Sermons by Fr Guy Nicholls (Cong Orat), our Chaplain

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, each year after Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate a sequence of feast days in which we give thanks to God for some of the most wonderful mysteries of our faith: first of these was last Sunday’s solemnity of the Holy Trinity, of God as He has revealed Himself to us in His own inner life in order to invite us to share in that divine life. Next Friday we will celebrate the solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the mystery of the heart whereby God-made-man loves us to the end: which is His total self-giving for us on the cross. Today we celebrate a feast which comes between the Trinity and the Sacred Heart, the solemnity of the Most holy Body and Blood of our Lord, commonly known as ‘Corpus Christi’ which is not only a mystery in heaven, like the Trinity and the Sacred Heart, but is fully present and alive to us here and now on the earth.

In the second reading we heard St Paul’s account of the Last Supper, at which our Lord took bread and gave thanks to God and gave it to His disciples as He solemnly announced to them that ‘This is my Body’. Sometime before this Last Supper Our Lord had taught that He was the living bread, and that unless we eat Him we cannot have life in Him. At the Last Supper He was fulfilling that promise and added to it this command: ‘Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body.’

Nor was this His only gift at the table that holy night, for at the end of the supper He took the chalice and said: ‘this is the chalice of my Blood’. The feast which we are celebrating today is that of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ our Lord, ‘Corpus et Sanguis Christi.’ You see how His Body and Blood are consecrated separately at Mass, first the bread and then the wine, recalling how they were separated when every last drop of His Blood was shed on Calvary. Then, just before Communion, you see that a fragment of the broken Body of Christ is dropped into the chalice to signify that the Body and Blood are reunited at the resurrection, and that they will remain united for all eternity in heaven, and that it is the Body and Blood together that we receive in Holy Communion.

But let me go back to those first words St Paul tells us that our Lord said at the Last Supper: ‘this is my Body.’ The words tell us what that bread in His hands has now become, its new reality. It is no longer bread, then, but the Body of Christ. So, just why did He turn bread into His Body? It was so that we might eat his flesh. Think now about these words: ‘This is my Body’. Do we not hear them spoken often today by people who mean the exact opposite of what Christ means? See what happens if we change the emphasis from our Lord’s words: ‘This is my Body’ to ‘this is my body’. Don’t we hear these words from people today who want to claim absolute rights over their own bodies? Isn’t this what we get in a society where women now have the right to destroy their babies in the womb for no other reason than that they are ‘in my body’? This is what the decriminalization of abortion which was voted in last week in Parliament has led us to. What does it take for a mother to want to kill the child in her womb? It is the sense that that child is somehow opposing and denying the freedom and personal autonomy of the mother. ‘This is my body’ becomes the justification for making the free choice to destroy that other person that child, it’s ‘my body, my choice’.

Moreover, isn’t this idea of my body, my choice, what lies behind the new law also passed in Parliament last week, that allows people to kill themselves, and to force others to assist them to do so? It’s my body, it’s my life, or rather: it’s my body, it’s my death if I want it so. And so what Pope John Paul II called the ‘Culture of death’ has spread like a cancer and has poisoned our laws and the minds of so many people, so that out of the murder of the unborn child comes the death-wish of assisted suicide – It is not just that this law permits those who want to end their own lives for whatever reason with a doctor’s help, but more sinister still, this new law does not prevent those who want to free themselves of the burden and expense in of elderly relatives in need of loving care and of help in their final years, from pressurizing them to seek assisted suicide. So inevitably we will move from the apparent but illusory mercy of assisted suicide to the deliberate, legalized murder of the helpless aged and infirm.

How different this is from our Lord, who, according to St Paul, after saying ‘This is my Body’, goes on to say, not, ‘which is for what I want to do with it’, but rather, ‘which is for you’. With those words, above all, our Lord is saying the exact opposite of what the modern mantra ‘this is my body’ is saying. Our Lord is saying to us that His Body is not for His own private ends, much less kept back from suffering for His own selfish purposes, but rather ‘this is my body which I offer up both here and now for you to eat, and also will offer up tomorrow on the cross to take away your sin and reconcile you to the Father so that you may live for ever in heaven.’ And this is the beauty of what our Lord does: He gives us His Body to eat so that we may be nourished by Him. He gives us His body on the cross so that we may be saved by Him.

When we eat food, we eat something that is dead. But when we eat the Body of Christ we eat that which is alive. Yes, it is in the form or appearance of bread, since that is what it was before our Lord changed it, but it is no longer bread, because now it has been changed into His Body. Because our Lord’s flesh is alive, it has the life of Christ’s soul in it. It is not dead flesh but living. And the flesh of Christ, His sacred Body on the Altar, is living not for Himself but for us. ‘This is my Body which is for you.’ He gave up His life for us, He surrendered His Body for us, so that we might be nourished and fed from Him. Do we not often say, ‘you are what you eat’? If that is true from eating food that is essentially dead, what far greater results come to us from eating that which is truly alive and life-giving? What is dead we can change into ourselves. But the Body of Christ which is alive changes us into Himself, transforms us into His likeness, preparing us for the resurrection.

Very soon I will once more pronounce those sacred words of our Lord: ‘This is my Body, which is given up for you,’ and the commandment which accompanies it: ‘do this in remembrance of me’. Remembrance here is not simply a casting back of the mind to a past and finished event. When we ‘do this in remembrance of Him’ we are not simply play-acting something that is over and done with. We are doing that which makes real the very thing we commemorate. Jesus gave His Body to His apostles the night before He gave it up on the cross. The sacrifice of Calvary was already present in the act of handing over His Body at the Supper. For us, the sacrifice of Calvary is still present whenever we celebrate the Mass. For the Mass is not a mere commemoration, it is the re-presentation, here and now, of all that Jesus did both at the Last Supper and on the cross. This is why we call the Mass a Sacrifice, and why our Lord’s words: ‘this is my Body’ were not meant as a mere symbol of His Body, but as the real, literal truth. The miracle of the Body and Blood of Christ is not only meant to make us wonder with amazement at such a miracle, that Jesus should turn bread and wine into His flesh and Blood, but also to be conscious and aware that we are being nourished and transformed into the likeness of the One who feeds us in this wonderful way.

As a reminder of what it is that we celebrate at every Mass, and in order to emphasise the meaning of the great feast we are celebrating particularly today, when you come to receive Holy Communion I will show you the Sacred Host as usual but using the Latin words which are the popular name of this day: ‘Corpus Christi’; to which, as usual, you reply ‘Amen’ before you receive with all due reverence and devotion the Body and Blood of Christ.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren in Christ, exactly seventeen hundred years ago and just over two thousand miles away there took place a meeting of over two hundred bishops that, despite distance of time and space, still has enormous significance for us today. For it was in June and July of the year 325 A.D. that those bishops met to discuss the faith of the Catholic Church which we hold firmly. In only a few minutes’ time we will proclaim our faith using, at least in good part, the same words that were discussed and then approved at that meeting which we call the ‘Council of Nicea’, and it was the very first of the ecumenical councils, of which there have been twenty one in all, the latest being the Second Vatican Council which met in Rome between 1963 and 1965. These twenty-one Councils are all known as ‘ecumenical’, from a Greek word meaning ‘the whole inhabited world’. Hence, an ecumenical Council is one in which bishops from all over the Catholic Church take part, and it has significance for the entire Catholic world. Such is the first Council of Nicaea whose anniversary we are now celebrating.

