One of the most remarkable testimonies of our time is the witness of Mother Teresa of Calcutta — a woman who spent her life finding the face of Jesus not in cathedrals, not in the comfortable pews of the powerful, but in the gutters of Kolkata, in the hollow eyes of the abandoned, and in the trembling hands of the forgotten. She knelt beside Hindu men ravaged by leprosy and saw the crucified Christ. She cradled children discarded by the side of the road and held the very body of God. She looked upon women cast away by their families and recognized, somehow, the divine image they still carried.

What was she doing, really? She was restoring the love of God to those from whom it had been stolen — stripped away by poverty, by caste, by cruelty, by neglect. She was not simply performing charity. She was performing resurrection.

The True Meaning of Resurrection

This Easter, I want us to wrestle with what resurrection actually means

. Because if we reduce it only to the miraculous resuscitation of a single body — Jesus walking out of a tomb two thousand years ago — we may be missing the far greater and more urgent miracle it announces to us today.

The resurrection is not merely about restoring life to one dead man. It is about restoring life — hope, dignity, belonging — to every human being who has been made to feel that their life does not matter. It is God’s declaration that hope cannot be buried. That love cannot be entombed. That no human being, however abandoned or despised, is beyond the reach of the divine.

The recipients of resurrection hope are not the triumphant. They are the ones who have run out of hope entirely. The feast of Easter is the feast of those who had nothing left to believe — and then found that God had not finished with them yet.

God Shows No Partiality

In our reading from Acts, the early church was forced to confront one of its deepest assumptions. Peter — a devout Jew, a follower of Jesus — stood in the home of Cornelius, a Roman Gentile, and announced words that must have startled even him: “God shows no partiality.” Not to the Jew over the Gentile. Not to the Roman over the Samaritan. Not to the powerful over the poor. Not to the citizen over the stranger.

The reason God shows no partiality is not a matter of policy — it is a matter of identity. We are all children of God. Every last one of us. The architecture of divine love has no walls, no gates, no checkpoints. There was not a person on earth who did not have room to dine with Jesus — not even Judas, who still found his place at the table on the night of the Last Supper.

Resurrection Is Universalism, Not Exclusivity

The resurrection proclaims a radically inclusive God. And this brings us to a profound irony at the heart of our national conversation.

There are those who insist this is a Christian nation — and in one sense, they are more right than they know. Because the founding vision of this nation, whatever its many failures in practice, was stamped with the very logic of resurrection. Emma Lazarus gave it voice in the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This is resurrection language. The tired. The poor. The wretched. The homeless. These are precisely the people Easter is for. Emma Lazarus, herself Jewish, envisioned America as a place of refuge for all people, regardless of origin, religion, or status — a nation built not on dominance but on the dignity of the displaced.

The Dangerous Heresy of Christian Nationalism

Here is where we must speak plainly. Christian nationalism — the ideology that fuses the Christian faith with ethnic, cultural, or political dominance — does not merely misunderstand American history. It misunderstands the very Christ it claims to follow.

“Christian nationalism confuses the flag with the cross, the nation with the Kingdom of God, and the powerful with the blessed. But Jesus did not rise from the dead to crown an empire. He rose to call a marginalized woman by name and send her — above all the men — to announce the news of new life to the world.”

Consider who witnessed the resurrection first. Not the high priest. Not the Roman governor. Not the powerful disciples who had access and influence. The first witness to the resurrection was a woman — Mary Magdalene — someone the world had cast aside. Jesus called her by name. He did not call Peter first. He did not appear first to those in power. He appeared to the marginalized, and he commissioned her as the first evangelist in history.

The poor, the fisherman, the tax collector, the farmer, the prostitute — those who knew they needed God — were the ones who could see the risen Christ. Those who clung to power and status fell over at the sight of truth, dignity, and divinity.

Our Easter Calling

So this Easter, let us be clear about what we celebrate. We celebrate a God who shows no partiality. A love that cannot be entombed. A hope that belongs to those who have none. A resurrection that is not the property of any nation, race, or political movement — but belongs to the whole of humanity.

Like Mother Teresa, may we find the crucified Christ in the faces of those the world has thrown away. And like Mary Magdalene, may we be the first to run and announce: Hope is not dead. It never was.

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