3rd Sunday of Easter B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2021 

Here we are, on the eve of the first day of the week, assembled, like the first disciples, to break bread together. We may even be hoping that our hearts will “burn within us” as we invite Jesus to break open the word for us.

However, though I have no difficulty believing the truth of Jesus’ resurrection, I often find difficulty in knowing what to say when it comes to the homilies every year at Easter — a time that I expect to be the easiest of all. Often enough, nothing particularly seems to grab me and enthuse me. It is not that I do not believe it. In fact, I think it might be that I do believe it so much that it has become second nature to me and nothing jumps off the page any more.

I feel anything but like the two disciples who encountered Jesus on the way to Emmaus, and who couldn’t get back to Jerusalem fast enough to tell the other disciples. Or like Peter in today’s First Reading from the Acts of the Apostles. He was irrepressible — prepared to take on, if only it were possible, the whole population of Jerusalem. For them it was all new. They felt wonderful.

I’ve heard it before. I know it is wonderful; it still directs my whole life — but I no longer feel it. A couple of lines from a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins come to my mind that give me heart:

… sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

I easily relate to “plodding”. In my mind’s eye, I readily conjure up a charred log at the edge of an evening camp-fire, rolling over, a few smouldering coals falling from it and suddenly bursting into a momentary gold-vermilion flame — unexpected, and beautiful.

My present feeling is like the “blue-bleak embers”, virtually unnoticed, but having still the potential, beyond my control to “gash gold-vermilion”.

I do draw a bit of heart from the last lines of this evening’s Second Reading, taken from a letter of St John, the author also of the better-known Gospel. He wrote, “When anyone does obey what God has said, God’s love comes to perfection in them.” I may have mentioned to you on some earlier occasion how the word “obey” in the Scriptures means more than our current English word conveys. It involves seeking, wanting, to explore the inner heart of the one giving the command, the reasons why they make their command, what they value and why — so that we can accede to their wish freely and even joyfully.

What John was saying is that the effort on our part to “obey” God [to get inside God, as it were, to discover God’s ways of seeing things and what God values and why], allows God’s love, over time, to become more and more our love. “God’s love comes to perfection in us”. That, I think, has little to do with feelings, but everything to do with faith and trust and determination. It is the reason why I pray as I do.

Not long ago, the Prince of Wales quoted some lines from another poem of Hopkins, referring to the alternating life-experiences of dark and dawn.

… There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went,
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastward springs —
because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I think that the knowledge of those “dearest freshness deep down things” is what keeps us going when life seems boring, dull and pointless— and all we can do is “plod” along. To Hopkins mind, it is all the work of God’s “Holy Ghost”, our “God of surprises”.