Two-Minute Homily by Archbishop Mark Coleridge for Easter Sunday 2024.
“Easter is the moment when Jesus rises from the tomb against all the odds. But Easter is also about the birth of the Good News from the tomb of our heart.”
- Two-Minute Homily Transcript
Two-Minute Homily Transcript
Author: Archdiocese of Brisbane
On this Easter day and right throughout this Easter season the word that we hear again and again is ‘witness’. In the Acts of the Apostles this morning, we’ve heard Peter say that those with me can witness to everything Jesus did. This Jesus he says, who appeared not to the whole people but to certain witnesses God had chosen, and then he says, we are those witnesses. And we stand in the tradition of the prophets who bear witness to Jesus. So there you have it, four times in the Acts of the Apostles, witness, witness, witness witness. But what does it mean to witness? That’s the Easter question.What it means according to the scripture is first of all we see something, a witness is someone who’s seen or heard something. So we see something or someone. But then we hear, not just the eye, but the ear, we hear a word that interprets what we have seen. And having seen and heard we then believe. Like the beloved disciple who goes to the tomb, sees and believes. Put our faith in the word that we have heard, the word that interprets what we see. And then having put our faith in that word we understand, we really understand what’s going on, what God is up to.
So witnessing involves seeing, hearing, believing, and understanding, and all of that then leads to proclamation, proclaiming the great truth and the great joy of Easter. Easter then is the moment when Jesus rises from the tomb against all the odds, that’s the fact that lies at the heart of Easter. He is the first born from the dead, what looked to be death in fact is a birth.
But Easter is also about the birth of the Good News from the tomb of our heart. In other words, it’s not just about the birth of Jesus from the tomb back there, it’s about Jesus present and powerful here and now in the witnessing of the Church. Easter is about the birth of Jesus from the dead, the first born, but it’s also about the birth of witness, the word that we speak, which is not our word, it is in fact the word of Jesus and it is the Good News.