached to his people more than a century ago. They’ll do just fine this morning.
They are words about how Easter sometimes doesn’t hit us just right, how we sometimes don’t feel it, don’t appreciate it as we should; they are words about the numbness and cynicism that can sometimes take over even on a day as beautiful as Easter. They are words about how that’s okay, it happens. Because God is working on you anyway, working on us. They are words about how God sometimes saves us not by the grace of a single Easter but of all the Easters God gives us over our lives—little by little, making use of even rainy little Easters like this.
Newman’s words are these, these words I want to share; he said:
We are risen again, and we know it not. We begin our Catechism by confessing that we are risen, but it takes a long life to apprehend what we confess. We are like people waking from sleep, who cannot collect their thoughts at once, or understand where they are. By little and little the truth breaks upon us. Such are we in the present world; sons of light, gradually waking to a knowledge of themselves. For this let us meditate, let us pray, let us work,—gradually to attain to a real apprehension of what we are. Thus, as time goes on, we shall gain first one thing, then another. By little and little we shall give up shadows and find the substance. Waiting on God day by day, we shall make progress day by day, and approach to the true and clear view of what He has made us to be in Christ. Year by year we shall gain something, and each Easter, as it comes, will enable us more to rejoice with heart and understanding…[1]
And that, really, is all I want to say: Happy Easter, and God is at work in your life; that’s a fact. The risen Lord is at work in your life no matter what you may feel in this moment or any given moment—whether joy or sadness or numbness or peace. God is at work in your life because he is not dead; he is risen. And so, my only plea this morning is that you trust to God’s slow and imperceptible grace, that you hold on. The disciples didn’t figure Easter out on one Sunday morning either; Mary Magdalene mistook Jesus for the gardener. Simply, trust the Lord is there, that he is looking at you, looking for you, loving you; and that he will soon call your name, as all our lesser loves fall away little by little. Happy Easter! It’s so good to see you. Amen.
[1] John Henry Newman, “Sacred Privileges”
© 2025 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
