We are more than our divisions
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At the heart of Easter is a moment of recognition. Mary Magdalene stands weeping in a garden, certain she is alone with her grief, certain the story is over. A man speaks her name, just her name, and everything changes. She turns, and she sees.
What she encounters is not a ghost, not a memory, but something entirely new: the same person she had known and loved, and yet transformed beyond what death should have permitted. The world, in that instant, becomes a different kind of place.
Easter Sunday falls this year on the 5th of April. For Christians, it is the central feast of the year. It is not merely a religious anniversary but a proclamation about the deepest structure of reality: that love is stronger than death, that communion is more enduring than division, and that the worst thing that can happen is not, in the end, the last thing.
I write in the hope that this conviction, tested, hard-won, and anything but naive, might speak to something that all Australians are grappling with right now.
We are living through a moment of unusual anxiety about who we are as a community. The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, established in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack of December 2025, is asking Australia some of the most searching questions a nation can be asked:
What do we owe one another across lines of religion and culture? What happens when fear and hatred are allowed to ground themselves in a society? And what does it actually mean to be a cohesive community and not just a collection of groups tolerating each other at arm’s length, but a people genuinely committed to each other’s flourishing?
These are not questions for governments alone to answer, or for commissions, however important their work. They are questions that belong to every household and every suburb, every school and every workplace, every faith community and every neighbourhood.
They are questions about whether the diversity that characterises modern Australian life, the extraordinary multiplicity of cultures, faiths, languages and histories that makes a city like Adelaide genuinely remarkable, becomes our greatest strength, or a source of fracture we never quite find the courage to heal.
Easter has always had something to say about this. The earliest accounts of the Resurrection are striking precisely because of their diversity. The Risen Christ appears to Mary Magdalene in a garden, to two despairing travellers on a road to Emmaus who do not recognise him until the breaking of bread; to a locked room full of frightened disciples; to a doubting Thomas who needs to touch the wounds to believe, to fishermen on a lakeshore at dawn. He meets each person where they are.
He does not require them all to have the same experience, or to approach him from the same direction. What unites them is not uniformity. It is encounter.
This matters, I think, for how we understand social cohesion. Cohesion is sometimes confused with uniformity, as though a united community is one in which everyone looks the same, worships the same, thinks the same. But that has never been the Christian vision, and I do not believe it is Australia’s either.
The community that gathered around the first Easter proclamation was, from the very beginning, startlingly diverse: Jewish and Greek, slave and free, men and women, the cautious and the reckless, the bereaved and the joyful. What held them together was not the erasure of their differences but something deeper than their differences, namely a shared conviction about what is ultimately true, and a shared commitment to each other across every boundary that might otherwise divide them.
There is a moment in the Easter story that I find myself returning to often. Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem. They are walking away from the site of their loss, away from the community of their friends, away from everything. A stranger falls into step beside them. They do not know who he is. But they invite him in. They sit at table with him. And it is in that act of hospitality to the stranger, in the breaking of bread with someone they did not yet recognise, that their eyes are opened.
I think this is one of the most quietly revolutionary stories in all of literature. The encounter with the other, the person who is not like us, who comes from a different place, who carries a different history, is not a threat to be managed. It is an opportunity for recognition. It is, potentially, the moment when everything changes.
I cannot write about Easter without pausing on this: the events we commemorate took place within, and grew out of, the Jewish tradition. The meal Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before he died was a Passover seder. The Scriptures he quoted, the prayers he prayed, the God he called Father — all of this was shaped by the faith of Israel.
For Christians, there is no Easter without the Jewish story that precedes and enfolds it. This places an absolute and non-negotiable obligation on us: to stand against antisemitism in all its forms, not as an optional addition to our faith but as a direct consequence of it. A society that allows its Jewish members to live in fear is a society that has lost something essential about what it means to be human together.
Social cohesion does not come cheaply or automatically. It is not achieved by simply declaring that we value diversity and leaving it at that. It requires specific, sustained commitments: the willingness to actually know our neighbours and not just tolerate them from a distance; the courage to name hatred when we encounter it, even when it is uncomfortable to do so; the humility to recognise that our own community, whatever community that is, is capable of the same failures we deplore in others; and the patience to build the slow, unglamorous work of trust across lines of difference. None of this is easy. All of it is necessary.
The Catholic community here in Adelaide is engaged in its own Synodal journey: a genuine effort to become a more listening, more humble, more genuinely inclusive community of faith. We have not always been what we should have been. We carry our own history of failure, and we carry it with honesty.
But Easter is precisely the feast of communities that know they are capable of failure. The disciples ran, denied, doubted, and are offered something beyond what they deserve: not condemnation but the greeting of peace, not judgement but an invitation to begin again. This pattern, honest about failure, open to renewal, is the one I believe Australian society needs now.
To every person reading this, whether you are a person of deep faith, a quiet searcher, or someone who feels quite distant from faith and religion, I want to offer not a sermon but a conviction: that the instinct toward community is not naïve.
That the desire to live alongside people who are different from us without fear is not utopian. That a society in which every person, of every religion, ethnicity, and background, can live freely, celebrate openly and belong fully is not an impossible dream. It is what we owe each other.
On Easter Sunday, the churches of Adelaide will ring with an ancient acclamation that has been sung across two thousand years, in more languages and by more peoples than can be counted: “Alleluia. He is risen”. It is a proclamation that the worst has been faced and has not won, that death itself, which is the final form of every division, has been overcome by a love that refuses to stay defeated.
I believe that same love is the ground of social cohesion. Not sentiment. Not policy alone. Not the careful management of difference. But love, in the most demanding and least sentimental sense of the word: the committed, patient, costly willingness to see the other as fully human, to refuse their diminishment, and to build with them a world worthy of what we all, at our best, most deeply hope for.
We are more than our divisions. Easter says so. And I believe, in Adelaide, in Australia, in this complicated, beautiful, fractured, extraordinary human community of ours, it is still possible to live as though that is true.
A blessed and joyful Easter to you all, for God is Good! Good indeed.