That council, important as it was, lasted only two months, yet it discussed and decided upon many important issues, some of which I will speak about in the coming weeks, because they still have a bearing on our life and our faith. But the most important fruit of that first Council of Nicaea of the year 325 was the promulgation or declaration of the Creed, that is the statement of belief, concerning above all the Church’s faith in Jesus as the only-begotten Son of God. Now the Creed which we will proclaim soon is, as I said, partly the same as that which the Council Fathers decreed at Nicaea, and partly as it was further developed at the next Church Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. Now the Council of Nicaea was concerned mainly with the divine state of Jesus as the Son of God, while the first Council of Constantinople over fifty years later not only restated the faith of the Nicene Creed, but added to it an important declaration of faith in the divinity of the Holy Spirit. That Creed, the one taught by the Council of Constantinople and based on the Creed of the Council of Nicaea, is the very one in which we will proclaim our faith in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in a few minutes’ time. Hence it is properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.

Why was it necessary for so many bishops to be summoned to Nicaea in 325 to discuss the Catholic faith? It was because the Christian faith in God had been questioned in a most serious way by a theologian called Arius. He thought that since there is only one God, then God can only be one person – and that person is the One whom we call ‘The Father’. For Arius, then, the Son, whom we know as Jesus, was not and could not be God. Only the Father could be truly God. So what was Jesus? Was He anything more than just a man – the son of Mary? Arius thought that Jesus was indeed more than just a man, because the Church had always taught that Jesus was more than a man: He was described in the Gospels and in the New Testament as ‘Lord’, as the ‘Word of God’, and as the ‘Son of God’. But what exactly did these titles mean? All right, Jesus is of a far higher status than any man, but how high exactly? Arius had an idea. Jesus is the ‘Wisdom of God’ as we heard in today’s first reading. This Wisdom is a special person below God. Now God has no beginning. He is eternal and without change. But what happens when creation takes place? Doesn’t God change when He created the world? At the beginning of the first reading we heard something which Arius took to mean that Jesus Himself was the Wisdom of God, and that He came into existence when God the Father ‘made’ Him. So the reading said: The Lord (that is God) possessed me (that is, Wisdom) at the beginning of his work (that is, creation)…Ages ago I was set up, the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth…’ Now, if Wisdom, who later became Mary’s Son whom we call Jesus, was a creature, then He could not be God like the Father. He could only be at the best the greatest of all creatures – but not true God. It was this that Catholics could not accept. Our Lord’s own words showed that He was ‘one with the Father.’

Just to take an example from today’s Gospel reading from St John, where our Lord told the Apostles: ‘all that the Father has is mine.’ What He meant by these words was made clearer in the words He spoke about the Holy Spirit: [the Spirit] ‘will glorify me, for He will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that He will take what is mine and declare it to you.’ In these and other words spoken by our Lord in the Gospels, we understand that Jesus Himself knew that He was one being with the Father by nature, and also that the Holy Spirit was the divine Spirit of God who shared in the being of God and of the knowledge of God with the Father and Jesus.

Now this understanding of Jesus’s words was not new. The Apostles had taught that Jesus was the Son of God, the Word of God, that is the expression of everything that God the Father is. They had also taught that, as we heard St Paul say in the second reading this morning: ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’ This is what we celebrated a week ago on Pentecost Sunday, and which fulfilled our Lord’s promise in the Gospel: ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and he will declare it to you.’

So when the Bishops met at Nicaea they discussed Arius’s theory that Jesus was not God, but only the greatest of all creatures, and that only the Father was God. They knew that this was not what Jesus had taught the Apostles, and not what the Apostles had written about Jesus. Nor was this only in the readings we have heard today. Our Lord had told the Apostles at His Ascension: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…’ So it was that from the very beginning of the era of the Church after Pentecost Sunday, the Apostles obeyed the Lord’s command to preach and baptize in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit who are One God. It is that faith which the Fathers of Nicaea professeed when they proclaimed that Jesus is ‘the only begotten Son of God’ not born in time, but eternally, for there never was any moment before He existed, but He always has been, as we say: ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God;’ then we acknowledge that although He is Son, this does not mean that He comes into being after His Father, as a human son does, but that the Father is never without His only-begotten Son. Then, contrary to Arius, we state that when we call Jesus ‘only-begotten Son’ we mean that He is not made, He is not created. There was no time when He did not already exist totally as God. Again, against Arius, who said that Jesus was a creature and made out of some substance other than the Father’s, the Council Fathers proclaimed that Jesus as God is of the same substance as the Father, which is in Latin ‘consubstantial’ with the Father.

But of course, the Church did not believe that only the Father and the Son shared the same substance, the same divine nature, but so does the Holy Spirit, which is why we say that the Spirit is adored and glorified with the Father and the Son. It would after all be idolatry to worship as God any being that is not God. So, for instance, we honour Mary with unequalled honour among all the angels and saints, but we do not worship her as God. However, this we most certainly do regarding the Holy Spirit. He is ‘the Lord and giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, meaning that He exists in the identical divine nature as the Father and the Son. And so it is that we believe, not in three gods, but in One God, and that this One God has made Himself known to us both in one infinite divine nature or substance, and in three co-equal persons sharing this divine nature – none of them being any more divine than the others.

From this faith, the faith of the Fathers of Nicea and Constantinople, we have a wonderful statement in the Mass of Trinity Sunday, in the Preface which we will hear shortly: ‘It is truly right and just…always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God. For with your only Begotten Son and the Holy Spirit you are one God, one Lord: not in the unity of a single person, but in a Trinity of one substance. For what you have revealed to us of your glory we believe equally of your Son and of the Holy Spirit, so that, in the confessing of the true and eternal Godhead, , you might be adored in what is proper to each Person, their unity in substance, and their equality in majesty.’

This is the wonderful and adorable mystery of faith which we both proclaim and worship on this joyful feast. We rejoice that God has so loved us as to share with us the inner mystery of his love and of His essence. May He grant that we all come to know, love and rejoice in this glorious mystery together with our Lady and all the angels and saints for all eternity to come. Amen.

Dear Sisters, throughout the liturgical year, when we celebrate Feasts of the Lord from His Incarnation and Birth to His Resurrection and Ascension, we call to mind those events which annually we commemorate so as to bring them alive once more within the Church, the living Body of Christ on earth which celebrates them. By ‘bringing them alive’, I do mean something far more than making them strike us through, and in, our powers of imagination.

When, for instance, we celebrate Christmas, our aim in doing so is more than merely to recall a beautiful moment in the distant past and a remote village in Palestine. It is to make present here and now the Christ child as the invisible God made visible among us, so that we may be seized, rapt, by love of the immensity who has made Himself one of us.

And when we celebrate the Mass of the Last Supper, it is not simply to commemorate the anniversary of that time of the year when, two thousand years ago, our Saviour hosted the Last Supper before He would depart from His apostles to go to the Father after His death, but it is to receive once more here and now His Body and Blood just as He gave it to His Disciples to offer to the Father, and to eat and drink for their bodily and spiritual nourishment.

And when we celebrate the Resurrection and Ascension, we do so not merely to call to mind the glorious event of the rising from the dead and the entry into heavenly glory of the Son of God and of Mary, but we do so in order to prepare ourselves, as members of His body here and now, for the vital truth that He has gone before us only in order to prepare a way for us to join Him in His risen glory in the eternal presence of the Trinity in heaven.

