Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Easter Sunday

April 8, 2023

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.8.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to wish you and your family a Happy Easter as we enter into the consequential conversation the Lord Jesus, risen from the dead, wants to have with each of us. He wants to meet us like he met Mary Magdalene in the Garden and call us by name. He wants to converse with us like he did with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, to make our hearts burn as he explains the word of God to us and helps us to recognize him in the Breaking of the Bread. He wants to speak with us like he spoke with the fearful apostles in the Upper Room, to wish us peace, to show us his hands and his side, to impart to us the Holy Spirit, and to send us out from the Upper Room, like he sent them, as witnesses to his resurrection. Jesus ultimately wants to change our lives this Easter and help us to enter more deeply than ever before into his triumph of light over darkness, joy over sadness, love over hatred, and life over death. For this to occur, however, we can’t live Easter in a routine way, as just another important day that will expire in 24 hours. We can’t live it just as an Octave or a 50-day season. We really have to let what Easter means sink deeply within us so that it changes our thinking, our being, our doing, our loving. We have to enter into the Easter metamorphosis.

* The Easter Proclamation, popularly called the Exsultet from its first word in Latin, describes this metamorphosis. What some have called the “Gospel of Easter” or the “Easter Kerygma” is sung at the beginning of the Easter Vigil, after the blessing of the Easter fire and the blessing and lighting of the Paschal Candle. The Church has been singing it for 15 to 17 centuries at the start of her Easter celebrations to try to sum up, despite the poverty of human language, the world-changing importance of Christ’s Easter triumph. I hope that you have the chance to hear it by attending the Easter Vigil, which is the most important and beautiful liturgy of the whole year in which the Church pulls out all the stops in praise and thanksgiving to God for the gift of salvation Christ has brought us. I’d like to highlight a couple elements of it to describe the consequences of the conversation our encounter with the risen Christ is supposed to have.

* The first consequence is joy. In the Exsultet, the deacon, or if he’s not present, the priest, sings with jubilation like a trumpet of salvation the Church’s joy at Christ the King’s triumph, encouraging us to make the holy sanctuaries of the Church “shake with joy” as with “ardent love of mind and heart” we praise God for what he has done for us. We sing of how, in the Sacred Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter, Jesus fulfilled the ancient Jewish Passover rites. “These, then,” we sing, “are the feasts of Passover, in which is slain the Lamb, the one true Lamb, whose Blood anoints the doorposts of believers.” We reenact, so to speak, with the procession of the Paschal Candle, symbolizing Christ and his light, how God led the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt behind the pillar of fire. And we sing of how Christ has liberated us from more than slavery to Pharoah, but has broken the “prison-bars of death and rose victorious,” leading us on an exodus from sin into the life of grace and communion with the saints. The first revolution in our life encountering the Risen Lord is meant to have abundant joy at his Resurrection,