#they need to hurry up and announce the lewis renewal

[roscoehamiltons]

icb we have news of the haas boys renewing before lewis’ contract extension got announced

[romancatholicreflections]

31st March >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections on Mark 16:1-8 for Easter Vigil: ‘He has risen, he is not here’. Easter Vigil Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada) Mark 16:1-7 Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, has risen When the sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices with which to go and anoint him. And very early in the morning on the first day of the week they went to the tomb, just as the sun was rising. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ But when they looked they could see that the stone – which was very big – had already been rolled back. On entering the tomb they saw a young man in a white robe seated on the right-hand side, and they were struck with amazement. But he said to them, ‘There is no need for alarm. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he has risen, he is not here. See, here is the place where they laid him. But you must go and tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going before you to Galilee; it is there you will see him, just as he told you.”’ Gospel (USA) Mark 16:1-7 Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified, has been raised. When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go and anoint him. Very early when the sun had risen, on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb. They were saying to one another, “Who will roll back the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back; it was very large. On entering the tomb they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a white robe, and they were utterly amazed. He said to them, “Do not be amazed! You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Behold the place where they laid him. But go and tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.’” Reflections (4) (i) Easter Vigil The great spiritual writer C.S. Lewis wrote many wonderful books. One of them is entitled, ‘Surprised by Joy’. The word ‘Joy’ in the title refers to a woman that he met and subsequently married, and whose first name was ‘Joy’. He met her rather late in his life at a time when marriage was not really on his horizon. He hadn’t really planned to marry, but, to his great surprise he met ‘Joy’ and married her. In some ways, the title of Lewis’ book ‘Surprised by Joy’ is a fitting description of what happened on that Sunday morning after Jesus had been crucified. The women went to the tomb bringing spices with which to anoint the body of Jesus. Joseph of Arimathea had buried Jesus hurriedly in his own new tomb. The women wanted to complete Joseph’s hurried burial rite. When they went to the tomb early that Sunday morning, they had death on their mind. They expected to find a corpse. Their only concern was who would roll away the stone from the mouth of the tomb. To their astonishment, when they reached the tomb, the stone had already been rolled back, and, instead of encountering a corpse, they encountered a young man who announced to them that Jesus of Nazareth who had been crucified was risen from the dead. The verse after where tonight’s gospel reading ends states that the women ‘went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’. The shock of Jesus’ resurrection left the woman completely disorientated. They were rendered speechless. Easter took everybody by surprise. It completely upended the expectations of the disciples, most of whom had left the Jerusalem area and had gone back to what they had been doing before Jesus called them. If Easter was a surprise, it was a joyful surprise. Jesus’ disciples were surprised by joy. Hopefully, that joy of Easter will touch all of our lives this night. According to all the gospel writers, it is women who are to the fore on that first Easter morning. For the last week or so, we have been reflecting on the story of the passion and death of Jesus in the gospels, where it is mostly men who are to the fore, and the men, with one or two exceptions, don’t come out very well. It is the male Jewish Sanhedrin who hand Jesus over to Pilate who in turn hands Jesus over to his soldiers for crucifixion. According to Mark’s gospel, all of Jesus’ male disciples deserted him at the moment of his arrest, Judas betrayed him and Peter denied him three times. Some women are mentioned as looking on from a distance as Jesus hung on the cross; they don’t appear to have fled. Then early on that Sunday morning, after the Jewish Sabbath, three remarkable women come to the fore, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. They wanted to honour the body of Jesus. There was a protective quality to their presence on that first Easter Sunday. It is women who, not only give birth to life, but who, so often, are the protectors of life. Their faithful, protective presence on that Easter morning was rewarded. It was these women who were the first to hear the surprising and wonderful news that Jesus who had been crucified had been raised to new life by God. It was these women who were the first to be commissioned to proclaim the Easter gospel to the other disciples. The angel in the tomb said to them, ‘you must go and tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going ahead to you to Galilee; it is there you will see him, just as he told you”’. The women are being called to tell the disciples to go back to where it all began, back