All this is made possible because of the event which we celebrate this day. For although we are commemorating an event that took place very shortly after those others we have just recounted, this one is different in a very important way. For in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as the Son had promised He would send from the Father, we do not consider only an event that took place on that day, but one which began that day and has never ceased to continue happening ever since.

Last night we listened to the account in Genesis of the confused ‘tower of babble’ which was the consequence and punishment of human rebellion against the Creator. As we did so, we recalled in that very account that the Holy Spirit Himself was preparing the ground for the antidote to babble and confusion: the restoration of the one language and the gift of understanding, poured out on those who profess their faith in God at their baptism. It is about this antidote that we have heard in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Nor is it merely the wonder that men of so many diverse languages and tongues suddenly found that they were all equally able to understand what they heard, but that what was being proclaimed to them were what scripture calls the ‘mirabilia Dei’ - the ‘marvels of God’.

For all that God had done in the incarnation and paschal mystery of His Son, all that was now being proclaimed in a new way – these events in Christ’s life and death are all ‘marvellous deeds of God’, a way leading to faith and to new understanding of God and His designs for us. No longer was there to be the babble of human confusion and the competition of many voices in declaring what we are, and how we have no hope beyond our death. For all those different ‘ways’ of claiming to know God were not only in competition with each other, but ultimately gave no understanding that endured the test of the great problem that faced everyone who came into the world: death.

The central importance of the message of Pentecost is that we have been given - not only the gift of life by the one who hovered over chaos at the beginning of creation and brought it all into order and beauty, but that He, the Spirit of God, continues to make all good, and to give the gift of understanding to those who are confused and bewildered by our very existence, and who see no hope in the end beyond the horrid barrier of our death approaching sooner or later.

The Spirit not only shows us that Christ is alive and assists us in preaching this truth, but He gives even to us the reality of this same life, through the power of the sacraments, and above all through the central act of our faith: Holy Mass. Pentecost is the one moment of the work of our redemption that continues unabated throughout history. It is the same Holy Spirit who came down on our Lady and the Apostles at that first Pentecost that still comes down now upon us and upon the gifts we offer on the altar so that they may become the Body and Blood of Christ. This present Pentecost is not merely a recalling of the first Pentecost, but is in fact its continuation.

The Holy Spirit no longer comes down in tongues of fire and in the sound of a rushing wind, simply because on that first day of Pentecost those were signs of a new reality which the Apostles needed in order to begin to understand what was happening. For every subsequent generation of new Christians the signs are no longer necessary because we know from the Apostles what the meaning of those signs is. We know by faith that the Holy Spirit who came down on them on that first Christian Pentecost is the same Holy Spirit who is coming down today upon us and upon the bread and wine that they may become our Eucharistic offering and nourishment. It is this same Spirit who, as St Paul teaches us, comes into our hearts and makes us cry out ‘Abba! Father!’ Our Lord has taught us to call God ‘our Father’, but it is the Holy Spirit who actually enables us to do so, by making us children of God in baptism, and coheirs with Christ of His glory in heaven.

Whatever the world’s babble does to attempt to bring back chaos, whatever it does to try and strike fear in us and threaten us with all kinds of mockery and doubt, and even despite the suffering it imposes on believers on account of the name of Christ which we bear, it is the Holy Spirit who can, and does, drive out all fear from us. This He does in the same way in which He first did it for the Apostles. When we recollect that they were poor, confused and demoralised by the death of Christ, and still could not quite take in what had happened to Him so much that they went back to former ways of life as fishermen in Galilee even after seeing Him in Jerusalem; and though they remained in the Upper Room after the Ascension, still doubtless out of fear of what the authorities might do to them, this was not where they would stay for long.

For it was on this day that the great inward change was brought about in them. The tongues of fire separated in order to rest on each of them and make them one. He gave them the gift of tongues so that they might be the better able to preach the truth about Christ’s resurrection and about our redemption in Him through forgiveness of our sins.

For the Holy Spirit is our teacher, as our Lord promised, bringing us the gift of understanding all that our Lord made known. He is our sanctifier, making us holy through the gifts which He gives us in the Sacraments, and there is no gift more holy, nor more giving of strength, joy and communion with God than the Eucharist which we share. For we remember that this gift, given by the Son and Spirit to the Church, will not only remain with us throughout this life until the moment we leave it to enter His presence, but it will be at the heart of our future life with the Trinity, the communion in us of Father, Son and Spirit which will make us His home, and of our dwelling in the Trinity, to make Him our everlasting home. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ; once again we are in the Novena for Pentecost, and in particular the Sunday within the Novena. For that reason, the Church presents to us each year on this Sunday a different excerpt from chapter 17 of St John’s Gospel which has been rightly called our Lord’s ‘Priestly Prayer’. It is truly right and just that on the Lord’s Day we should listen to our Lord’s own Prayer of Consecration at the Last Supper. One of the first things we note is that each time we read an extract from this long chapter, we repeat at the beginning the same words which open that chapter, ‘raising His eyes to heaven, Jesus said, “Father…”’.

The whole of the mystery of Christ’s work on earth can be summed up in this prayer of consecration, uttered by our Lord alone after all else has fallen silent, uttered as He offers Himself to the Father in anticipation of the offering He will accomplish on the morrow. He is the priest, indeed the only priest of the new and eternal covenant. When we pray the Mass, the central point is the Eucharistic Prayer, the Great Prayer as it is called in the Christian East, which is modelled on this prayer of Christ the High Priest. Like our Lord Himself, in the Canon of the Mass the priest who stands in persona Christi, at the beginning of the narration of the Last Supper consecration of the bread and the wine, raises his eyes to heaven in imitation of our Lord, before he goes on to speak those wonderful and extraordinary words: ‘take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body which will be given up for you,’ and ‘take this, all of you, and drink of it, for this is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the New and Eternal Covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins; do this in memory of me.’

The Body which will be given up, that is, handed over; and the Blood which will be poured out, as into a vessel for us to drink from; these together are our Paschal Lamb of sacrifice. It is at this wonderful time of the year that we celebrate the Pasch of Christ, which so far surpasses the Pasch of the Old Testament, as His priesthood surpasses that of Aaron and Levi and their successors.

In the passage of chapter 17 which we read today, the final section of the chapter, the prayer comes to a climax. Jesus prays to His ‘righteous Father’, not only for those who hear these words for the first time, but for all those who, through hearing their preaching of His word, will come to faith in Him. How wonderful it is to know that He is not only present to us when His word is solemnly read at Mass, but that He already had us in mind, us who are here today, when He uttered that prayer the first time. He had us in His heart even before we were made. He longed for our time to come so that He might bring us to Himself, unite us to Himself, fill us with His joy and with His Holy Spirit.

How wonderful it is to realise that these words: ‘Righteous Father,…I have made your name known to these and will continue to make it known, so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and so that I may be in them’, these words, I say, are spoken for us to hear. We are those to whom our Lord makes His Father’s name known. He not only makes it known once, but, as He says, He continues to do so. He does this ‘so that the love with which you loved me may be in them’. This love with which the Father loves the Son, and with which the Son loves His Father in perfect return, is the love which is God Himself, the Holy Spirit of God, the bond of love. Our Lord, then, is praying the Father that the self-same love which they share, which is the Holy Spirit in person, may be in us, too. Our Lord’s prayer is that out of this love which they share, they may actually come to dwell in us, and that the Spirit may make both the Son and the Father known to us.

