The passage we just read. It's one of the resurrection accounts in Scripture. But if you notice in all the resurrection accounts, Jesus first appears to women. It's an interesting fact in all four gospel accounts Jesus first appears to women.

Now, one of the obvious reasons is that they were the people who came to the tomb. The men didn't come. They came there but that's not the deep reason. There's a deeper symbolic reason.

Women are the midwives. Women are there when new birth is coming, when a baby is being born and something new powerfully is being born. And the women are going to help midwife this. You know, women are there. They hold with the woman and they help the baby come through the birth canal.

And so women were actually the first disciples of Jesus, but they were the midwives. And as I said at the end of this homily, that's also we're invited to be. So the midwife. New birth.

But what was the new birth? Okay. What was being born? Well, radically new time was being born. You know, like in this passage or in Luke's Gospel where Luke says, on the morning of the first day, they don't just mean the first day of the week, they mean the first day the world is starting over.

You know, in Genesis, the first day, light separates from darkness. But here Christ comes out of the tomb. That's the first day. And you know, that's not far-fetched. You know, we measure time by that. Very few people realize that we're in the year 2026 since this happened, like time started over.

But secondly, what was new is that death was overcome. You know, I can put this in simple language before the resurrection of Jesus all dead things stayed dead. You know, after Jesus dead things don't stay dead anymore. That's the radical shift. That's the new creation and the first creation Genesis dead things stayed dead. In the new time from Jesus to 2026 dead things don't stay dead anymore.

Jesus rose. He's the firstborn of the dead. We’re the others. Now, what I want to emphasize in terms of an Easter message is this. That is the basis for all Christian hope. That is the basis actually for all hope, period.

Hope isn't wishful thinking. So you can't say I hope to win a lottery. No, you can wish to win a lottery. It's just a pure wish. But more commonly, hope is confused with optimism. Say, I'm an optimistic person. I see the bright side of things. That's a pleasant personality trait. But you can be an optimist and not have any hope. You can be a pessimist and be full of hope.

What is hope? What is hope? I want to illustrate that telling a series of stories. Some years ago here at our school with a young French-Canadian oblate priest, Pierre-Olivier Tremblay, and at the time he was chaplain at Laval University in Quebec City. He was a young man in his 30s, and he gave a very powerful talk. He said, you know, I work with young people. I'm a university chaplain. And these kids come in and they're between 18 and 22 or 23, and said, and they are full of life. You know, at that age, they're just they radiate life and energy and so on, he said. But you know something? Sadly, most don't have any hope.

They have life, they have energy, but they don't have any hope. Then he coined this word. He said, they don't have any hope because they don't have a meta narrative. They only have their own life. And then when their life is good, life is good. Then you break up with a boyfriend and you're suicidal. You know, like you go up, down.

But they only have their own story. Their own story isn't linked to the big story. You know, they don't have hope because they don't have a meta narrative. What is a meta narrative?

I want to illustrate that with a story from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Died in New York City in 1958. French scientist, but one of the great mystics in our tradition. He was a scientist, but most of all he was a Christian mystic.

So he first of all, was a world class scientist. He was written up in Time magazine, you know, a paleontologist who for years did research in China. But he was able to do what he was able to do and is still one of the great synthesis I've ever read. He can take creation from the Big Bang Theory right down to today, and just melt it perfectly with Scripture, and that Christ is going to be the end of all creation.

And he has this wonderful vision of just all things come together in Christ. So one day Pierre is presenting this to some, a group of people, many who weren't believers. When he finished, somebody said to him, "Well, that's a wonderful, optimistic little vision. What happens if we blow up the world with an atomic bomb?” And Teilhard smiled and he said, well, that would be a 2 million year setback. He said, but what I say is that it's going to happen. It's going to happen, he said. Not because I wish it, because God promised it.

God promised that in the resurrection of Christ, God shows that God is going to deliver on the promise. You can kill me. You can kill everything. You can blow up the world. It's still going to end up death doesn't stay dead anymore. I love that. See, that's a meta narrative. It's a big story, which we have to link to our story.

Some other examples of this. I love the story of Archbishop Tutu, the Anglican bishop in Cape Town. You know, at the height of apartheid and he was fighting apartheid, soldiers would try to intimidate him. So he'd be having a Sunday service. And just as he gets up to preach, soldiers would come down both sides of the aisle with machine guns and look at him, and Tutu would smile and he'd say, he said, I'm glad you came to church today. Your mothers are probably happy. But then he said this. I'm glad you came to join the winning side. We have already won. He wasn't talking about apartheid. He was talking about the resurrection. We've already won. The end of history is written and we can have setbacks and so on. See, that's the meta narrative we have already won. See, that's Christian hope.

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Roman Catholic theologian, and he had been an artist. And so he uses an image, he says, you know, imagine your life. Just imagine your life as a five act play, you're an actor or an actress in a five act play. And you know the ending and the ending is going to be happy. You know you're going to have this wonderful ending. You're going to be the hero, and you're going to marry the prince and the princess and so on. He said, well, you can take some really bad pain in acts two and three because you know the ending.

See, as Christians, we already know the ending not just of our own story, but the ending of the story for the entire universe. It's going to be cosmic ecstasy, you know. Julian of Norwich, the great mystic English, she coined this expression that's so famous, she says,”In the end, all will be well and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well." To which Oscar Wells adds at this point said and if it isn't well, it's still not the end. None of you have woke up dead yet, and you never will. Okay, you're going to wake up in different places and so on.

You know, Saint Paul puts it so clearly. He says, if there is no resurrection, as Christians, we're the most deluded of all people. But if there is a resurrection, it all makes sense.

Remember kind of a witty line from a movie way back in the 80s called Oh God. And so that at one point God is on a court case and he's there visibly. And he says, you know, I've only done three miracles in all of history. The Red sea, the resurrection, he said, and the 1969 New York Mets. He said, those are the three miracles.

But, you know, as Christians, we believe there's been two major miracles in history that changed the world: the Red sea, the foundation of the Jewish community from which Jesus emerged. And then the resurrection, which starts time over.

On the morning of the first day, time started over. The first time light separated from darkness. This time. Death was overcome. Dead bodies don't stay dead anymore.

Now the challenge. First of all, we need to be midwives of hope. At the resurrection the women were there. They were midwifing this. You know, if I could take a little sarcastic thing. The men soon marginalized them and took over. But they were the first disciples. They were there. They helped bring the newness to birth. And that's still our job.

We need to be midwives of hope. We need to be midwives of the resurrection. Okay. And then secondly, we need to sustain ourselves in hope. And that's difficult today. You know, you can watch the news at night and you can get really discouraged.

Or I recently heard a talk from a theologian and he said, I have a 4 or 5 year old daughter, he said, and she comes to me and said, dad, how can there be Jesus if all this stuff is happening? You know, you know, it's hard to sustain hope.

I love a line from Jim Wallis. You know, Jim Wallis's an evangelical, but he's the new Dorothy Day in our culture. And Jim Wallis always says, don't base your hope on the evening news. Base your hope on Jesus and the resurrection, and watch for the evening news to change.

The two challenges we need to be midwives of hope. We need to take the message to the resurrection. The meta narrative to people to link their lives so that we don't just have energy in our own lives. We have a big story.

And then secondly, to sustain ourselves in hope, particularly in times when you can watch the evening news and you don't see any basis for hope on the evening news. Our basis for hope is the resurrection of Jesus.

So I think this is one of the central messages of Easter. Easter service has many messages, but I've chosen this one. Midwiving, hope and sustaining hope. Thank you.