The world’s hope

An excerpt from Pope Francis’s Easter Sunday homily:

“We are not alone: Jesus, the living one, is with us, forever. Today our hopes no longer come up against the wall of death, for the Lord has built us a bridge to life. At Easter, the destiny of the world was changed. …Our hope is not an illusion, but the truth! And that, in the wake of Easter, humanity’s journey, now marked by hope, advances all the more readily. …At Easter, then, the journey quickens and becomes a race, since humanity now sees the goal of its journey, the meaning of its destiny, Jesus Christ, and is called to make haste to meet him, who is the hope of the world.”

Where our love story begins

An excerpt from the pope’s Easter Vigil homily:

“This, then, is what the Pasch of the Lord accomplishes: it motivates us to move forward, to leave behind our sense of defeat, to roll away the stone of the tombs in which we often imprison our hope, and to look with confidence to the future, for Christ is risen and has changed the direction of history. Yet, to do this, the Pasch of the Lord takes us back to the grace of our own past; it brings us back to Galilee, where our love story with Jesus began, where the first call took place.”

Leave our graves

An excerpt from Patriarch of Jerusalem Pierbattista Pizzaballa’s Easter Vigil homily:

“It is the Church’s task to proclaim that new dynamism of life, which from the angel reaches the women, from the women reaches the disciples, and from them reaches the whole world. It is the one thing the Church is called to do and for which she exists: to announce that Christ is risen, is the Kyrios. We too, like the women, may not understand everything. We too, like the disciples, may be uncertain and doubtful to the end, with only a hint of faith. Yet we are not asked to be perfect, but only to accept to turn around, to leave our graves, not to give in to our small and big deaths.”

(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)