An Easter Message from the Parish Priest

  Dear brothers and sisters,

May I wish you, on behalf of the Jesuit community who serve Farm Street Church, a very blessed Easter. 

Of course, this is anything but a normal Easter.  Under normal circumstances we receive many more visitors at this time of the year.  What we celebrate at Easter lies at the very heart of our faith, the belief that Our Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and through this we have the gift of new life here on this earth and in eternity in heaven with him.  It’s normally a day for much celebration.  But we can’t fabricate that joy of Easter right now, being as we are right in the very midst of this dreadful crisis.  We have to come before God as we are, in the midst of a national crisis, with personal and family tragedies. 

Nevertheless, for the Christian we are called always to learn from every experience and to pray that we can see it in the light of our faith.  Pope Francis has been urging us to do this.  He says we must listen to the painful now to prepare for a better future.  For the Christian this requires us to not just hope in new life but to learn how to create it.  We have, says Francis, been seeing glimmers of this as humanity realises its interconnectedness with each other and with the planet.  We are in the midst of a crisis but as Christians we must keep our faith in the Risen Christ ahead of us. 

In particular today I would suggest we should pay close attention to the scriptures, to the story of the discovery of the empty tomb.  This is the story of a group of people who are in the midst of a crisis, a tragedy, their leader, their friend, their Lord and master, is dead.  The whole Jesus movement is about to collapse. It is a crisis point. They are surely surprised, shocked, to discover the stone rolled away. But this is now the start of new life.  A new dawn.  And they are called to greater faith than ever and to pass that on.

May we be filled this Easter with the gift of faith in the Risen Christ so we may build a more human future for our world in crisis being called again today to new life.   

Fr Dominic Robinson, SJ