to Galilee where Jesus first met them and called them to follow him. Galilee, in a sense, was the springtime of the disciples’ relationship with Jesus. It was where they left everything to follow. Now they are being called back to Galilee to a second springtime, after the winter of failure and disloyalty and death. There the Lord will renew his call to his disciples and they will renew their response, and this time, in the light of the resurrection, they would remain faithful to the end. Easter was a moment of new beginning, not only for Jesus, but for his followers. Easter is a moment of new beginning for all of us. The risen Lord keeps calling us back to the beginning of our relationship with him. When was our beginning? It was the moment of our baptism. That is why we renew our baptismal promises at Easter. Baptism was the beginning of our resurrection life. We were baptised into the Lord’s risen life. We don’t always allow the Lord to live out his risen life in and through us, and, so we too need to go back to the beginning. Just as the risen Lord went before his disciples to Galilee, so he is always going before us, calling us back to our beginnings. Tonight, we remind ourselves that we are an Easter people, whose song is ‘Alleluia’. As an Easter people, we commit again to following in the footsteps of the risen Lord who is always going ahead of us. And/Or (ii) Easter Vigil Most of the time, our lives follow a certain routine. We more or less know what to expect each day. The details may change but the pattern generally remains much the same. Every so often, however, something comes along that is completely unexpected. Our day takes a surprising turn. Sometimes the nature of the surprise can be unpleasant. At other times the surprise can be delightful. In the words of the title of a book written by C.S. Lewis, we can find ourselves ‘surprised by joy’. The title of that book is a good description of the experience of Jesus’ disciples on the first Easter morning. The gospel narratives suggest that the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb came as a complete surprise to the women who were the first to the empty tomb. The empty tomb of Jesus just was not part of the expected script. The empty tomb spoke volumes although its full meaning was not immediately understood by the women. The real meaning of the empty tomb was that, in the words of today’s gospel reading, the crucified one ‘has risen, he is not here’. The emptiness of the tomb proclaimed that Jesus had passed over into a fullness of new life. The realm of death had been emptied of its power. The empty tomb announced that love, not hatred and prejudice, had won the day, the love of Jesus for God his Father and for all of us. The women who came to the tomb discovered that Jesus was not dead; he had not left them but was living among them in a way that transcended all their hopes and expectations. Whereas the passion and death of Jesus is very much about the work of men, in the gospel stories of the finding of the empty tomb it is the women who are to the fore. It is the women who are entrusted with the good news that Jesus has risen. As in so many other contexts, it is the women who emerge as the protectors and guardians of unexpected new life. The resurrection of Jesus defies explanation. It does not lend itself easily to rational analysis. The gospel stories tell us that when the women went to the other disciples to proclaim the good news that the tomb was empty and that Jesus had been raised from the dead, the other disciples did not believe the women’s story. They had to go to the tomb for themselves. They could not bring themselves to believe such staggering news. We often say of something that ‘it is too good to be true’. That seems to have been the view of the disciples on that first Easter morning. Sometimes we can be ready to believe anything but good news. Tonight we are all being asked to renew our faith in the good news that the one who was crucified in weakness has risen in power. His bones are not to be found in any tomb in Jerusalem. Where then is he to be found? He is to be found among us all; he lives in a special way within the believing community, which is his body. What Paul said to the church in Corinth, he would say to all of us gathered in this church tonight, ‘Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it’. Within the believing community, the risen Lord is present to us in a privileged way in and through the Eucharist. In that same first letter to the Corinthians, Paul asks, ‘the cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a communion in the blood of Christ? The bread that we bread, is it not a communion in the body of Christ?’ Like the first disciples in the days after Jesus’ resurrection, we continue to recognize the Lord in the breaking of bread. The forthcoming Eucharistic Congress is a celebration of this special presence of the risen Lord within the church, and through the church to the whole world. Without the resurrection there would have been no church and no Eucharist; there would have been no written gospels. As Paul says in that same first letter to the Corinthians, ‘if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in faith’. We don’t just celebrate Easter on Easter Sunday. We celebrate Easter every day, because every day the Lord is risen. Every day the risen Lord works among us and within us, working to raise us up from falsehood to truth, from despondency to hope, from hatred to love, from death to new life. In whatever darkness we may