Archbishop of Birmingham's Easter Message focusses on joy

Archbishop Bernard Longley Homily for Easter Sunday 2014, at St Mary's College, Oscott

Now we are those witnesses – and he has ordered us to proclaim this to his people.

Today I join you for the first time this Holy Week in your own chapel at the heart of your home in the seminary. All this last week you have taken part in the great paschal liturgies at St Chad’s Cathedral that are the highlight of the Christian year. On Wednesday we celebrated the Chrism Mass together with all those priests who had just renewed their priestly commitment of service, and I know that many of you were able to return to your home dioceses to be united with your bishop and the presbyterate that one day you hope to join.

In St Chad’s as we began to celebrate the Easter Triduum at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper some of you came forward to take part in the washing of feet. It is a moment that emphasises for every priest his life of eucharistic service and the compassion of Christ that He urges us to imitate. At the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday you came forward in procession to venerate the cross together and then to embrace and shoulder the cross individually in your own lives.

During last night’s Easter Vigil your own future ministry lay before you as we brought the Paschal Candle to dispel the shades of darkness in the heart of city. In the years ahead it will be your task to take the light of Christ into the darkest places of the world and to brighten and guide peoples’ lives through the radiant light of your faith in Him.

In this morning’s Gospel we feel the impact of the resurrection through the experience of the first witnesses to the risen Christ. St John’s Gospel speaks of Mary Magdalen who came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved. This was her first amazed and joyful instinct after seeing that the stone had been moved away from the tomb.

She went immediately to inform the apostles and because of this decision she became the first to testify to Christ’s rising. Her decision was both wise and generous – not keeping this news to herself but entrusting it to those to whom the Lord had already entrusted His own mission. It drew Simon Peter and the other disciple into her experience and it was therefore pivotal for the faith of the early Church. The two men ran together…to go to the tomb and when he arrived Peter saw and he believed. St Peter’s faith in the resurrection was to be the core of that rock on which Christ promised to build his Church.

The Mass of Easter morning echoes the joy of the apostles as they began to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead. For your community it is also a moment of transition as you now look forward to Easter week and the restful holiday with family or friends that it brings. I am delighted that we are joined today by members of your own families – and of mine - enabling us to celebrate Easter together in a joyful and memorable way.

Like Mary Magdalen we are about to be sent out with the good news of the resurrection. We are called to be the Spirit-filled evangelizers of our own time esteemed by Pope Francis and needed for the Church’s continuing mission to the world. You have no need to wait for your ordination to take up this urgent task.

In his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium – The Joy of the Gospel the Holy Father has drawn inspiration and encouragement from his predecessor Pope Paul VI where he emphasises the Easter joy that must characterise our lives as priests. Pope Francis warns us not to become:

Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter…an evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral! Let us recover and deepen our enthusiasm, that “delightful and comforting joy of evangelizing, even when it is in tears that we must sow… And may the world of our time, which is searching, sometimes with anguish, sometimes with hope, be enabled to receive the good news not from evangelizers who are dejected, discouraged, impatient or anxious, but from ministers of the Gospel whose lives glow with fervour, who have first received the joy of Christ”.

As the Easter break beckons I want to thank Fr Rector on completing his first year since returning to Oscott for his leadership within the seminary community and most recently for the gift of his homily on Good Friday. Among the Staff I thank especially Fr Richard Walker during his last Easter at Oscott and as he now prepares for his new ministry in Banbury – my thanks in particular for his thoughtful contribution to the task of drawing the two seminary communities together since 2011 and in the great support he has given to two Rectors of Oscott.

May we all, staff and seminarians, be blessed in these coming days of Eastertide with fresh experiences of the risen Lord and be graced, like Mary Magdalen, with opportunities to share with others our renewed enthusiasm and joy at the new life He is sending us to live.