Homily for 2nd Sunday of Easter

This is indeed a strange time in the life of the Church, after the death of the Holy Father – a Sede Vacante, the See of Rome is vacant; the Vicar of Christ is dead. With Pope St Gregory, we could reflect that while the earthly shepherd is struck, the sheep might scatter, but we have hope in the Risen Lord, Who has never abandoned His Church – not before the papacy, during it, or now. Though, for a moment, the shadow of St Peter’s successor is withdrawn from the world, the light of Christ remains.

In many ways, this Sunday urges us to think of the mercy of God towards sinners – alive or dead, pope or parishioner, known to us personally or united only to us by Holy Baptism or by our creation in the image of God. With the Psalmist, we can celebrate that “His mercy endures for ever”, working in the souls of those who turn towards the Lord. In this cry for help, there is great hope.

And why do we have this hope? Because “Christ our hope”, Who died and is alive forevermore – as St John recalls in our Second Reading – has “the keys of Death and Hades”. This is not a vain or fictional hope, but one based in the truth that Christ has truly died, is truly risen and has conquered death, sin and despair.

In gratitude to the Lord for this, we have a duty to call to the Lord for His mercy. How can we do this?

1. We can do this for ourselves in the Sacrament of Confession, where we make an Act of Contrition. We turn to the Lord, Who is merciful to repentant sinners, and is gracious to pardon us from our sins. The Gospel recalls that instruction from Jesus to His Apostles to absolve: this is the ordinary means in which God wills to share His mercy with us. Our Lord breathes on them, urging them to give new life to those who were previously dead in sin; they are to be a new creation, set apart from the Lord, called to renounce Satan, sin and the lure of evil.

Let’s go often to confession. Though the Church’s Precepts require a confession once a year, at Easter, we should not be afraid or ashamed to go more often: no less than once a month; once a fortnight if you can bear it; once a week if the Fathers can!

And how can we make the most of this great sacrament. We should prepare well with a thorough examination of conscience, such as we can find in those old manuals and prayer books – we might follow the commandments, the beatitudes, the virtues or some other method. We are focusing, in this, not so much on our waywardness, but on God’s love that calls us out of sin and to Himself. We try to be careful in confession to confess our own failings, and not those of others: our time in the confessional is not to complain about how awful our spouse is, or our children or our colleagues – this is a privileged moment of self-accusation, in which the God’s mercy is applied to the soul. And in this confession of all matter demanding confession, without summarising, proposing a “highlights package” or a snapshot of the things that trouble us most, we make no excuses for the sins. We’ve committed them, and so we confess them, knowing that the Lord is committed to setting us free. Those older, and reliable, guides for confession recommended that penitents express, in addition to the nature of the sin, the number – a guide to the frequency with which we commit the sin. Here, without being too scrupulous about it, or obsessively marking it out, we want to offer a truthful, honest account of our actions, appealing to Christ-Who-is-Truth to save us. Where possible, without excessive detail, we might tell the priest about the circumstances in which fall into sins; he may have some earthly counsel to assist us in avoiding the occasions of sin. But it’s the supernatural help that is most important of all.

By this point, we can express that desire with which we’ve come to confession – that we are sorry for our sins, and desire not to sin again. We may stumble here, thinking that our weakness is too great, or that future sin is inevitable. We must fight against the dread of the potential future occasion, trusting that in that moment of confession, at that time of accusation, we have full trust in God’s goodness and our love for Him, which will make us hate the things which offend Him, and make a good act of contrition. We don’t promise to “try” not to sin again; we are resolved that – in that moment, trusting in the Lord, loving what He loves and loving Him most of all – that we will not sin again. The words of absolution, then, come to us like a spiritual new breath; the old man is gone, the new is come. We undertake our penance diligently, knowing that the Lord has done all that He wills to set us free, and we now have our small part to play – in thanksgiving, and in justice, to set right in time what the Lord has accomplished in eternity.

2. But we should also ask the Lord, by our prayers and by acts of self-denial, for the grace of conversion in unrepentant sinners, too. This is mysteriously connected to the grace of reparation, us making up for the sins of others, just as Our Lord has taken our sins on Himself for love. We can offer a kiss of love to the Lord Who is offended by so much unrepentant sin. But our love for Him and for the world must not end here: we should ardently pray that unrepentant sinners experience the love of God, abandon their sins, and turn away from wrongdoing. The first of these, of course, is us; we then must pray for the conversion of the world.

3. And not only for the living, but also for the dead: we have a duty, bound up in the love of Christ, to pray for the liberation of our brothers and sisters who have died, but remain connected to us by Divine charity. We must pray for those known to us; we should pray, daily, for all the faithful departed. Especially now, we should pray for the soul of Pope Francis, whose stands before the judgement seat of God, supported by the prayers of the Church that was entrusted to his care.

We have great confidence to believe in God’s mercy, which is far greater than our human weakness. But we must choose to commend ourselves to it. It is in a mercy in which we are called not to doubt, but to believe. It is a mercy that urges us not to stand idly by, feeling that God will “sort it all out for us” at the end of time. Rather, it is a mercy that is available to all, even if some choose to reject it, ignore it or choose to receive it all too infrequently. It is justly applied to souls who are open to the transforming grace of the Lord, Who has called us to “put on the new man”, to “forget what is behind us”, to “confess our sins to one another”, and to live “no longer for ourselves, but for Christ who died for us”.

And so, let us follow the Divine inspiration to seek for God’s mercy, for ourselves, for the living and for the dead. Amen.