Homilies

Easter – 17 April 2022

On the darkness of this night, the darkness of the world itself is only too apparent.  Each celebration of Easter is prefaced, as it were, with the world’s suffering, especially the suffering of those who are innocent.  This year we are conscious of the suffering of Ukraine, the brutality and senselessness of war. The horror of it all arrests us, and we stand bewildered by our violence towards one another.  To gather in the night, on this night, is to stand in the face of our confusion and in the midst of our questions which resist their answer.  In our hearts, we hear the echo of the question, “Who will roll away the stone for us?”  Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to all those experiences that entomb us, the experiences that render us distorted, the moments of our cruelty to one another that cover us with their shadows?

Pope Francis once defined the poor as those who are afraid of the future. And we are fearful of the future when we have lost hope.  It is the absence of hope that maintains the stone of our tragedies and misfortunes so rigidly in place, immoveable. An absence of hope endows our experiences with a deadness of weight, an obstacle that pushes us back.  When we say, in our own way, “who will roll away the stone?” are we not really saying, “What can give us hope?”  What gives us the hope that violence is not the last word? What gives us the hope that we are not trapped within an endless cycle of cruelty to one another? What gives us the hope that we are not condemned simply to the present, let alone the past?

Our hearts stretch out for an answer. John Paul II expressed this sentiment of a hope born in the midst of suffering when he wrote:

“the suffering human being knows that they are suffering and wonders why; and they suffer in a humanly speaking still deeper way if they do not find a satisfactory answer. This is a difficult question, just as is a question closely akin to it, the question of evil. Why does evil exist? Why is there evil in the world? When we put the question in this way, we always, at least to a certain extent, are asking a question about suffering too.

[We] put this question to God with all the emotion of [our] heart and with [our] mind full of dismay and anxiety; and God expects the question and listens to it . . . “[1]

The hope that arises in the midst of our experience, however, comes to its limit. It stands in need of the receipt of another hope—that which we know as theological hope.  Christian hope is born, not of what we do not have, but is born, rather, of what we have been given. [2] This is more than the realization of our own human aspirations, no matter how ardent they might be, and no matter how passionately they stretch out into an incomprehensible horizon.  As Pope Benedict wrote, true Christian hope “is the great hope based upon God’s promises that give us courage and directs our action in good times and in bad.”[3]

Christian hope has its genesis, not within us, but outside of us. We have been given a word of hope: Christ is Risen!  The stone that weighs us down, that blocks our path, has, in fact, been rolled away, and where we expected death and diminishment has now become a place of life and fresh beginnings. Christian hope breathes the irrevocable nature of this promise.  And yet, such is the paradox of this genuine Christian hope that it is most keenly experienced in the face of all that would seem to deny it. Genuine Christian hope is, in fact, exercised in the midst of evil:  it is the projection of the Promise, given and received, over the absurdity of evil. St. Paul put it this way, ‘Affliction makes for endurance, and endurance for tested virtue, and tested virtue for hope. And this hope will not leave us disappointed’ (Rom 5:3-5}

Fr Paulus Budi Kleden, the General Superior of the Divine Word Missionaries, preached earlier this year, “Hope is open spaces; hope opens up prospects, hope dares the uncertain, and the unknown. Those who hope have the courage to leave and take risks. Love makes love possible.” In the words of the first President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Halev, “hope is not the belief that something has a positive outcome, but the certainty that something makes sense, however, it ends up.”

In this night we proclaim a promise given to us.  Life beyond death is not just a wish; it is a reality. This proclamation of God’s promise to us, realized in Jesus, changes the way in which we see our life and changes the way in which we do things. It is that promise that opens for us new possibility even in the midst of what might be extraordinary limitation. The promise we have been given, and the hope that springs ever new from this faith, enables us to celebrate even in the face of frustration, distortion, or limitation. 

Believers in the Risen Christ, we are bearers of hope. Yes, when we are able to create even a moment in which people can imagine a better future, when we can transform the absence of hope into the exercise of hope and allow our self and others to dream once again, in some small way we mirror the life of the Resurrection.  Because of what we celebrate this night – the triumph of life over death, the victory of presence over absence – hope now is always possible no matter what stone we come across in our path.  And a future is always ours.


[1] John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris, “On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering,” Apostolic Letter, (11 February 1984), nn. 9-10.

[2] See Gen 12:2-3; 13:15; Ex 6:5-8; Is. 65:17.

[3] Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, “On Christian Hope,” Encyclical Letter (30 November 2007), n.35.

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