Second Sunday of Easter – 27 April 2025
Last weekend we celebrated how the life of Jesus has burst forth, no longer constrained by the fetters of death. And we suggested that at the heart of this experience lay a question. On the first day of the week the women come to the tomb looking for something. And there in the empty tomb, where they do not find what they are looking for, a proclamation re-orients and transforms, not only their own search, but indeed the human search itself. The question with which they are greeted is simply, “Why look among the dead for someone who is alive? Just as discipleship of Jesus begins with hearing a question, “What are you looking for?” the experience of the Resurrection, too, begins with hearing a question: Why look among the dead for someone who is alive?
This is the question that is given to each and every one of us. The power of the Resurrection takes hold of our own lives when we are drawn into its claim. When we are locked up in the room of our own fears, of our own resentments, of our own bitterness, or of our nostalgias then we looking among the dead for something. In the Resurrection the death of fear gives way to the life of love, the death of resentment gives way to the life of possibility, the death of our bitterness gives way to acceptance, the death of nostalgia gives way to the dawn of a new beginning.
Whenever the place of darkness in our life is transformed into a place of light we are being seized by the mystery of the Resurrection. The Easter gospel today reminds us that it is this place within us that Jesus seeks out. In each of us there is a locked room as it were, a room where we live in darkness, where we search for life but among what is dead. What is that dark room inside me wherein I await a presence, a touch which will bring life?
Perhaps it is the room which is full of fear, or the room full of doubt, or of shame, or of guilt. Or perhaps it is that room in which I find myself unable to forgive or to love. And the resentment has darkened my life.
This is the room that the risen Jesus comes to, just as he came to the room in which the apostles had entombed themselves. No defence is too strong that his presence cannot fill the space of that room. Jesus comes into the darkened room of our life to utter a life-giving word. And that word is peace: the word which gives courage, the word which steadies, which accepts us in its understanding of us, the word of affection, of joy: the word of life.
It is also the word of companionship. The risen Jesus who is not afraid to come to the place in which are afraid is at the same time the wounded Jesus, the Jesus who eternally bears the marks of the cross. This is the Jesus who has faced the darkness and known a love stronger than it. It is that love he offers to us as we cringe in the darkness.
It is the love that our late Pope Francis sought to convey to us – the tenderness of God, the embrace of God, the mercy of God. And yet he realised that it is not easy for us to receive this love. We are too proud; we resist. And yet God never tires of extending this love. As he preached to priests some ten years ago,
How good it is to listen to God Who teaches me to progress, the Almighty Who stoops down to me and teaches me to walk . . . And God’s closeness is this tenderness: He taught me to walk, and without Him I would not know how to walk in the Spirit. How often I think that we are afraid of God’s tenderness, and since we are afraid of God’s tenderness, we do not allow ourselves to experience Him and as a result are at times hard, harsh and punishing; we are pastors without tenderness. [1]
Let this Easter be a celebration of dark places transformed. Transformed because the locked spaces inside us have been opened by a word of peace and promise.
And let us go forward from here to unlock those places in others – first and foremost by our forgiveness of them or being able to accept forgiveness from them. As Cardinal Re reminded us in his homily at the funeral of Pope Francis yesterday, we then become those who build bridges not walls, those who are able to cultivate of culture of encounter, rather than simply of transaction. This, indeed, was one of Pope Francis’ central legacies with which he bequeaths us, and which he must never forget.
Then, with him, we too may know in our hearts, “Christ is risen. Yes, Christ is truly risen!”
[1] Pope Francis, Homily, Third Worldwide Retreat for Priests, 15 June 2015.