How wonderful, too, it is to realise that the Son of God is praying that by means of the Holy Spirit entering into us, He too may enter into us and so therefore the Holy Trinity may make His dwelling in us and share His life, His knowledge, and His love with us!

Whilst we can only stop in awe at the very thought of this, we must also remember that this is only the beginning. The prayer our Lord offers is not only for us, His followers, here and now, but looking beyond the end of this life towards eternal beatitude. It is the thought of this love that can have only one end: the desire for it to be increased. For there is always more of what God is and what He offers us.

This leads to the point that St John wrote not only the fourth Gospel but also three epistles which we are reading at this time in the Office of Readings, and the Apocalypse, from the end of which our second reading comes this morning. This passage relays the words which our Lord addresses to John at the conclusion of the long series of visions of the future, as He proclaims: ‘Behold, I am coming soon, my reward is with me to repay according to every man’s work.’ The Lord whom the Apostles saw visibly taken from them at the Ascension, is the One who, the angels told them, ‘will return as you have seen Him go,’ not to offer Himself as Priest and victim, but to judge in righteousness. This righteousness is the Father’s infinite holiness and justice without attaining which no one will enter the kingdom of heaven. This is why our Lord addresses His Father as ‘righteous One’ in today’s passage from the Priestly Prayer. He also makes manifest to John His own status upon entering into heavenly glory as man: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.’ We heard those words as the Paschal Candle was blessed and signed with its defining marks at the opening of the Easter Vigil. We also remember that when He comes again it will be as Judge to reward each one according to his deeds in the life, and that He will come as the bright morning star. Now that star is the sun, which rises in the East, just as we hear in the Benedictus canticle, ‘by the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will bless us.’ Jesus is the morning star, the rising sun, the living Paschal Candle that enlightens us all.

Yet as we long for His coming again, and as we pray to be ready to greet Him then, we draw strength from the fact that He has given us His Spirit in order to enable us to make this simple yet profound prayer: ‘Come!’ For when we know not how to pray, the Spirit Himself prays on our behalf and within our hearts, in words too deep for us to grasp fully, but meaning just this: ‘Come!’ This is the meaning of those repeated words at the final verses of the Apocalypse, showing the final glimpse of Him who is to come: ‘The Spirit and the Bride, that is the Church, together say to the Lord, ‘Come!’ Let everyone who hears these words answer (as though to intensify the call): ‘Come!’ Let all who thirst for righteousness come and drink the water that is the Holy Spirit poured out on those who thirst. The one who testifies to these words is Christ. He witnesses to their truthfulness, because He is Truth in person. He answers the prayer of the Spirit and the Bride, replying to them, ‘Indeed, I come quickly.’ As we await the renewal of the gift of the Spirit and the deepening of His life of prayer in us, we pray with longing to our Lord in the language of the earliest Christians, ‘Amen. Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!’

On Maundy Thursday, when we celebrated the Mass commemorating that night on which our Lord made His great prayer of consecration to the Father, we sang the hymn Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est, which concludes with this prayer which we may well make our own at this time, too:

‘So may we be gathered once again, beholding

Glorified the glory, Christ, of Thy unveiling;

There, where never-ending joys, and never failing

Age succeeds to age eternally unfolding.’ Amen.

In the second reading this morning we heard part of the final chapter of the Apocalypse. It presents a wonderful contrast with the rest of the book. The earlier parts are so full of violence, terror, death, mayhem, hatred of God and of mankind, persecution of the just who are faithful to God, and visions full of darkness, destructive fire falling to earth, seas of blood, mighty earthquakes, terrifying, deafening noises and cruel voices screaming blasphemies against God, that it is a strange and welcome relief to arrive at this final peaceful, brilliant vision of the new Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down from God out of heaven, bedecked with all the radiant glory of God, glittering like some precious crystal-clear diamond.

After describing the city’s walls and gates, St John notices two things in particular: First, that there is no temple in this city. This might seem strange until we realise that there is no need of a temple like the one in the earthly Jerusalem of old, the temple which was built by men’s hands. Many years before the time of this vision, the young beloved disciple John had heard these words of our Lord: ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will build it up.’ In these words our Lord had identified Himself as the true and living Temple. For it was as a Temple that He would be the place of sacrifice to God the Father, and it was as the victim that He would be offered on the Altar, just as He will be on this altar here in a little while. Just before the consecration we will hear these words in the Preface: ‘by the oblation of His body, He brought the sacrifices of old to completion…and by commending Himself to you for our salvation, [O father, He] showed Himself the Priest, the Altar and the Lamb of Sacrifice.’

This is why in the new, heavenly Jerusalem there is no temple to be seen. It is because Jesus, the Lamb of God, is the only Temp le in heaven; there, too, He is the only priest and the only victim. Yet here on earth He gives us a real sharing in this heavenly sacrifice that He offers to His Father: day by day, through the ministry of anointed priestly hands like mine, Jesus offers His own Body and Blood on the altar that represents Him. He is the victim who is offered as the one perfect sacrifice to take away all sin, uniting us to God and to each other in charity.

Then there is another aspect of this glorious new city that John notices: there is no need of sun or moon for light. And the reason why there is neither sun nor moon is the same as why there is no created, man-made Temple. There is no need for a created light, such as sun or moon, because God’s own radiant glory is itself the light, fully suffusing the city from within. Everything that belongs in that city is shot through with that uncreated light which is eternal joy, love and communion. It is a light that illuminates from within, not, as the sun and moon do, from without.

During this wonderful season of Eastertide, at Mass it is as though we are almost in heaven already. After the rigours of Lenten fast and penance, which resemble the trials and difficulties of this present life, we now celebrate a time of light, peace and joy – which share in the reality of heaven to come. In the Masses of the Easter Season we rejoice in the light of the Paschal Candle here on the Sanctuary, which represents to us the light of our risen Lord and Saviour. It is in this light that we hear our Lord’s teaching in the Gospel. It is in this light that we are brought by the Holy Spirit to a deeper understanding of that teaching. This is what our Lord means when He says in the Gospel today: ‘the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.’ This is why we call the Holy Spirit ‘the Spirit of understanding’, for in the light which He pours into our hearts and minds we are made able to understand, as far as is open to us, the very God who is light itself.

The first forty days of the Easter season will come to an end this Thursday on Ascension Day. During these forty days after His resurrection our Lord was appearing to His Apostles, teaching them in preparation for the great event which follows on from the Ascension. In other words, He was preparing them for the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, on the fiftieth day of Eastertide, still a fortnight away. It is the Holy Spirit who teaches all truth, who reminds us of all that Christ taught the disciples in His lifetime, and the same Spirit who fills us with joy at this knowledge.

What out Lord promises His disciples in today’s Gospel passage is nothing less than the indwelling of God in our very selves, so as to make us His temples. Here is what He said: ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.’ This is the heart of the mystery that our Lord tells us, that God chooses to live within those who love Him, not merely to allow them to know Him, as it were, from afar, but to know what it is for Him to take up his dwelling in them. This is an extraordinary promise indeed, and one that far exceeds all expectations that we might ever have had of God towards us. For this is a promise that does not even need to await heaven for the beginning of its fulfilment. Even now, our Lord says, those who love God will come to know what it is to have Him living within them.

