The Voice That Calls Us into New Life – On the Easter Sequence
“Tell us, Mary, what you saw on the way.”
Dear brothers and sisters,
Every Easter morning, we hear a chant unlike any other in the Church’s liturgy—the Easter Sequence: Victimae paschali laudes immolent Christiani. Christians, sing your praises to the Paschal Victim. But what are we truly being asked to proclaim? What does it mean to speak of resurrection in a world where tombs stay closed, where death appears final, and where the silence of God is often more present than His voice?
The Sequence does not try to resolve this. It doesn’t present the resurrection as a historical report, but as a poetic summons. It speaks of “death and life contending,” and of Mary seeing the empty tomb and the risen Christ. Yet this is not the language of newspaper headlines. It is the language of encounter—not with an event in history to be verified, but with a word that demands a response.
The Easter message, then, is not first a claim about what happened two thousand years ago. It is a call that happens here and now, whenever the proclamation of new life breaks into the dead places of our hearts. We rise, not because a body once stood up, but because the Word of God stands us up again.
The Sequence places this event not in the realm of proof, but in the realm of proclamation. “Yes, Christ my hope is arisen; to Galilee he goes before you.” Galilee is not geography—it is the place where we first heard the call to follow. It is where our stories begin again. The resurrection is not a moment in time, but an awakening—a breaking in of meaning, a new horizon of understanding, a call to live as if death does not have the last word. That our lives belong to the tapestry of history and are never completely forgotten. To live as if death does not have the last word is to live with purpose, love, and integrity, trusting that our actions, relationships, and values transcend our mortality and become part of and contribute to something greater that endures beyond us.
Mary Magdalene does not offer certainty; she offers testimony. She says, “I saw.” And this “I” is not merely personal—it is ecclesial. It is the voice of all those who have been interrupted by grace, surprised by forgiveness, encountered by the presence of love where only absence was expected. The risen Christ is not proven; he is preached. And in that preaching, he becomes present—not as object, but as event, as the moment in which we are grasped by a love stronger than death.
So what does it mean to say, Christ is risen? It means that the proclamation still stirs us. That the old has passed away. That faith has heard the call. That we are no longer who we were. In this sense, the resurrection is not something we believe about Jesus—it is the space where we meet him.
The Sequence doesn’t ask us to understand. It asks us to listen. It doesn’t answer our questions. It speaks into them with a deeper silence—one that becomes a voice, a call, a hope.
“Christ indeed from death is risen, our new life obtaining.”
The new life is not waiting for us beyond the grave. It is calling us now—to live differently, to hope dangerously, to love as if resurrection were true.
Because in the deepest sense, it is.
Amen.
