Holy Land Homily - Day 3

Deacon Patrick van der Vorst

Rev Patrick van der Vorst delivered this homily on 13th April 2023 at the Mass of the Resurrection, to our pilgrim group in St Anne's Church, in Jerusalem.

Colossians 3: 1-4
John 20: 1-9

At yesterday's mass we found ourselves on the Mount of Olives, overlooking Jerusalem. Today we are in the very heart of Jerusalem, a holy city for Christians, Jews and Muslims.

And the Church of Saint Anne reflects this myriad of influences and overlaps of all three religions.

The Roman built a pagan temple on this very site. Then followed a Byzantine basilica in the 5th century, which then was destroyed under Persian rule in the 6th century, to make way for a crusader Church built in 1131. Then that church came briefly under Islamic rule, etc… What this juxtaposition of cultures, religions and influences shows, is that there is always a need for close inter religious dialogue.

Are our three Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) different? Yes, sure they are. But there are a whole load of overlaps too and things we share in common.

So why are you and I here today, as Catholics?

The short answer is simple: we are here because we believe in the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ!

The long answer however is more complex. Each of us will have our own private responses to why we are here… because we all have our own, individual relationship with Christ… And yes, that is what it is all about, about having that private personal friendship with him. But we are not alone in our faith and we cannot live our faith alone. Through our faith we are linked to the community of the Church. And this is what we celebrate here today being in Jerusalem. We are part of this wonderful vast Christian community which finds its very roots in the Resurrection of Christ.

We are part of our two thousand year old Church who thorough all generations, places and time, has displayed and continues to display quiet, persistent, generous, beautiful daily heroics through all of you, far away from the radar of the media who often gives our Catholic Church a bad press. For two thousand years ordinary people have in the name of Christ:

Loved
Forgiven
Fed the hungry
Cared for the sick
Look after the poor…
… and whilst this is not something of course solely done by Christians, it is nevertheless something to be very proud of and something we do well.

As a church we have been at the forefront of education (learning people to read and write), with literally hundreds of thousands of schools allover the world. We have been at the forefront of healthcare with again hundreds of thousands of hospitals across the globe. We are still the largest AIDS care providers on the world…

Also think of all the saints from ordinary backgrounds who have helped inspired the world:

A wife and widow: Saint Monica
A soldier and warrior: Saint Ignatius of Loyola
A sailor: Saint Brendan
A baker: Saint Honorius of Amiens
A computer programmer : Saint Carlo Acutis

We are at the forefront of social justice, fighting so many injustices throughout the world. We celebrate the sanctity of life, we want to protect nature, we encourage creativity, etc..

Why am I saying all this?

Just because we should celebrate that we are part of this incredibly rich texture of the community of our Church…

And we do all this with a great sense of urgency….. and this sense of urgency is coming our so beautifully in our Gospel reading today:

"Mary of Magdala" RAN to Simon Peter and the other disciple
"The Peter and the other disciple RAN to the tomb…
When do we run? We run because there is something urgent to do. We run because we are patient to see things for ourselves. That is exactly why the three protagonists of our Gospel Mary Magdalene, Peter and the disciple ran: they were impatient to see what had happened and then impatient to share the good news.

Do we share their sense of urgency?

This sense of urgency is very much highlighted in our ops Easter liturgies. As you know we are now in the Easter octave, that begins on Easter Sunday and ends with the following Sunday: if we were back home in London, we would be following the normal readings of the Easter Octave week, and every day we would read a different account of the Resurrection story, a different aspect. But ALL those readings share this same sense of urgency of the early Church, an urgency to share the good news.

That is also why there are no readings of the Old Testament during eastertide (the 50 days after Easter, between Easter and pentecost), as we want to accentuate this sense of urgency, this forward-looking, the future building of the Church. Many readings are of the Acts of the Apostles, as we want to act, we want to do things, move forward, look ahead at what needs doing.

But that doesn't come without challenges! Think of Jerusalem here and the many challenges it faced over the years. Founded in the 4th millennium before Christ, Jerusalem has seen so many challenges in its history. The city was:

besieged twenty three times,
completely destroyed twice,
attacked fifty two times
and reconquered 44 times.
Somehow Jerusalem has always picked herself up, rose again and always rebuilt herself.

Same goes for our spiritual lives. We can feel we are under attack at times, we are at a loss, but we pick ourselves up and move forward.

But yes, faith is a challenge. And what the Church asks from us is immense; the bar is set high.

What we have to always bear in mind however is that whilst the Church is extreme in its demands it is extreme in its forgiveness too. Better to be part of such a Church, than be part of a church which would set bar lower, but then also be less forgiving.

And this brings us to the core of our Christian faith: forgiveness. I don't think it would be unfair to say that most other ancient or contemporary religions place forgiveness at the very heart of their faith. Many would even hold an eye-for-an-eye mentality. But for us, Christ came for the forgiveness of sins. He walked this very road outside the church we find ourselves in, carrying the cross, so that we may be forgiven. And he asks of us to do the same.

But forgiving takes practise. It is not something we do occasionally. We must do it every day. If you want to become a gardener, your don't become one merely by reading books or online articles, or talking about it. You became a gardener by lifting up a spade, plant seeds, weed, trim, etc… The more gardening we do, the better gardeners we are. The more forgiving we do, the better Christians we will be.

That is why I want to personally pray here on this very site for our societies in the West. They are largely societies where Christianity is less and less present… the danger is that when that happens… forgiveness will soon fade away too…