This is the truth that requires no sun to enlighten us, just as St John sees is the case in the heavenly City. The Holy Spirit is the light of God in person, and when He comes to us He enables us to do what by nature alone we could never do: to know who God is; to know Him first of all as Father – the source and origin of everything, and not just of all create things, but then also as the source and origin of the Son and Holy Spirit. This year we are celebrating the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, at which was drawn up for the shole Church the Creed which we will proclaim in a few moments’ time as we do every Sunday and Holyday. In that Creed we proclaim our faith in three persons who are one undivided God.

What, then, does our Lord mean when He says in today’s Gospel: ‘the Father is greater than I’? Does He mean that the Father alone is really God, and that He, the Son, is a lesser kind of divine being? No. Far from it. Our Lord means that He is ‘God from God, Light from light….’ The Father is greater in the sense that the Father is the origin of the Son. The Son is not the origin of Himself, but is ‘begotten of the Father’. He is begotten, not made, meaning that He is not a creature, but is, as we say in the Creed, ‘consubstantial’ with the Father. Similarly, the Holy Spirit, like the Son, is not self-caused, but ‘proceeds’ from the Father and the Son, as we say in the Creed. This means that He, too, is of one and the same nature as the Father and the Son, and therefore with the Father and the Son He is adored and glorified as one and the same God. Because He is God, the Holy Spirit makes us to understand the true meaning of all that our Lord came to teach us.

As Pentecost draws near, we begin to see what Christ was doing in those forty days after His resurrection. He was preparing His Apostles for the immensity of the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who was about to descend upon them to live in their hearts and minds, and to fill them with knowledge, love, wisdom, fortitude, courage and joy – such that they had never known even when Our Lord walked in their midst. For the Spirit would also make the Lord present within them in a wholly new way. From that day onwards, the Church has always been filled with the Holy Spirit, and even in the midst of this world’s trials, sufferings, disappointments, failures and even spiritual perplexity, there will always be, from that first Pentecost onwards, this light and life dwelling within our hearts, giving us hope and joy, and calling us on towards the eternal heavenly light of the living Temple – God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, to Whom be all glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, today, even as I speak, Pope Leo will have just begun celebrating the inaugural Mass of his pontificate in Rome. I am sure that it will still be in full swing by the time you get home at the end of this Mass if you want to watch the rest of it. For my part I will only be able to see a recording of it later on because immediately after this Mass I must get off to celebrate another Mass at St Chad’s in Sedgley.

You may well want to ask, what exactly is his ‘inaugural Mass’? After all, it is not the first Mass he has celebrated as Pope. This he did on the morning after his election, when he sang Mass in the presence of all the Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel where the election had taken place. So what is the significance of this Mass today? Well, it is really the first great public Mass of the pontificate, the first to be celebrated in the presence of the faithful gathered in front of St Peter’s basilica, near to the relics of the first Vicar of Christ, to whom we heard our Lord commend the care of his sheep, lambs and flock in the Gospel two weeks ago. Leo is now the successor of that same Peter, and has inherited Peter’s role as the first among all the successors of the Apostles, the bishops of the Catholic Church. What is his role, then, specifically as Peter’s successor? It is, as we heard our Lord say to Peter in St Luke’s Passion Gospel on Palm Sunday, to ‘strengthen’, or confirm, ‘the brethren’, that is, the other Apostles. Peter was given the task of being the chief shepherd of the flock of Christ, and the one who would keep the other Apostles united in one faith.

On the morning after his election, Pope Leo preached at Mass a sermon in which he mentioned what the great first century bishop of Antioch, St Ignatius, said when he wrote to the Christians in Rome that it was the role of their Church to ‘preside in charity’ over the universal, that is, Catholic, Church. It was St Ignatius who also described the principal work of any bishop to preside over the celebration of the Mass in his diocese, a word meaning the place where people live together under the bishop’s authority. Each bishop is the shepherd of the Church located in a particular city and in its surrounding hinterland. But the one who presides in unity over all these many different local churches and their bishops is the Bishop of Rome, the successor of St Peter. St Ignatius taught that truth over nineteen centuries ago and it is still true today. But what does it mean to say that Pope Leo, the Bishop of Rome, ‘presides in charity’ over the local churches of the whole world?

Well, it doesn’t mean ‘rule them’, much less ‘lord it over them’. As our Lord told the Apostles at the Last Supper, ‘among the nations their leaders lord it over them and their great men make their authority felt. But it must not be so among you. Rather, the greatest among you must behave as though he were the least’. That is why St Gregory the Great, the pope who sent missionaries to our land in 597, called himself ‘Servant of the servants of God’ and not ‘Lord of lords and king of men’.

In years and even centuries gone by, the Mass which is being celebrated right now by Pope Leo would have culminated in the pope’s coronation with a triple tiara, denoting his authority over all men in matters spiritual and temporal alike. The last pope to be crowned in this way was Paul VI in 1963. When Pope John Paul I succeeded him in 1978, he chose not to be crowned, but rather to celebrate a Mass outside St Peter’s soon after his election which would mark the beginning of his ‘presiding in charity’ over the universal Church. He would preside not like a reigning king or emperor, but as a servant of the Gospel and representative of Peter. The popes who followed Pope John Paul I have done the same, so that it is now normal for a newly elected pope not to be crowned like a king but rather to celebrate Mass and to receive a special token of his new apostolic authority as Successor of the Apostle Peter.

What token is this? It is called a ‘pallium’. This is a word for what was originally a kind of cloak, but which is now so reduced in form as to be a strip of woollen cloth embroidered with crosses and placed around the neck and shoulders of the pope as a sign of his jurisdiction. The pallium is important in two ways. First, because of what it is not: it is not a symbol of kingly authority, as a crown would be. Secondly, because of what it is instead: it is a symbol of a bishop’s authority, when he is vested as a high priest. Moreover, when the pope wore the tiara, he wore that which no other bishop could wear by right, thus emphasising his higher status over them, but the pallium is something which the pope wears himself and also gives similar pallia to certain other bishops as a sign of their unity with him and their equality as successors of the Apostles. Thus the pallium signifies the unity of the principal successors of the Apostles with the successor of Peter.

The inaugural Mass this morning is not literally the beginning of Pope Leo’s pontificate. That began the moment he accepted his election in the Sistine chapel. When two thirds of all the cardinals in the conclave had chosen him, it was still absolutely necessary that he should accept the election. He could have said ‘no’. But he recognized that the choice of the electors was, effectively, a sign to him of God’s will, and from the moment he answered he question ‘do you accept your election?’ with the single word ‘yes!’ (In Latin he said the single word ‘Accepto’, I accept), at that instant he was given the grace of his new state as successor of Peter and bishop presiding over the universal church. This is also why, traditionally, popes take a new name at this moment. They do so to emphasize their new identity, just as our Lord gave Simon Bar-Jonah the new name of ‘Peter’, that is, rock, to mark the moment at which He made Him the ‘rock on which I will build my Church’.

But the Church of Rome, presiding in charity over the whole Catholic world, is founded not only on the martyred remains of Peter under the great basilica that bears his name, but also on the remains of the other great Apostle of Rome, Paul. In today’s first reading we heard how Paul and his companion Barnabas were ‘strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.’ They also made provision for shepherds, ‘when they appointed elders (or we would say priests) for them in every church (or we would say diocese), with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.’ In this way Paul went about choosing and then as we would say, ordaining priests to celebrate the liturgy, to preach the true faith, and to rule the flock of Christ in that place. This is how the Church continues, in every age, to pass on to every successive generation all that she is and all that she believes. So it was that the cardinals prepared by prayer and fasting to enter the conclave in which they would elect the new successor of Peter and of Paul, the new bishop of Rome and pope of the universal, that is, Catholic Church.

