Homily / Sermon for Easter Three

A ghost has no flesh and bones as you can see I have.

This is a remarkable and interesting story. Let me tell you why.

There are lots of stories that speak of ghosts and spirits, of the dead who live and are still present. From Charles Dicken’s Christmas Carol to Harry Potter to television programmes to films and books there are so many stories that speak of the dead who come back to visit the living. Some stories are frightening - for adults - others are funny and intended for children.

Even so, in most of these stories, a ghost is not a good thing. They are shady and often malevolent. They are up to little good. Sometimes they seek vengeance. They can sometimes be seen, but mostly they are cut off, isolated from the physical world in some way. They are like a bad, musty smell. They are found particularly in darkness, in the old house with creaking floorboards, in distant spine tinglng screams.

Yet, these ideas, so familiar to us, may make it difficult to understand what is meant by Jesus’s rising from the dead, and what our own life after death might be like.

The Gospel makes it very clear that these ideas are far from reality.

Here, in this account, the Risen Jesus sits and eats with his friends. He talks with them and teaches them. This is no vision. They can see him and touch him. They can see the wounds which led to his death, but he is now alive again and meets with them.

This is no Ghost. He lives not in darkness, but in the light. And the risen life of Jesus is a physical life, with a real body and a presence which can touch and be touched.

And when we, through baptism, live now his risen life we live to value and cherish the world God has made, and the bodies he has given us. Here, in this world, we can already experience the life to come.

And when we try to understand life beyond this life, we know that finally it will be a physical life, when our souls are given new bodies,  in a new heaven and a new earth and we live for ever in his Presence.

Homily for Easter Two / Low Sunday / Divine Mercy Sunday

Those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven.

We associate the sacrament of reconciliation, confession, penance, especially with Lent, don’t we? Lent is the time, surely for us to creep to confession, queue in the church, sneak into the dark box for a few minutes of awkwardness, the mention of a few routine sins and a lot of what-I-cannot-now-remembers. It’s an important duty, but an uncomfortable one.

But today’s Gospel reminds us of something that we should always have known, that the forgiveness of sins is first and foremost an Easter blessing. Before the resurrection, it is Christ who dispenses the forgiveness of God - here in this Gospel as we are clearly told - gives this wonderful gift to the Church.

So when we fall from grace, when we say the harsh word, omit the important duty, are thoughtless or greedy or dishonest or unloving, and when we acknowledge our guilt and our failings, the Church can free us from our sins in the power of Christ. This is what is meant by salvation and redemption. This is what is meant by the victory of the cross and the power of the resurrection.

Yet too often - like Thomas - we think we know better. We hide or excuse our sins. We shrink from recognising our need of God. We hesitate in approaching the Church, and if we are reluctant in this way, we remain in the narrowness of vision, and the hardness of hard and the coldness of faith which sin brings.

Rejoice and praise God. Raise your hearts. Utter with Thomas, My Lord and My God - because through his resurrection, Christ has given the Church the power to release us from our sins.

Homily for the Easter Vigil

Very early in the morning on the first day of the week they went to the tomb, just as the sun was rising.


There are two small but important details held in these brief words in the Gospel for this mass. Firstly, the women came to the tomb ‘just as the sun was rising’. When they arrived Jesus had already risen from the dead - so the resurrection took place not at dawn, as people sometimes like to think, but in the darkness. That’s the first little detail. The second is this: it was the first day of the week. Notice that the Gospel does not give the name of the day - for good reason, because generally speaking days of the week didn’t have names either for the Jews or the Roman - it is just the first day.

Each of these little details tells us much.

Firstly, the resurrection occurs not in the emerging light of day, but it breaks into the fleeing darkness of night. This is important. This is why we light our Easter candle, why we sing ‘Christ our Light’ ‘Lumen Christi’ - the light is not the first light of the sun, but the light of the Son himself which overcomes the darkness. We share a faith which celebrates victory over darkness, triumph over suffering, the defeat of Satan and the utter vanquishing of death. Christ overthrows the strongholds of night before ever the arrival of the expected dawn.

Christ has conquered! Glory fills you! Darkness vanishes for ever!

And secondly, this day, this wonderful day, is not the last day of a hard week, but the first day of a glorious life. How sad it is that people seem to have forgotten that the day we call Sunday is actually the first, not the last day of the week - look at your diaries and calendars at home to see what I mean. Don't confuse Sunday with the Jewish day of rest, even though it has some features in common. In Genesis it is this first day on which God begins his creation by separating light from darkness; in the New Testament it is the day in which God begins his new creation with the defeat of darkness.  Sunday is not for us the day of rest after the work of creation, but it is the day of resurrection, the celebration of the new creation.


May Christ, the Morning Star, who came back from the dead, shed his peaceful light on all mankind.