Happy Easter to you! We are still mid-way through the Easter season and there’s no doubt that we really needed Easter this year.

With lay people observing the sacred liturgies from their lounge rooms, instead of in churches, and longing to once again partake in the Eucharist, while priests celebrated private Masses streamed online, we were ready to be reminded again of the tomb-busting power of the resurrection in our lives and in the whole world.

When I was a young priest, I was often surprised by the number of people I met who were “disappointed by God”, and so they walked away from Him.  “God never answered my prayers, so I stopped praying.” 

“Peace be with you.” This was the greeting of Jesus to his apostles on his first appearance after he has risen from the dead. After that, his disciples were first astonished at seeing him. Then he greeted them again, “Peace be with you”.

The Easter celebrations this year are very interesting and certainly very different. It’s really our first Easter Triduum without the richness and the beauty of our liturgical Services, which we normally experience as a community of faith in our parishes.

"Follow me!" "Follow me!" In those two words we have the encouraging invitation of Christ to Peter and the other disciples gathered there by the Lake Tiberias, where he first called them from their fishing nets.

Easter begins very early in the morning when it is still dark so the Easter experience is in fact an invitation OUT of darkness INTO the light of a new day. Furthermore, the Risen Jesus first appears not to “the heavies” like the 12 apostles but to Mary Magdalene who is one of the little people. Easter begins in the dark and with someone living on the margins of society.

Sceptics demand evidence and proof that Jesus rose from the dead. Well what do we have?

Happy Easter to all our friends and readers of ‘In the Word’.

There’s nothing quite like Easter to renew and reinvigorate our faith. The empty tomb, the appearances of the Risen Lord, and finally, the penny dropping with Jesus’ followers, that the Scriptures have been fulfilled in Him.

For more than 1500 years the first Sunday after Easter had been known in the Liturgical Books as “Sunday in White Garments -- Dominica in Albis”.

Pope Francis in his Apostolic Exhortation, ‘The Joy of the Gospel’, states, “There are Christians whose lives seems like Lent without Easter”. Are we that?

Palm Sunday commemorates the triumphant entry of Christ into Jerusalem, just days before He was to be crucified.