find ourselves, we always dwell in the light of Easter. When the women came to the empty tomb, the message they received was, the risen Lord ‘is going before you to Galilee’. The same risen Lord goes before his disciples in every age, raising us from our own tombs, whether the tombs we have built for ourselves or the tombs others have built for us. Because the risen Lord always goes before us, because, in the language of Saint Patrick’s breastplate, he is with us, within us, behind us, before me, beside us, Easter is an everyday feast and we are always an Easter people. Even as we struggle with our own Good Fridays, the light and power of the risen Lord continues to envelope us, which is why we can all make our own those words of Paul, ‘I can do all things in him who gives me strength’. And/Or (iii) Easter Vigil It is easy to become disheartened when we look around at our world today. We sense that much of the world has become less safe. Those who deal in death can appear to be gaining the upper hand. We can get discouraged by the violence, the hatred, the greed and self-serving that seems all around us. We can easily feel helpless before it all. Today’s feast speaks a word of hope into that situation. The same forces of evil and death, of which we are so aware today, put Jesus on the cross. In raising his Son from death, God was making a powerful statement that evil and death need not have the last word. At least on this one occasion the powers of evil and death did not have their way. God’s way prevailed and God had the last word, as he brought his Son through the darkness of death into the light of a new life. God’s last word was a word of love. God’s love for his Son raised him from the dead; God’s love for humanity led God to give his Son back to us, even though he had been crucified by us. In raising his Son from the dead, God sent his Son back into the world that had rejected him. God’s persistent and faithful love ensured that the powers of death and darkness would not prevail. The persistent and faithful love of God that conquered the dark forces of evil and death on that first Easter morning is as real today as it was then. God continues to face down the forces of death and destruction. Jesus, who was raised from the dead as a sign of the power of God’s love, is as alive today as he was on that first Easter morning. The loving power that brought new life out of death in Jerusalem two thousand years ago remains at work in our world today. When we celebrate Easter, as we do every year, we are not simply remembering a victory that belongs to the past, as some people might remember the victory of King William over King James at the battle of the Boyne. We are celebrating a victory that is ongoing. We are celebrating a king, whose loving and life-giving power at work among us is constantly bringing new life out of death, continually transforming our tombs into places of hope. Tonight’s feast invites us not just to look back to some wonderful victory in the past, but to look all around us for the signs of that victory in our own lives and in our world today. Tonight we announce, not just, ‘Christ has been raised’, but, ‘Christ is risen’. Because Easter is a present reality and not just a past event, the Lord calls us to become Easter people. Like the women who came to the tomb on that first Easter morning, we are constantly being sent forth as witnesses to the victory of Easter. As Easter people, our whole approach to life should witness to the Easter truth that love is stronger than hatred, and life is stronger than death. As Easter people, we approach every situation, no matter how threatening or painful it might be, with hope in our hearts, because we know in faith that God who worked powerfully in the darkness of Golgotha continues to work in the same life-giving way in all our dark places today. As Easter people we keep on working to ensure that the forces of death and destruction do not have the last word, because we know that this is God’s work today, as much as it was two thousand years ago, and we want to align ourselves with that work. We want to give God the opportunity to do his life-giving work, his Easter work, in and through us. As Easter people, we show the same faithfulness to the broken as God showed to his broken Son. We are alert to the stone rejected by the builders, recognizing that it can become a cornerstone. As Easter people, we try not to allow despondency and negativity to take possession of us. When we sense that happening, we invite the risen Lord to join us on the path of life, as he joined the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and we ask him to pour his Spirit afresh into our hearts and to fan into a living flame once more the gift of Easter hope. As Easter people we do not get too troubled when our plans fail to work out as we had expected, because we know that God’s plan for our lives is always more wonderful than our own plans. When the women came to the tomb on that first Easter morning they planned to anoint the body of Jesus. They knew how to anoint a dead body; they had probably done it many times before. What they discovered on that Easter morning rendered their spices and their plans redundant. God took them by surprise. They were now into unknown territory. The gospel reading says, ‘they did not know what to think’. The familiar, the expected, was shattered, and this was both disconcerting and exciting. We too can discover that our plans are really too small to contain the work that God is doing in our lives. As