Letters from Bishop Bartosic

April 20th, 2025, Easter Sunday, The Resurrection of the Lord

 

To whom does the Risen Christ first appear? It depends whom you ask! The evangelists give different names. Mark reports that two women named Mary and one named Salome “...went out and fled from the tomb, seized with trembling and bewilderment. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” But it wasn’t because Jesus had appeared to them. All they had seen was an empty tomb, and a young man in white who told them that Christ was alive. If some New Testament scholars are right, Mark originally ended his gospel, the first written of the four, right there at 16:8, with a cliffhanger. 

Does the news ever make you want to turn tail and run for your life? It’s then that you have to remember that you were grafted to the risen Christ at baptism. You entered the Kingdom of God. In his 2024 encyclical, Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis writes: “When our hearts are united with the heart of Christ, we are capable of the social miracle of building the Kingdom of God.” It is easy to be discouraged by what we see happening in the world. Discouragement is nothing new: the disciples were devastated by the news that reached their eyes and ears during the last days of Jesus’ earthly life. But we know something they didn’t know, at least not at first. 

 

The first words of Mark are “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Mark 16:8, when the women turn tail and run, is the end of the beginning. It remained for these women and many others to have a personal encounter with Christ risen from the dead. The other three evangelists write a whole lot more about that part. The encounter with the living Christ created in these first disciples an penetrating sense of belonging and an acute awareness that, instead of living for themselves, they would offer themselves in service to a mission that would reshape the world forever. 

The 2000-year-old drama reacquaints us with the wound in Jesus’ side, piercing his heart: the drama tears open the veil and reveals a love that is boundless. We. Meet. Him. Even though his love for us proved to be the death of him, God has not written us off. Through us—the members, his Body, the Church—Christ still heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, and raises the dead. A disciple knows this. A disciple is always on the lookout to live this. Easter is the joy of coming home; of becoming what God has always intended us to be, a family. It is the joy the first disciples experienced again, after being scattered in the aftermath of Good Friday.