The beginning of the new life, the life of the Risen Lord, is very like the beginning of his earthly life. Before developing this theme, let us pause there a little. The Son of God entered the world in poverty and obscurity. In St Matthew’s Gospel, he is a baby in a refugee family, and spends his earliest years in exile. His life is short, he has no children, he dies a condemned criminal, and his mission ends in failure. That is his...

‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ These words of Jesus have seared themselves on the memory of the Church. Matthew and Mark record them in the precise Aramaic words that Jesus used. They are the opening words of Psalm 22. Taking their cue from these words of Jesus, all the evangelists to a greater or lesser degree interpret the Passion of Jesus in the light of this psalm, including...

I hope it will not seem too strange that I begin the homily for Holy Thursday, which is to be about the institution of the Eucharist, by taking you back to the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry as narrated by John, to the marriage feast at Cana.

Of course there are connections that...

In what we’ve just heard (Jn 20:1-9), first a woman and then two men make a discovery. They discover, early on a Sunday morning, that a tomb that should have had a stone at its mouth and a body inside was now open and empty. This was a tomb, cut out of limestone, in an abandoned quarry just outside...

‘Dear friends in Christ,’ we heard at the beginning, ‘on this most holy night..our Lord Jesus Christ passed from death to life.’
 He ‘passed’. This is our Christian Passover. Tonight our Lord Jesus passes from death to life, and throughout the world thousands of men, women and children, are being buried with him by baptism into death, and are rising...

‘See, my servant will prosper, he shall be lifted up, exalted, rise to great heights’ (Is 52:13) - the first words of today’s 1st reading. Today, ‘the royal banners forward go; the cross shines forth in mystic glow’. Today, the Cross is lifted up, a crucifix in fact, and therefore the Crucifixus himself, the crucified Christ. As he...

It’s hard for us to bring together everything happening tonight. There is so much.
As a great back-drop, like a tapestry on a wall of the Upper Room, there is the Exodus. It was God’s great act of freeing Israel from Egypt, already 1300 years old by the time of Christ.
There is the commemoration of the...

There is a story of Bl. John Henry Newman preaching on the Passion. He had cited several of the painful things done to Jesus. He paused. Everyone held their breath. Then he said in a low clear voice, ‘Now I bid you recollect that...