An Episcopal Letter for Easter Sunday

An Episcopal Letter to the Faithful on Easter Sunday

from the Primate, Felix Gibbins OSD.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

This morning, across the world, Christians are waking to the oldest and most decisive proclamation in human history: Christ is risen. And the Church answers, as she always has: He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

I want to take a few moments with you this Easter Sunday, not simply to repeat what has been said before, but to think with you about what the Resurrection means today, in the world we actually inhabit in April 2026.

It has been a difficult few months. Those of you who follow the news will know that conflict has escalated in the Middle East, with military action reaching Iranian soil. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a mine collapse in the Rubaya region killed more than four hundred people in a single disaster. Last summer, the Punjab region of northern India experienced its worst flooding in nearly four decades, with almost two thousand villages submerged and hundreds of thousands of families displaced; I am deeply grateful for the work of our own missionary priests, who have remained among the poorest of those communities through months of hardship and loss. Closer to home, Storm Kristin brought devastation to Portugal and Spain in January, and a train collision in the south of Spain took forty-six lives at the start of this year. And courts in the United States have now ruled that major social media companies bear legal responsibility for the addiction they deliberately engineered into their platforms, particularly among the young. The world, it seems, does not lack for darkness.

And yet this is precisely the world into which the Resurrection speaks. Not a world tidied up for the occasion, but this one, with its wars and its grief. The Resurrection is not a comforting idea we reach for when things go wrong. It is a claim about something that actually happened, and that claim changes the meaning of everything else that happens. Saint Thomas Aquinas writes that the Resurrection of Christ is the efficient cause of our own resurrection, because by divine power, the rising of Christ will extend to all (Summa Theologiae, III, q.56, a.1). This is not piety; it is theology. The raising of Christ is not a private transaction between the Father and the Son. It is an event with consequences for all of creation.

I want to stay with that social media ruling for a moment, because it touches something the gospel has always understood. Saint Augustine of Hippo, writing in the fifth century, opened his Confessions with words that have never dated: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee" (Confessions, 1.1). He was describing the condition of every human being who seeks satisfaction in things that cannot ultimately provide it. The engineers of our digital platforms have become extraordinarily skilled at exploiting that restlessness, that deep hunger for meaning and connection, and directing it not towards what truly feeds us but towards what keeps us scrolling. A court's judgement is welcome, but the deeper judgement belongs to the gospel. We were made for communion with God, and nothing else will finally do.

This week also brought something of a different character. On the first of April, NASA launched the Artemis II mission, carrying human beings further from the earth than anyone has travelled since 1972. Whatever you make of space exploration as a priority, there is something genuinely moving about it: human beings looking up, reaching further than they have gone before. I find myself thinking of the question the angels put to the disciples at the empty tomb: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" (Luke 24:5). The disciples were searching in the wrong place, not because searching was wrong, but because they had not yet understood where to look. Easter gives us a direction for our deepest searching: not backwards into the tomb, and not into the dark of space, but into the risen life of Christ, which is closer to us than we tend to imagine.

Saint Leo the Great, preaching to his congregation in Rome in the fifth century, said something I keep returning to: "Recognise, O Christian, your dignity, and becoming a partaker of the divine nature, refuse to return by evil conduct to the former baseness" (Sermon 21, On the Nativity). He was addressing the newly baptised at Easter, but the word reaches us all. The Resurrection is not an invitation to passivity or mere consolation. It sets before us a standard of what we are capable of becoming, and it is a genuine call to become it.

I am thinking this morning of all of you, in this diocese and far beyond it: those in the Punjab and Cameroon, those in difficult circumstances and those in relative ease, those who have buried someone dear this year and those who have welcomed new life. The gospel applies to all of us because it addresses the one thing we share, which is mortality, and the question of what lies beyond it. Saint Paul gives us the answer with characteristic directness: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile" (1 Corinthians 15:17). But Christ has been raised. That is the whole point. That is what we are celebrating today.

Whatever you are carrying into this Easter morning, I ask you to bring it to the risen Lord. Not because the carrying will immediately stop, but because he is alive and present, and that changes everything.

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia.