Easter Vigil, 2025

St. John’s Cathedral, Limerick

Homily of Bishop Brendan Leahy

This year, Christians all over the world are celebrating Easter on the same day. It’s not always like that for reasons to do with history and calendar changes. It has never been easy to get all the churches agreeing on a common date. But this year, by coincidence (but nothing happens just by coincidence in God’s plans), it is the same day. So that is special. Together we are saying, as the Orthodox churches puts it, “Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed!”. Together we are remembering the amazing story of Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome discovering an empty tomb and hearing a young man say to them: “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised”.

This year is special not only because of the common date for the celebration of Easter but also because this year we are celebrating the 1700^th anniversary of the Nicene creed that we recite every Sunday. In that Creed we all declare what we received from the women, Peter and then also the apostles – our common belief that Jesus Christ is not just a man but is God. Despite difficulties and struggles over the centuries, this basic belief remains a source of huge inspiration to us all for our personal and social lives. It is also this belief that should spur us into action, to work together to let this man-God, now risen from the dead, continue his work of healing and building community in the world, creating a more united world, a world of justice and truth, peace and reconciliation.

Yes, this Easter day we are celebrating the most amazing news that Jesus, the man-God who walked this earth, sharing with us our joys and sufferings, right up to experiencing annihilation, abandonment and isolation as we saw on Good Friday has broken through to another level of life. He is risen. He has moved from darkness to light. He has opened up for us a promise of what is to come also for us. He is already at work inspiring us to believe that we can break through the walls of despair and darkness. Despite everything, no matter what winter we’re going through, there is hope. The Risen Jesus is now present and working in every point of the world, in each person and in every situation, helping us overcome darkness.

Easter is certainly a time to renew this faith in the Risen Jesus. But it is also a time to strength our love and hope in the Risen Jesus. And since this year is a Jubilee Year to which Pope Francis has given the title “pilgrims of hope”, let’s focus especially on hope this Easter. Faith is knowing the truth that we believe in. Love is what unites us to the God-man, the Truth that we want to follow, the Person with whom we want to be united. But it is hope that spurs us on to strive to be united in love with the Risen Christ we believe in. Based on our belief in Jesus Christ, hope is the virtue or inner strength that pushes us to love, to love one another, to keep going, to begin again, to endure hardships and to face even death itself with courage.

We need to pray for the gift of hope that can be dented when we see so many difficulties around us. To encourage us, I would like to quote a few lines from Pope Benedict who wrote a wonderful encyclical letter on hope a few years ago. He movingly wrote about the image of the Crucified-Risen Jesus as our Shepherd who accompanies us when we might feel we are utterly alone and surrounded by darkness and difficulties, including the reality of death: “The true shepherd is one who knows even the path that passes through the valley of death; one who walks with me even on the path of final solitude, where no one can accompany me, guiding me through: he himself has walked this path, he has descended into the kingdom of death, he has conquered death, and he has returned to accompany us now and to give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through.” (Spe Salvi, 6).

Yes, we are not on our own. The Risen Jesus now accompanies us. He is among us. We can find a way through challenges, negativity, despair and death. This gives us great hope. And, as Benedict puts it, “the one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life…”. Because of the great certitude of hope, we can do our part to make a difference in the world. We have the great hope “that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere”.

This is the hope that comes from Easter that Christians all over the world are celebrating together this year. Let’s ask God to fill us more and more with this hope that does not disappoint.