Presiding in charity is what St Ignatius called the role of the bishop of Rome, i.e. to hold together in unity those who are called to live Christ’s commandment to ‘love one another as I have loved you.’ May God grant Pope Leo the grace of presiding in love and holding in unity the entire body of Christ on earth. We should pray for him as the one to whom Christ has now entrusted the care for the sheep and lambs of His flock, as of old He entrusted them to Peter, remembering the last words Christ spoke to Peter in that Gospel reading two Sundays ago: ‘”Truly I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” This [Jesus] said to show by what kind of death [Peter] was to glorify God. And after this Jesus said to him, “follow me”.’ Remember, then, to pray for Pope Leo, just as the early Christians prayed for Peter when he was imprisoned for the faith, so that whatever challenges may lie ahead for him and the Church, he may be constant in his own holding of the faith and firm in his teaching of it.

Dear Sisters, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, today, the fourth Sunday of Eastertide, is known as Good Shepherd Sunday because the Gospel is taken from the tenth chapter of St John, in which our Lord describes Himself as the ‘Good Shepherd’, as we heard in the Gospel acclamation. Today’s Gospel reading is from the final part of the chapter, ending with the important words: ‘I and the Father are one.’ It is God who is the Good Shepherd, not only because Jesus is God, but because the Father, too, is to His chosen people as a shepherd is to His flock. Throughout the Old Testament God either calls Himself the shepherd of Israel, or is addressed as such by His people, as in the Responsorial psalm today, ‘He made us, we belong to Him, we are His people, the sheep of His flock’ (ps 99) and of course, one of the most famous of all the psalms begins with the words ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ (ps 22)

But in the New Testament it is Jesus who also calls Himself our shepherd, as He does in the Gospel today. In this passage we have just heard He proclaims with great love and confidence that ‘my sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.’ The shepherd is there to protect and guard the sheep entrusted to his care, and in the case of our Lord, the sheep are not only entrusted to Him as though He were a hired man, but rather they are entrusted to Him as to one who will guard them with His own life.

In the second reading from the Apocalypse, we heard St John describe the vision he saw of heaven peopled by a great multitude taken not just from the chosen people of the Old Covenant, the Jews, but ‘from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages’. This is the vision John has of the Church brought to perfection in heaven. And what are they doing there? They are ‘standing before the throne [of God] and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.’ These are the ones who ‘serve God day and night in His Temple; and He who sits on the throne will shelter them with His presence’. He who sits on the throne is God the Father and He is the guardian or shepherd of those whom He protects in heaven. But there is another shepherd too, for St John goes on to say that ‘the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ God on His throne, and the Lamb ‘in the midst of the throne’ are One. For the Lamb is God just as the Father is God. They are One and the same God, whilst being different persons.

The Father as shepherd is greater than His flock, which is what one would expect, because usually a shepherd is a man, and a flock is comprised of sheep, so that the one who guards and those who are guarded are of different natures. That is how it was clearly in the Old Testament, where God is the shepherd and the flock comprises humans. But in the New Testament there is a big and important change: the shepherd is now a Lamb. He is of the same nature as those whom He guards and protects. It is Jesus, the Lamb of God, who guides His flock to living springs of water. The shepherd’s task is both to protect and to nourish. Jesus does both. He protects us from our foes, and he nourishes us with green pastures and living water. As a lamb, Jesus is of the same nature as the sheep of His flock. And why is He known as the ‘Lamb of God’? It is because He gives up His life in order to save our lives. In the Old Testament, lambs were sacrificed to God in order to bring about God’s protection for His people. Now in the New Testament, Jesus is the Lamb who is sacrificed for us, whose blood was shed for us, and in whose blood our robes are made white, that is, cleansed from all impurities and sinfulness.

Now the Lamb has died for His sheep to take away their sins, and has risen again to give them new life. He still guards and shepherds His flock, just as he did in His days on the earth. Yet now He does so through intermediaries. He chooses other shepherds to do a shepherd’s task of guarding and feeding His flock. These are the pastors of the Church, for the word ‘pastor’ is the Latin word for ‘shepherd’. They are the ones our Lord chooses and appoints to look after the flock.

Last Sunday in the Gospel we heard our Lord address Simon Peter by the Lake of Tiberias when Jesus appeared to seven of the Apostles after the resurrection. Remember how it was that Jesus asked Simon Peter three times, ‘Simon, do you love me?’ and three times Simon Peter replied, ‘yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ And to each of those three replies our Lord then gave Peter a solemn command: ‘Feed my lambs’, ‘tend my sheep’, ‘feed my sheep’. In other words, our Lord was emphasising to Peter that he was to be a shepherd to His own flock.

Now in the last few days in Rome, there has been elected a new successor to Peter, a new inheritor of Peter’s role as chief Pastor, that is, chief shepherd of Christ’s flock. But this new successor of Peter is not Himself the Lamb, of course. Only Christ is the true Lamb who takes away our sins. Yet Christ has given us a new shepherd to be His Vicar, which means ‘one who takes His place’, and he has chosen for himself the name ‘Lion’, for that is what ‘Leo’ means. He needs to be a firm and strong shepherd of Christ’s flock in the coming times. We must therefore pray for Him, as Christ prayed for Simon Peter, that his faith may not fail and that he may fulfil his new role of ‘confirming’, that is strengthening, his brethren, his fellow pastors and shepherds, the bishops of the Church who are the successors of all the Apostles. They were strengthened and united in their witness by Peter. We must pray that all the bishops of the Catholic Church may be strengthened and united in their witness to Christ and the Catholic faith by the Lion who now leads them. God bless and protect Pope Leo so that he may bless and protect God’s holy Church. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, the last time I preached about the passage from St John’s Gospel which we have just heard, which was three years ago, I spoke about the miraculous haul of fish and the recognition of our Lord by St John. That was the first part of this, the final chapter of the Gospel and now it is the second part that we have also just listened to which I want to speak about today in the light of the fact that it concerns St Peter and the mission given to him by Christ Himself. This is particularly appropriate in view of the forthcoming conclave to elect a new successor of St Peter which begins in Rome this coming Wednesday.

For St Peter has a unique role among the Twelve Apostles. Yet, even so, we hear about him in entirely different ways in each of the Gospels. It is St Matthew alone who tells us about the famous occasion at Caesarea Philippi where our Lord calls Simon ‘Peter’, meaning ‘the Rock’, upon whom Christ proclaims that He will build his Church. Then, only three weeks ago on Palm Sunday we heard St Luke’s dramatic account, in the Passion story, of the Last Supper during which our Lord not only foretold Peter’s threefold denial which would take place that same evening, but went on to speak of Simon Peter’s recovery from his fall into the sin of denial, and of the special role Peter would have thenceforth of ‘confirming his brothers’. Last of all, St John alone gives us this very detailed account of what took place between our Lord and St Peter after the resurrection.

We should note in the first instance that Peter, who is always first to be named among the Apostles, is clearly their leader. St John has told us that after the crucifixion, the Apostles had returned to their native Galilee. Jesus had already instructed them even before His death that they should go to Galilee where they would once again see Him after His resurrection from the dead. Moreover, St John has already told us what we heard in the last two Sunday Gospel readings, namely that our Lord had risen from the dead and had appeared to Mary Magdalene by His empty tomb, and that he had twice appeared on successive Sundays in the Upper Room where they had gathered together for safety because they feared what the authorities would do to them now that their Master had been most brutally killed. Here He had reassured them by the sight of His wounds and by the greeting ‘Peace be with you’. Here He had shown Thomas His hands and His side, and Thomas had responded by making that wonderful act of faith: ‘My Lord and my God!’

