The account of Jesus’ resurrection that we hear this year from John begins not with peace but with anxiety. In a panic, Mary Magdalene runs to Peter and John and frantically says, “We don’t know where he is, they’ve taken him, they’ve taken my Lord!”

Because we know the end of the Easter story, and because we know that Jesus is indeed risen from the dead, it is hard to enter into the anxiety, fear, and frustration of these first disciples.

But their anxiety and fear are real, and they are only magnified by their sorrow and shock at losing their teacher, their friend, their Lord, the one with whom they spent almost every waking hour. Their confusion and wrath at the scandal of the Cross weighs heavy too.

While it might be hard to feel the exact fear and anxiety of Mary, Peter, and John in the Gospel today, at different points this year, we have probably experienced similar emotions. When we feel this way, it can even seem as if all is lost, as it did for Mary, Peter, and John that first Easter—as did for the first followers of Christ.

When the death, despair, and darkness of evil lingers like a cloud of smoke, when the Cross looms large and our hearts are left with only the emptiness of the tomb, we can get so deeply wrapped up in them that they seem like the only things that are real. We come to see only darkness and not His light.

In these dark times, as Mary did that first Easter morning, as Peter and John did, and as countless Christians who have come before us have done, we ask ourselves, “Where is Jesus?”

He is much closer than we think. He is never far from the Cross and the empty tomb—never far from our crosses, crises, and chaos, never far from our empty tombs, even when it feels like He is light years away!

The history of the Church is full of Christians who have allowed the light of Christ to shine in them against a backdrop of dark despair. They are men and women who, like the first disciples, shared His light! They are men and women who, in the Cross and in the empty tomb, saw not death, but life…saw Jesus, the Risen One … saw resurrection.

They are people like St. Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, who in 1980 was murdered, martyred as he was saying Mass. He was one of these Christians, who in desperate and despairing times, when members of his flock were literally being killed, engaged darkness with light. But not his own light, but that of Jesus, the Risen One. And that light spread!

At his funeral, with the backdrop of the tomb, those Christians saw Jesus, the Risen One. In the face of death and evil, when they had every right to despair, they shouted, “Resurrection, resurrection!”

On dark days, when we ask, “Where is Jesus?” the answer is that wherever we find and sow light, we find Jesus, the Risen One.

When we love, in the face of only searing hatred, we find Jesus, the Risen One. When we turn our enemies into our neighbors, we find Jesus, the Risen One. When we forgive those who have only sought our peril and defeat, we find Jesus, the Risen One. When we see the poor as our brother or our sister, embrace their dignity and feed their hunger, we find Jesus, the Risen One. When we step foot in a Catholic Church and pray before the Eucharist, we find Jesus, the Risen One.

On dark days, may the light of Easter shine brightly! Amidst the backdrop of the empty tomb, when we and others question in fear, anxiety, and despair, asking, “Where is Jesus?” may our lives shine forth with His light, and may our actions give others reason to hope and see Jesus, the Risen One—so that we all might chant with contagious joy: "Resurrection, resurrection, resurrection!"

Fr. Christopher Brennan, C.S.C., a member of the United States Province of Priests and Brothers, wrote this reflection for the Solemnity of Easter on 20 April 2025. Having made his Final Profession on 15 September 2017, and then been ordained a priest on 7 April 2018, Fr. Chris currently ministers at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana, where he is the Rector of Stanford Hall.