Easter Vigil Mass
Bishop Brendan Leahy
St John's Cathedral Limerick
In the Gospel that we have
just heard, the women, the first evangelisers, receive an important message
that is repeated twice: Go to Galilee and you will see Jesus there.
Deep down, we all want to
know where we can see the Risen Jesus. What’s more, as Pope Francis reminds us,
many people today call on Christians to speak of a God they themselves know and
are familiar with, “as if they were seeing him”.
But how can people “see”
Jesus?
It’s important for us to remember
Jesus didn’t just rise again, body and soul, for those living in the Holy Land
about 30 AD. Jesus isn’t trapped in Galilee back two thousand years ago. Indeed
he is no longer in any one place in the world. In his resurrection he has
entered a new sphere of existence. He now embraces the whole world and is
present to us in a new and powerful way in every place.
But how can we see him and
let him be seen? The night before he died he told his disciples: “By this all
will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.” We “see” and “show”
Jesus Risen through the love we have for one another. It is the distinctive sign of Christians.
Some years ago I met a nurse,
let’s call her Yvonne, who was working in England and she shared with me an
important discovery in her life. She was brought up with absolutely no contact whatever
with the Church. But when she became a nurse she noticed something special
about some of her colleagues in the hospital. Not only were they good at their
work, helpful to patients, and open to others, but there was something about
their own way of relating to one another that attracted her. After a while she
asked them, “What is it you have here?” They answered, “well, we try to give
priority to our love for one another. We believe Jesus is present among us
because he promised to be among those united in his name.” Yvonne listened with
rapt attention to the explanation of a life she’d glimpsed over the years at
the hospital. She found herself saying: “So, that’s it…I want to live like
this…” Sometime later she was baptized. For her, the way those nurses lived,
with Jesus among them, in their relationship, was the answer to the unspoken,
then spoken yearning in Yvonne’s heart. ‘I want to see Jesus.’
Pope Francis has said that
‘instead of seeming to impose new obligations, Christians should come across as
people who want to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who
invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the
Church grows, but “by attraction”.’ It is the attraction of the love we have
for one another; it is the attraction of the Risen Jesus made visible among us.
In this year when Limerick
is the national city of culture, we can take away this Easter reminder that we
are called to live the culture of the Resurrection by the love we have for one
another.
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