Now, some days after that second appearance in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, seven of the Apostles were back in Galilee and it was Simon Peter who led them onwards, saying to the others that he was going fishing. This is not necessarily to suggest that he was turning his back on the last three years, the time since our Lord had called him, after a miraculous draft of fish, to become a fisher of men. But apart from being our Lord’s chosen disciples, fishing was what several of those involved in this expedition had in common from their former lives. But they had already seen our Lord since His resurrection, not once but twice at least, and He had already told them both before and after His resurrection that He would go before them to Galilee where they would see Him again. So it was not a mood of sad resignation to dashed hopes that took them out to start fishing. Rather, it was probably the need to find something to do whilst they waited for the Lord to fulfil His promise that inspired that call of Simon’s to go fishing.

But there is another reason why Simon and his companions are inspired to go fishing. It is to allow an important memory to trigger them to recognize the risen Lord when He appears in yet another unfamiliar form on the seashore. He is quite far away, as the men are a hundred yards from shore, and day was only just breaking, so perhaps it is not altogether surprising that they cannot recognise Him. So when the stranger asks them ‘if they have anything to eat’ (that’s what the Greek says), they tell him no, despite working hard all night. He then tells them to cast out their nets again, but this time on the right side of the boat. This was unusual. The fishermen of Lake Tiberias, or Galilee, were used to fishing from the left side because the rudder was on the right, and they would naturally not want the net to get tangled in the rudder. So this suggestion is strange to the men in the boat, but even stranger, perhaps, is their preparedness to do as the stranger suggests. They do not even know if the stranger has any understanding of the rules of fishing, yet, probably against their better judgement, they do as he has said and lo! - a huge catch of fish which they cannot even pull into the boat but have to pull behind them as they begin to make for shore one hundred yards away. It is John who, as on Easter morning at the empty tomb, is the first to recognise the truth, crying out, ‘It is the Lord!’ John often tells us that he remembers certain things that Jesus had said or done long afterwards and saw deeper meaning in them than his companions did. On this occasion John had recalled the miraculous draft of fish some years before when they had hardly known Jesus yet. Then, too, He had met them after a long night’s fruitless fishing and had similarly instructed them to cast their nets to the other side, reassuring them that they would catch something. That was the occasion when Simon’s reaction was to say, ‘Leave me Lord, I am a sinful man’. Then Simon wanted Jesus to go away, now he can’t get to Him quickly enough as he pulls on his outer garment and springs impetuously into the sea, splashing his way to the shore to meet the Lord. On that earlier occasion, our Lord had told Simon that from then onwards he would be a fisher of men, and now He was about to do something very similar, but with another recollection in mind, a more sombre one.

But not yet. First our Lord has prepared a meal for them, with bread and fish cooked on a fire He has made. They are tired. He feeds them. He even asks them to bring some of the fish they have just caught to add to what He has already prepared, so that they can benefit from their own labour. During that meal Jesus serves them, giving them an example that they too should serve one another. John tells us that they were afraid to ask Jesus outright, ‘who are you?’ because they already knew within themselves that, despite His changed appearance, this could be no one else. It is after the meal is over that the really important matter is dealt with. Jesus has waited until now and at this chosen moment He addresses Simon by name, but with great solemnity formally adding his father’s name: ‘Simon son of John’. We and Simon Peter know that something very important is about to happen. Then our Lord puts the question, ‘Do you love me more than these?’ meaning more than these other disciples here love me. Simon answers, ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.’ I am not merely saying this, he is saying, but I appeal to your own intimate knowledge of me in all my weakness. Jesus responds with a command: ‘Feed my lambs’. Then Jesus repeats the question, Simon Peter answers the same way, and Jesus slightly changes the command: ‘tend my sheep.’ Finally the third time comes the same question. Simon Peter is smitten with grief. It is not that he fears that our Lord is doubting his sincerity, but that this recalls the threefold denial before the Passion only a short time before. Then Peter had wept bitterly but had no opportunity to show his sorrow to Jesus. Now at last he can do so, but not without revisiting that threefold shame. Yet out of that terrible shame comes a new commission: to feed and tend Christ’s flock of sheep and lambs.

In the Old Testament, God had described Himself as the ‘Shepherd of Israel’, for instance in the psalms 79, ‘O shepherd of Israel, hear us!’ and 22, the well-loved ‘The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want,’ and next week in the Gospel we will hear our Lord describing Himself as ‘the Good Shepherd, who gives up His life for His sheep.’

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, St Paul tells us this morning in the second reading from the First Letter to the Corinthians that ‘Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.’ And in the Sequence, the beautiful hymn that precedes the Gospel, this theme was repeated and developed, where Christ is described as our ‘Paschal victim’. Once a year, in Spring time, the Jewish people celebrated the Passover, commemorating the Exodus, the event in which their ancestors had been brought out of slavery in Egypt, including the passage through the Red Sea which we heard so dramatically described in last night’s Easter Vigil, the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, and the entry into the Promised Land – all this was recalled in a solemn ritual meal in which a lamb was eaten. The lamb had been killed in preparation for the feast not simply as an act of butchery, necessary in order for the lamb to be cooked and eaten, but it had been killed in a sacrificial rite in the Temple in Jerusalem.

Now our Lord, you will recall from the Gospels, was killed at the time of the Passover. In fact, as St John tells us, He was crucified at the very same time that the lambs were being sacrificed in preparation for the Passover feast that would be kept the following day. This is what John meant by referring to the Jewish Day of Preparation as the day on which Our Lord died and was buried. St Paul takes this even further. It was not just a coincidence that Jesus was killed in Jerusalem on the day before the Passover feast, it was exactly God’s plan. St Peter will tell the crowds in Jerusalem on the first Pentecost of the Christian era that ‘Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.’ It was God’s plan from the beginning that Jesus should die at the Passover because God intended that His Son should die as a sacrifice, a complete and total offering of Himself on the cross out of love for sinful humanity.

But where in the Old Testament a lamb was required, God’s plan to be completed in the New Testament was for a man to be offered as a sacrifice. This is why our Lord said, at the Last Supper: ‘This is my Body which is given up for you’, and ‘this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant, which is being poured out for you and for many’. The Last Supper was the commemoration of the Passover, and it was at that commemoratory celebration that our Lord was giving the entire Passover a new meaning and purpose. No longer was a lamb to be sufficient for a sacrifice and a sacred meal, but now there was to be a new lamb, a new victim of sacrifice, and that lamb, that victim, would also be the food that we would eat and drink.

This is why St Paul talks to the Corinthians in this way: ‘Let us therefore celebrate the festival’, meaning the Passover, in a new kind of way. One of the significant ways in which the Passover was celebrated was by the use, special to this time of year, of unleavened bread. To this day, the Jews go to great lengths before the Passover to ensure that there is not the slightest trace of yeast, or leaven, anywhere in the house. It is to this that Paul is referring when he says: ‘cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, (that is of dough)’. The old leaven he associates with ‘malice and evil’, and this is the reason why he urges the Corinthians to drive it out. But what does this mean to us? We don’t clear out leaven or yeast from our homes at this time of year, so isn’t this all a bit meaningless to us? Well, no. St Paul sees in this ancient practice a symbol of something spiritual and real to us. He sees it as a symbol of sin being driven out by God’s grace. It is Christ who drives away sin, and this He did when we went to confession before Easter. He is then the new unleavened bread of what Paul calls ‘sincerity and truth’, which come to us as the fruit of His resurrection which we celebrate today.

But we are not simply recalling an ancient event, as though the death and resurrection of Christ were simply in the remote past. We are actually making His death and resurrection present here and now in our midst on this most sacred and joyful feast. How is that possible? We do so by doing what our Lord Himself commanded us on Maundy Thursday night at the Last Supper: by taking bread and wine and transforming them into His Body and Blood which we then offer to God the Father as a sacrifice for the taking away of our sins and for the giving of the new life of grace in the Holy Spirit. This is why St Paul talks today of Christ as our Passover Lamb being sacrificed. We don’t sacrifice lambs in the Temple of Jerusalem like the Jews of old, but we do sacrifice The Lamb of God in the Temple which is His Body, for we remember how He said, ‘destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up’. By this He meant two closely connected things: first that the temple of which He was speaking was His own Body and it would be ‘destroyed’, so to speak, on Calvary; and secondly that three days after it had been put to death, He Himself would raise that body to a new life.

That new life He now shares with us. How? First through baptism which was celebrated all over the Catholic world at the Vigil last night, and secondly through the Mass and Holy Communion. Mass is indeed truly the sacrifice of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Temple which is His Church, made not of stones but of living human persons of flesh and blood and spirit. We, too, become partakers or sharers in that very sacrifice by taking part in the Mass and by receiving Holy Communion.

At the end of the Offertory, just before the Preface the prayer which I will pray says this: ‘Exultant with paschal gladness, O Lord, we offer the sacrifice by which your Church is wondrously reborn and nourished.’ Then the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer sings that ‘it is truly right …at all times to praise you, but above all to acclaim you, O Lord, on this day, when Christ our Passover has been sacrificed. For He is the true lamb who has taken away the sins of the world; by dying He has destroyed our death and by rising He has restored our life.’ And again at Communion we repeat the same words from St Paul that ‘Christ our Passover has been sacrificed, therefore let us keep the feast with the unleavened bread of purity and truth.’ Let me end with the triumphant words of psalm 117 which were the response to the psalm: ‘This is the day that the Lord has made: let us rejoice in it and be glad! Alleluia!’

Dear Sisters, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, earlier in the week just ended we heard the familiar story of the betrayal of our Lord by His own disciple, Judas Iscariot. We heard how he judged that this act of betrayal was worth being paid thirty pieces of silver by the chief priests to bring about. We also heard how Judas complained loudly at what he called the waste of a very expensive perfume which Mary of Bethany poured out upon our Lord’s feet just days before His death. What does this tell us? Well, it says that Judas had a terrible sense of value. There are some things that cannot be given a price, they are so valuable, and I think that is what our Lord was telling the Apostles in general, and Judas in particular, when He told them to leave Mary alone. That bottle of perfume was worth nearly one year’s wages for a labourer; it would have taken someone spending many gruelling and back-breaking hours day after day for the best part of twelve months to earn enough to buy that perfume. But our Lord recognised that it was quite simply a symbol of Mary’s love and gratitude to our Lord for having raised her beloved brother Lazarus from the darkness and stench of the tomb in which he had been buried for four days.

To Mary, then, the perfume was hardly precious enough for what she wanted to show, and our Lord knew that, and so He firmly defended what she had done. For Judas, such an anointing could only be waste because he couldn’t recognise the meaning of the symbol and the real cost of true love and gratitude.

Then we consider the thirty silver pieces, which the Book of Exodus sets as the value of a slave, telling us that: ‘if an ox gores a slave, male or female, the owner of the ox must give thirty shekels of silver to the slave's master.’ This, then, is how not only the Chief Priests, but more shockingly, Judas, arrived at a calculation of the worth of our Lord in their eyes. He was no more valuable than a slave. Worse still, it was as though Judas was saying that Jesus is just a commodity to be traded with, no longer even a person, let alone one to whom Judas owes unswerving loyalty as a friend and a disciple whom he has followed for the last three years.

But why, on this most wonderful of nights, do I go back to those events from last week? It is because they should remind us of another transaction, another exchange, which, while it is equally shocking, is also infinitely more joyful and fruitful. For whereas Judas’s sale of his Lord leads only to two deaths, Jesus’s and his own, this other exchange leads to life, and eternal life at that. For if Judas showed only greed and contempt, and Mary of Bethany showed what love she was able, yet still without being able to save Jesus from death, we are faced with something infinitely greater and more powerful, that is love without limits on the part of the infinite God Himself; a love which cancels out Judas’s miserable perfidy on the one hand and praises and perfects Mary’s generosity of gesture on the other. It perfects it by utterly shattering the bonds of death itself, the bonds in which our Lord has just been enchained as a result of his Passion and death on the cross.

During the Exsultet, the mighty and ecstatic hymn which sang of the joy of Easter following our entry into the chapel this evening, these words were sung to God the Father: ‘O wonder of your humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son.’ Well, what can we say? If Mary’s gesture of love was extravagant and powerfully symbolic, how much more powerful and effective was the Father’s outpouring of His own Son’s life on the cross? Unlike Mary’s sign of love, the crucifixion was no mere gesture, but a total giving of God himself. Father and Son alike did this for one reason and one reason only: love - infinite love, totally extravagant and unselfish love. To ransom a slave God was prepared to pay not thirty pieces of silver, not the price of a powerful perfume, but the price of His own Son’s Passion and death.

But who is the slave? Quite simply, the slave is not just all of us, but every unique and individual one of us. When we reflect on those words: ‘to ransom a slave, You gave away your Son’, just remember that those words mean that to ransom me God gave away His Son to suffer a terrible death. Am I worth that much? God not only thinks so, but has acted in the only way that can prove it: He has done it. The death of Christ is a fact in history and its meaning is this: To ransom me, God gave away His Son.

This gift of Himself is the Sacrifice of Calvary. In it God acts out of infinite love for every single one of us here tonight. To God, then, each of us alone is worth as much as the entire human race. This must surely strike us as an astonishing thing to say! Yet we are that valuable to God. Even if God had thought we were worth no more than thirty pieces of silver, the value of a slave, that would surely be something, but God does not stop at a mere trifle like that: he does not stop at anything less than the complete offering up of His Son as a proof of His infinite love, and as the means of bringing us out of that slavery in which we had been condemned to live and die until our Lord paid the infinite price of His own precious life’s blood on the cross.

Mary’s precious perfume was the best she could offer to show her thanks for the life of her brother. But Jesus here does more than raise Lazarus: by means of His own rising from the dead He promises to raise each and every one of us along with Him on the last day.

So now, on this most holy night we give thanks for that price which has not merely bought us out of slavery, but has crowned us with the dignity of the new life of the resurrection, the life in which each of us is already a first-born son or daughter of God Himself. That is how much we mean to God, to our Father and to his Son our Lord. To ransom a slave, that is you and me, He gave away His Son. And now, the Father has raised His Son to life so that He might be the first of many brothers, the first fruits of the plan that God has had for each of us from all eternity. As St John says, ‘we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is’. May this joyful and holy night bring us all closer to the infinitely loving heart of the Father and prepare us for that final day when He will raise us to the fullness of the resurrection of His only Son, our Lord and Saviour who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.