Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord
Acts 10:34,37-43  +  Colossians 3:1-4 [or 1 Corinthians 5:6-8]  +  John 20:1-9
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
April 5, 2026

Tomorrow if you go to Walmart, you’re likely to see the store decorated for the Fourth of July.  In most of the secular world, there is an attention deficit.

But God wants us to enjoy this celebration of Our Lord’s Resurrection.  God wants us to celebrate this Easter joy the way that we enjoy the best meal we’ve ever eaten; the way that we enjoy the best evening of conversation we’ve ever had.  God wants us to enjoy Easter by luxuriating in it.  God wants us not to turn the page tomorrow and forget about the mystery of Jesus rising from the dead.

God wants us to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus for fifty days:  seven weeks plus one more day.  The last day of this season of celebrating the Resurrection will fall on Sunday, May 24 (the day before Memorial Day).  Between today and May 24, God wants us to “rest” in the joy of Jesus’ Resurrection.

Consider this word “rest”.  This word “rest” means a lot of different things to a lot of different persons.  To a three-year-old, the last thing he wants to do is take a nap, and he’ll let you know that.  To someone older, whose hair is a different color than when in school (or who doesn’t have as much hair as when in school), rest is something prized, sought after, and even snuck in wherever and whenever possible.  Then again, there’s the “rest” that we wish upon our dearly departed:  we pray that they will “rest in peace”.

In contrast to all of those kinds of “rest”, there is the rest that God is calling us to during these fifty days of Easter.  What is this kind of rest?

To see what this “Easter rest” is, we have to go back to “the beginning”:  not to the day of Jesus’ Resurrection, but many thousands of years before, “in the beginning”, when God created the heavens and the earth.

In six days God created the heavens and the earth.  Then, on the seventh day, God rested.  We might be tempted to think that God on that seventh day acted like we would if we were in His divine shoes.  But God does not rest as we rest.  When God “rests”, He delights, He rejoices, He exults.  On the seventh day, God rested in His creation, He was like a grandparent spending a day surrounded by children and grandchildren, delighting in the goodness of those lives:  that creation.  On the seventh day God rested in His creation, because He found it good, and very good.

Another way to consider this sense of “rest” is connected to the word “arrested”: not in the sense that a policeman arrests a criminal, but in a more personal sense. Imagine that you go on pilgrimage to Rome, and in visiting the Sistine Chapel, your attention is “arrested” by the fresco of the Last Judgment. It’s almost as if you are within the scene portrayed. The artistry transports you, and you “rest” within that sacred work.

This helps us understand the rest into which God is calling us.  He wants us to rest with Him, in His Presence, and in fact, within Him.  He wants us to enter into His rest [cf. Ps 95:11 and Heb 4:11].  We enter into His rest by placing faith in Christ and His power over sin and death:  by letting Him live His life within us, instead of us making our lives about ourselves and our own works.

During these fifty days of the Easter Season, we do not just celebrate over and over for fifty times Jesus rising from the dead.  We celebrate what Jesus chose to do after rising from the dead.  For forty days He appeared to His disciples to prepare them for what was coming next.  After forty days, the Risen Jesus ascended to Heaven, to sit at the Father’s Right Hand.  After ten more days, God the Father and God the Son sent down from Heaven their Holy Spirit.

This Holy Spirit, who is the Love of the Father and the Son, is what makes us sinners like Christ.  This Holy Spirit is the Gift whose Life destroys the power of sin and death.  This Holy Spirit is what allows Christ to live within us, and to live through us.  So ask God during these fifty days to open your heart further to the grace of the Holy Spirit, to make your life more like the life of Jesus Christ, who has risen from the dead so that you can rest in the beauty of God’s merciful Love.