Paul says to the Corinthians: ‘no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’. Easter teaches us to hold our plans lightly, so that we remain open to the surprising new work that the God of life is always doing in our midst. And/Or (iv) Easter Vigil There are only two nights in the church’s liturgical year when we gather this late to worship, and they are Christmas Eve night and this night of the Easter Vigil. Of the two, the Easter Vigil is certainly the more important, the more solemn. The lighting of the Easter fire outside the church, the lighting of the Easter candle from the Easter fire, the procession of the Easter candle into the darkened church, the spreading of the flame of the Easter candle to all the other candles that people are holding, the singing of the Easter Exultet – we do all of that because Jesus who was crucified was raised from the dead by God and remains alive among us as the risen Lord. Yesterday, Good Friday, we venerated the wood of the cross, on which hung the Saviour of the world. Tonight, we worship the risen Lord; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord to the glory of God the Father, in the words of Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The journey from the cross, from Good Friday, to the empty tomb, to Easter Sunday, was chronologically very short; the time interval was less than two full days. Yet, at a deeper level, the journey was immense. In that short interval of time, everything had changed. The political and religious power that put Jesus to death had been overpowered by the power of God who brought Jesus from death to life – and God’s power did not simply restore Jesus to the life he had before he was crucified; it raised him to a new and more wonderful life. Jesus was not resuscitated; he was transformed; he was glorified. Everything changed for Jesus in that short interval of time, and everything changed for us as well. At Easter we do not only celebrate what God has done for Jesus; we celebrate what God has done for all of us, because in raising his Son from the dead to a new and more vibrant life, God has lifted us all, God has raised us all up. If Jesus had not been raised, everything would have ended at Calvary. There would have been no community of believers, no church, no preaching of the gospel, no gospel to preach. In raising his Son from the dead, God authenticated, vindicated, everything Jesus said and did. It is because of Jesus’ resurrection that his life his death have come to mean so much to us. God was reaching out to us in the life of his Son; God continued to reach out towards us in the death of his Son; God reaches out to us even more powerfully in the resurrection of his Son. God gave us the gift of his Son; when that gift was rejected, when his Son was crucified, God gave us the gift of his Son anew by raising him from the dead. In that sense, the resurrection proclaims God’s faithfulness to all of us. God did not withdraw the gift of his Son when that gift was rejected, but faithfully held out that gift to us all again by raising his Son from the dead. Easter celebrates not only God’s faithfulness to his Son; it celebrates God’s faithfulness to us all. Easter proclaims a divine faithfulness, a faithfulness that is stronger than sin and death. God’s faithfulness revealed in the resurrection of Jesus gives us hope in the face of sin and death; it assures us that sin and death will not have the last word. Easter reveals a God who was able to bring good out of human sin, human failure - the failure of Jesus’ disciples to stand by him, the failure of the religious leaders to respond to God at work in Jesus, the failure of the political authorities to recognize the innocence of Jesus. God’s love is stronger than our sin, our many failures. Easter also reveals a God who can bring new life out of death, whether it is our own personal death or the death of our loved ones, whether it is the various little deaths that we negotiate on our journey through life, the many losses and letting goes that are an inevitable part of our lives. Because of Easter, we can be hopeful in the face of both sin and death. Easter assures us that nothing, not even sin and death, can separate us from the faithful love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord. We have just read Mark’s account of the finding of the empty tomb. That note of faithfulness sounds very strongly there. Two days earlier, according to Mark, all Jesus’ disciples deserted him, and Peter had denied him three times. Yet, the word of the young man from the empty tomb to the women was, ‘Go and tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going before you to Galilee; it is there you will see him, just as he told you”’. The risen Lord would meet his disciples in the same place where he had first met them and called them, and where they first responded to him. There, he would renew his call and they could renew their response. Easter proclaims a faithful Lord who goes ahead of us, in times of failure and death, and who is constantly offering us opportunities to make a new beginning. Easter was a new beginning for Jesus; it is an invitation to all of us to make a new beginning on our journey of faith. Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland. Email: sjtbclontarf@eircom.net or frmartinhogan@gmail.com Parish Website: www.stjohnsclontarf.ie Please join us via our webcam. Twitter: @SJtBClontarfRC. Facebook: St John the Baptist RC Parish, Clontarf. Tumblr: Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin.