Author: Brendan Coffey

Fr Patrick Hederman OSB

Our Lord, Jesus Christ, when he came on earth used images to explain what he was trying to do for us. These images were taken from the day to day lives of the people with whom he lived. ‘I am the bread of life’ he said; ‘I am the door;’ ‘I am the shepherd;’ ‘I am the gateway.’ If he were here with us today, he might have used more up-to-date imagery to make us understand what is happening.

Instead of ‘I am the vine and you are the branches’ [John 15:5] he might have said: ‘I am the fibre optic splicer.’ Fiber optic splicing is one of the new professions in the telecommunications industry. You join two fibre optic cables together to create a continuous path for data transmission. The cable has at least two flexible fibres with a glass core
through which light signals can be sent. The Splicer makes a permanent connection between cables which allows each one of us to connect into the main branch. This is how we receive digital cable TV on our lap-tops, for instance. It comes through a network of high-speed fibre-optic cables.

Three weeks from today, on the 19 th May, is Pentecost Sunday, the day we welcome the Holy Spirit into our high speed networks. This completes the fibre optic connection between each one of us and the great power station that is the hub of the universe. We can either plug into this system or we can carry on paddling our own canoes. The choice at every stage of the connection is ours.

The second reading this morning gives us a clue: ‘Let us not love with
words or speech but with actions and in truth’ [1 John 3:18]. Let us be down-to-earth and practical as we prepare ourselves for our transfer to broadband. You don’t have to know how it works to find out that it works: just turn it on and benefit from your cable television. ‘We know’ Saint John tells us later on in this same letter, ‘that God lives in us because of the Spirit which God has given us’ [1 John, 3:24]. We all have that Spirit within us, that eternal source of God’s energy and power. All we have to do is activate that presence, by splicing the
fibre optic cables.

St Benedict tells us how to do this in the Prologue to his Rule: ‘whatever good work you undertake, ask him with most instant prayer to bring it to perfection.’ Whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever you hope for, stop for a moment and ask the Holy Spirit to help you. Instantissima oratione is the secret formula of Saint Benedict. Instantissima in Latin is the same word we use for ‘instant coffee’ or ‘instant soup.’ It is instant prayer. You can do it anywhere, at any time, in a couple of seconds; as long as it takes to say ‘I love you, help me.’
And it’s a question of getting into the habit, of going down into yourself and touching base. If someone asks you a question, instead of replying immediately, automatically, ask the Spirit to tell you what to say. The Holy Spirit is the finger of God, the extension of God’s right hand. The Holy Spirit is the Digitus Dei, digital divinity, The Holy Spirit is your ATM, your automated teller machine –telling you whatever you are meant to do; whatever you are meant to say.

If you allow the Holy Spirit to guide you there will be magic in your life ahead. You only have to learn to interpret the coded messages sent your way. These can happen through coincidences which can so easily be shrugged off or overlooked. Other times it is an impulse, sent your way: talk to this person, take down that book, walk in this direction, go into that church now. When we obey, we find that it leads to the unforeseen. The meaning of a particular hunch is often at the other side of our obeying it, of our doing what we are told. I have found that this instantissima oratio is particularly useful when doing examinations. Before even reading the question paper, make sure that the cables are connected and then continue working on evergreen energy.

Try it for yourselves when the Holy Spirit comes.

Fr Christopher Dillon OSB

A shepherd in Palestine or anywhere in the Middle East manages his sheep very differently from what you might expect of a shepherd in this country. We think of shepherds as driving their sheep, but the Palestinian leads his. He walks ahead of them to guide them to safety and good grazing, keeping an eye out for dogs and wolves and ready to take them on, should they attack. That is the point of the image which Jesus uses of the Good Shepherd. He sees his task as being out there ahead of us, to keep us safe. And not only that; he says, “I lay down my life for my sheep”.

All three readings today talk about God saving us. St Peter in the first reading says of Jesus’ name, “Of all the names in the world given to people, this is the only one by which we can be saved.” St John puts it more mysteriously in the Second Reading, when he says, “all we know is that when the future is revealed, we shall be like him”, that is to say, we shall be like God.

“And what”, you might ask, “do we need to be saved from?” Well, look around you: climate change, wars in Ukraine and Israel, migrants fleeing catastrophes of one kind or another, threats to democracy and sane government, social problems ranging from housing to health services, to say nothing of famine and drought around the world, the mental stress of addiction and loneliness.

There is so much from which people, including us here, need to be saved, to be rescued. And these readings represent the voice of God saying to us, “I love you. You are my children. I will not fail you. I will lay down my life for you.” The Easter story tells us that God, in Jesus Christ, has done just that; he has laid down his life for us, has laid down his life for us and taken it up again. He has taken it up again in such a way that we too can rise to new life after our own death. That is the saving, the rescue that he is speaking about. He is inviting us to put our trust and our hope in his love for us.

That is what our Christian faith is about, believing in God’s love for us. When all else fails, as it will, his love for us is absolute and unconditional. The question for every one of us is, “Do you trust his love?” At the very least, like the father of the sick child whom he brought to Jesus for healing, we can say, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Fr William Fennelly OSB

‘The disciples told their story’, Saint Luke tells us, about what had just happened on the road to Emmaus and about how, at the breaking of bread, they finally recognised that their new companion was Jesus, their Lord. you can almost feel the buzz. You can hear the urgency in their voices telling what they’d seen. And they were so consumed with the business of telling the others, that Jesus comes again and interrupts them mid-flow.

Telling stories about Jesus, sharing news of God’s wonderful works, and witnessing to the Risen Lord remains a vital task for 21st-century disciples as it was two thousand years ago. It’s how the faith was spread, often at great sacrifice and risk, and how it has been handed down through countless generations the world over. In this sharing of the Good News of Jesus Christ, no detail is more important than the Resurrection, not least because, as Jesus says, it fulfils the scriptures.

So, how good are we at engaging in and performing this key resoinsibilty? Have you, for example, radiated some of that same joy of the early disciples as they basked in the light of the Risen Lord? Have you greeted people with the traditional Easter greetings like ‘Christ is risen! Alleluia!’? When was the last time you spoke with friends about an encounter with Jesus like the Emmaus disciples? How many of us see his Holy Spirit as an animating force in our lives? Did you, this Easter, choose the Easter bunny and Easter eggs over the cross? These are searching questions to ask of ourselves.

The Korean German writer, Byung Chul Han, says that  Homo sapiens have degenerated into “phono sapiens”. Storytelling used to bind us together around the campfire; it connected us to our past and helped us imagine hopeful futures. The digital screen has replaced that fire, making us individuals that perform fictitious versions of ourselves to unseen peers, tailoring our looks, lives and opinions to get our story liked. “This smart form of domination constantly asks us to communicate our opinions, needs and preferences, to tell our lives, to post, share and like messages”. Han argues that in a fog of instant information, commodified data, and selfie updates, our ability to tell our stories has degenerated. He surely has a point and the effects of this decline really affect the christian community’s efforts to share its story and encourage each other in the faith. My story seems to be hard to connect to our story as christians.

One issue is ignorance of the story itself. You can’t speak about what you do not know about. ‘Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ’, it is said. Reading scripture and spending time in prayer are humble and faithful slow works of a lifetime, part and parcel of being a disciple.

Another obstacle is of course our sin. Our credibility as storytellers, as sharers of the Gospel, depends on the way we live our lives. People are rightly reluctant to accept the word of a hypocrite, one who says they know Jesus but doesn’t keep his commandments, as the Second Reading put it. Actually, I think few have the brass-neck for such double standards and so the result of sin is not that the Gospel is shared by sinners and is disbelieved, but that it isn’t shared at all for fear of being labelled a hypocrite or judged ourselves. Of course, not one of us is perfect and so failing to proclaim the Lord because of our own shortcomings is a complex but real state of affairs. Happily, there’s a remedy and one that is found in the very thing we seek to proclaim.

When we sin and we all do, we can confess and repent, as St Peter said in the first Reading. We repent knowing of the Lord’s victory over sin and death, confident of his forgiveness for all. As forgiven and redeemed people we can testify to others that we need not be trapped by our faults and vices in an endless cycle of guilt. Moreover, when we seek to avoid sinning, we hold to the ideal of being a genuinely good person on our horizon so that, ‘God’s love can come to perfection’ in us. Only by living God’s love will the Good News be seen for what it is: authentic; compelling; and transformative.

Jesus tells the disciples, as he tells us, in no uncertain terms ‘you are witnesses to this’. So let’s tell his story! Tell his story in your story! And tell the stories well, because salvation depends upon this vital task.

Fr Jarek Kurek OSB

Quite recently the death occurred of a Polish man whose name was Ernest Bryll. He was a well-known writer and poet; a man of wide cultural horizons. He had a particular affection for Irish Culture and because of his love for this country he gave his Polish readers many Irish gems. For instance, he made a translation into Polish of Irish poems from the 6th to the 19th centuries. But also, and I have this book here with me, he left us with a most fascinating account of the
journey he made with his wife across Ireland, a journey that started in Dublin, where the two of them followed the trail of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and continued until they eventually reached Dingle and the Blasket Islands, mapping out for the reader all the cultural phenomena they encountered.

Mr Bryll lived in Ireland, back in the early 90s’, while he was serving as the first Polish ambassador to Ireland. And it was during those years that he had a very memorable encounter with a Polish nun called Sr Faustina Kowalska. Well, like it or not, you are stuck with the Poles today…

To be perfectly honest with you, Mr Bryll, didn’t think too much of Sr
Faustina’s revelations initially. To him they seemed quite odd. But he was lucky enough to be challenged by some Irish people who helped him to appreciate her. He happened to meet a local Irish woman, the owner of the hotel he was staying in, and in that hotel there were some pictures of Sr Faustina and the Divine Mercy. That landlady said to him: ‘You are from Poland, are you not? Tell me everything about this Sr Faustina, because, you know, her revelations are very important to us here in Ireland’. The Ambassador looked at her quite perplexed and thought: ‘What am I supposed to tell her? I don’t really know anything
about them’.

On that occasion he managed to save face by remaining rather vague. However, that conversation made him read up on Sr Faustina and her legacy, to avoid similar future embarrassment. At this stage it was still too soon for him to read the actual Diary containing her revelations and he still maintained a low opinion of these writings. He believed
they were rather chaotic, a folksy text produced by an uneducated nun and not worth his scholarly attention.

It was only some years later that he finally started to seriously explore the spiritual experience of the Diary. Only then did he discover that there was far more to this than he had originally though. This highly educated man humbly admitted to himself that this Diary, so often
unappreciated and ridiculed, could actually have a transformative power on its reader.

And a spiritual transformation is what Ambassador Bryll experienced as he carefully read these pages. This extraordinary man subsequently became a herald and promotor of Divine Mercy. We read in the Diary those powerful words that Jesus spoke to Sr Faustina: ‘I want to give Myself to souls, I yearn for souls, My daughter. On the day of My feast, the Feast of Mercy, you will go through the whole world and bring fainting souls to the spring of My mercy, and I shall heal and strengthen them, amen’.

Fr Senan Furlong OSB

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been … think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first
link on one memorable day.

Great expectations were shattered on the Friday we call good. Jesus’ death on the cross seemed so final, so irrevocable, the erasure of meaning and hope. Things fell apart and those left behind were broken and devastated. The violence of Friday however gave way to the stillness of Saturday and now, it’s early dawn on the first day of the week, the first Easter Sunday. And the first link of the long chain of new life on this one memorable day is an empty tomb.

Sometimes things come along that you didn’t know you needed until you’re offered them. And who would ever have imagined that something as unpromising as an empty tomb would be one of these? On one memorable day three people, one woman and two men came to the tomb where Jesus had been laid. Each came looking for something, not really knowing what that something was.

First came Mary of Magdala, grief stricken and inconsolable. To her horror, she found that Jesus’ body was gone. Then came Peter and the beloved disciple running to the tomb at Mary’s news. Peter did not hesitate to go straight in, but all he could understand then was emptiness: an empty tomb and empty grave clothes. The beloved disciple who outran Peter also entered in. “He saw and he believed.” What he believed is hard to say. Even if he outran Peter in faith, clearly neither of them yet understood what this was all about, for both of them just went home. But Mary, who stood by Jesus as he was dying on the cross, now waited at the tomb in tears; and it is to her that the first link, the empty tomb, yielded up its meaning. Mary is the first to see the Risen Lord. She is first to proclaim, ‘I have seen the Lord.’

We may think we know what we are looking for, hoping to fulfil our great expectations. And then suddenly everything changes: the tomb is empty! Our expectations are shown to be far from great, what we were looking for embarrassingly paltry.

Waiting at the empty tomb like Mary changes us. We seek the Lord only to find that it is the Risen Lord who is seeking us. No matter what we throw at him, however deeply we reject him, however much we seek to bury him, he will find a way back to us. Nothing can separate us from the love of the Lord, not even death itself. This is the story of Easter, this is the story of eternity. Today is the one memorable day that changes the course of our lives and binds us with the long chain of God’s infinite love.

Abbot Brendan OSB

As we listened to the account of God’s dream for the world in the Liturgy of the Word; could you feel the presence of the Risen Lord with us? Has this dream become a reality? The promises made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Elizabeth and Zacheriah, Mary and Joseph, have they come true?

Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Salome, came to the tomb. St Cyril of Jerusalem calls Mary of Magdala the philochristos – the ‘lover of Christ’. But strong as she was, Mary of Magdala was almost broken as she approached the tomb. It was all too much. She was reduced to misery. Like all the others she misread the situation.

John’s gospel tells us she had been weeping in the garden. This seems to be a human pastime, starting with Adam and Eve. The three women didn’t realise that God’s plan had already become a reality.

These women expected to see a corpse wrapped in a sheet, instead they see a young man dressed in white. They expected to see a body lying in the tomb, instead they see a man sitting on the right: on whose right? Someone placed this young man on his right hand, saying to him: ‘Sit on my right’.  Do we not remember the words of Jesus to the sons of Zebedee, “sitting at my right hand and my left, this is not mine to grant; this is for those for whom it has been prepared.”

“You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth”, said this man dressed in white, “he has risen, he is not here.” The place of deposition bears witness to this. The hour has come when the bridegroom has been taken away, just as he said.

There is one more line in this gospel passage which we never hear, it is always omitted. It says, “And the women came out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and amazement had gripped them. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

What an anticlimax! No wonder it’s omitted. They have just been told the most important news in all of history and what do they do? Nothing. They were afraid. I think this verse is actually more for us than for the women disciples.

Are we afraid of Jesus’ resurrection? Are we afraid of proclaiming it? Are we afraid to stand up for what is right and true in the world? Many of us in the church today are so afraid that we don’t even tell ourselves who we are anymore – the disciples of the Risen Jesus.

Yes, the problems of the world have not disappeared and life remains a struggle for many people, but Christ is Risen, the stone is rolled away from the entrance to our tomb, and we are the messengers of this truth.

Have you not heard, this is the night when a tsunami of grace is poured out, as it will be on Carole when she comes before the altar to receive the sacrament of confirmation.

So do not be afraid, listen to the voices of Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Listen to the voices of the peoples of Ukraine. Listen to the suffering people of Gaza and the Middle East. These are the voices crying out to the Risen Christ who stands among us and before whom one day every one of us must stand and ask for mercy. Christ is Risen and it is intolerable in our day that God’s children should be treated like this. Do not be afraid – proclaim the resurrection, proclaim the gospel!

Can you feel the presence of the Risen Christ among us? Can you hear what he is saying to us? We believe in the God of life and “He is going before you to Gallilee, there you will see him.” What shocked the disciples about the resurrection was not just that Jesus rose from the dead; they witnessed this before, Jairus’ daughter, the son of the widow of Nain, and of course, Lazarus. What was so shocking was that the resurrected Jesus did not come back from death as an avenger, but as the bringer of forgiveness. His pierced hand is forever raised against the flames of war, violence and vengeance and he says: Stop! ‘Peace be with you’. Such words break down the gates of hell. These are now our words, if we have the courage to use them.

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη! (Khristós Anésti! Alithós Anésti!) Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

Abbot Brendan OSB

We have listened to the Book of Exodus. How each household must share the Passover lamb with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, taking into account what each can eat. The Last Supper, the memory of which we keep this evening, was a meal Jesus celebrated with his disciples during Passover.

Over time the Passover traditions of the Jewish people strayed a little from the regulations in the Book of Exodus and by the time of Jesus, well over one thousand years later, Passover could also refer to the weeklong celebration of Unleavened Bread with which it had merged.

The famous Roman historian Josephus tells us that over 250,000 lambs were slaughtered every year on the eve of Passover between 3pm and 5pm, some in the Temple and some in people’s homes. This is the same time we will celebrate our Liturgy of the Passion tomorrow afternoon. The time that Jesus died on the cross. The lambs used in the Temple were, like Jesus, born in Bethlehem. They were without blemish, specially reared in the hills surrounding Bethlehem and brought to the Jerusalem Temple for sacrifice. The blood of these slaughtered lambs was collected in bowls and some of it thrown against the altar. Two rods in the form of a cross skewered the lambs before they were prepared and eaten. St John in his Gospel wants us to understand that Jesus is our Paschal lamb. The Lamb of God.

On this night Jesus chose to digress from the normal ritual of the Passover week. He rose from the table and washed the feet of his disciples. He made the disciples ritually clean and brought them into communion with him. Then he fed them with himself. The bread was his body, the wine his blood.

Next he goes to the Garden of Gethsemane, which means ‘oil press’. Do we not remember here another garden, the Garden of Eden with its two trees, the tree of good and evil and the tree of life. Despite what almost everyone thinks, nowhere does it say in the Book of Genesis that Adam and Eve ate an apple. Genesis only mentions that they ate fruit and the ancient Jewish tradition was that this fruit was probably fig, because Adam and Eve afterwards sewed fig leaves together to make themselves clothes. This also helps us make sense of what Jesus said to the fig tree as he was on his way up to Jerusalem for the Passover, “may no one ever eat fruit from you again”.

If tradition says the fig was the tree of good and evil, it also says that the olive was the tree of life. Gethsemane is the oil press where the olive from the tree of life must be crushed. The healing power of the tree of life, holy Chrism, has to flow down upon us from the Paschal Lamb on the tree of the cross.

This blessed night, the gift of the Eucharist, the gift of healing oil, the washing of our feet, reveals in a beautiful way what St John teaches us in the Gospel: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end”.

Tomorrow, Christ our Paschal Lamb will be sacrificed. Tonight, he invites us to come home. He invites us to sit at his table with him to be washed and healed by his oil of love and feed on his body and blood.

Fr Abbot Brendan OSB 

This morning the monks at morning prayer listened to a sermon from St Aelred for today’s feast. It began like this, ‘Today is the Transitus of St Benedict and so I have to say a few words to you. This is particularly so, as you are so eager to listen.’ I hope that is also the case here? Today, 21 March, happens to be the traditional date for the spring equinox. As you probably know from your geography lessons, at the spring or vernal equinox, as it is called, the sun is directly over the equator making its way northwards. Astronomically speaking, it is the start of spring and summer. From now on the days will get much longer and the light grow ever brighter.

On this highly significant day of light, St Benedict passed from this life into glory in the year of our salvation 547. That is what we celebrate today. Today then we are remembering the day St Benedict died. Those of us who have lost relatives and friends will know how important it is to remember loved ones on their anniversary day. However, here the emphasis is different and we can learn a lot from it. The story of Benedict’s passing is told by Pope St Gregory the Great in his book, The Dialogues.

As Benedict was dying, his brother monks held him up, they carried him to the Eucharist. This is telling us that we as brothers and sisters are supposed to carry each other through life. At times we are all in need of this.

We are also told that after his death two monks saw a vision of a road leading from the monastery into heaven and this road had a carpet of light and was flanked by lamps. This is the road Benedict took when he went to heaven. The lamps are his good deeds in life and the shining carpet is charity, which covers all things.

It is also important for us to note that this account is told to us in the present tense. This passing into life is not an end, it is another stage on a journey. Both life and death are journeys and that journey is marked by the lamps of our good deeds and the carpet of love we leave as we travel this road.

Anyone who has lost a loved one will have little difficulty identifying with this vision and will also be able to take from this account great consolation that those we have loved and who have loved us, have passed along this road too on their journey. This is the message the Transitus of St Benedict leaves with us today, on this spring equinox, a day of light.

Fr Cuthbert Brennan OSB

The great prophet Jeremiah walks into our lives this morning and he is one of those people I’d rather read about than live with. He must have been one incredibly tough truth teller, reminding God’s first Chosen People how they had violated the covenant with their Creator, not only because of their worship of other gods but because of the way they had oppressed the poor.

So love of God and neighbour! It sounds familiar doesn’t it? Jeremiah announces a second chance – a fresh covenant, not one with new content but one with a new geography. From now on, the heart not
stone tablets will be the place where God writes his covenant. The late Stacy Simpson, a Baptist minister, in an attempt to understand what a heart inscribed covenant might look like, offers this reflection entitled Branded by God She writes; The image of God writing on the heart of the people is a compelling one, it also has a frightening aspect to it. Think of a tattoo. Pain, indelibility, identity are the central aspects of what it means to be marked. If it didn’t involve pain, it wouldn’t be indelible; marks that don’t hurt are the ones that wash off. If it were not indelible, what it revealed about a person’s identity wouldn’t be so critical.

Maybe you remember your catechism classes as a child where we learned that baptism left an indelible mark on our souls. At baptism a covenant was inscribed on us, our very hearts were tattooed by God. On the very centre of our being, we are fired with love, that same love which called St Patrick back to this land with the gift of the gospel. That gospel which isn’t simply a story showing us a path to life; it’s an education in what things are worth dying for.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single
grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. From Jesus, we learn that divine power is the most subversive force in all of creation. Rather than crush opponents, God’s power undermines evil and the violence it perpetrates. As Mahatma Gandhi explained, “Love is the strongest force the world possesses, yet it is the humblest imaginable.”

Ultimately, the greatest leap of faith Christians are invited to take is to
believe in this entirely counterintuitive and countercultural idea that the
forces of humility, generous love, and tender, nonviolent creativity are the instruments of world change. This is Jesus’ message. He taught that falling into the ground and dying lead to ousting the ruler of this world.

Jesus was planted on Calvary, St Patrick was planted in Ireland, we were
planted deep in a baptismal pool and it is here at our liturgies that we
rehearse transformation, we learn to germinate, we practise dying so that our lives when we leave here, can give seed to justice and care, respect and dignity, love of neighbour equal to a love of God.

Jesus knew what he was living for. And he knew what he was dying for. He was the grain of wheat that died and produced much fruit. That fruit is us. That leaves only one question on this St Patrick’s Day – What are we dying for?

Fr Lino Moreira OSB

In his dialogue with Nicodemus, a Pharisee who came to see him during the night, Jesus spoke about the light of faith, and at one point he said: ‘As Moses has lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life’ (Jn 3:14-15). Jesus was referring to chapter 21 of the Book of Numbers, where fiery serpents are said to have been sent among the Israelites in the desert to punish them for speaking against God. Moses interceded for the people, and then God told him what he had to do to save them. So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole – reports the sacred author. – And if a serpent bit anyone, they would
look at the bronze serpent and live (Nm 21:9).

Nicodemus was very familiar with this story, and Jesus told him that the bronze serpent was an image of himself, and that whoever looked at him with faith would be rescued from the power of Satan and live forever. But what exactly did Jesus mean by saying that the Son of Man must be lifted up? As is often the case in Saint John’s gospel, the assertion has a double meaning. Jesus was not simply predicting that he would be crucified in Jerusalem, he was explaining that his death on the cross would be the moment of his exaltation, the occasion when – having accomplished the task entrusted to him by his Father – he would be glorified with the glory that was his from the beginning
(cf. Jn 17:4-5; 19:30).

Seen in this light, the crucifixion of Jesus was not a humiliation, but
rather a revelation to the world that the Son of Man was also the Son of God, and that the one into whose hands the Father had placed all things (cf. Jn 13:3) was enthroned on the cross as supreme king over the whole creation. That is why Jesus said to Pontius Pilate: ‘You are right in saying that I am a king. For this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me’ (Jn 18:37).

As king of all creation Jesus was commissioned by God the Father to
judge the world on his behalf. And again according to Saint John’s gospel, judgement is an on-going event, not just something that will take place at the end of time. As we have heard today, Jesus gives a verdict for the here and now when he says that whoever believes in him is not condemned (cf. Jn 3:18). And then he explains that a genuine believer is someone who does what is true (cf. 3:21) – an idiom which means the exact opposite of doing evil (cf. 3:20). So we should ask ourselves constantly, as we go about our daily life, whether we are doing what is true – that is to say, whether we are living by the
truth and our deeds are good. Conscious of the many times we have fallen short, we may be inclined to think that the standards set by Jesus are simply too high for an ordinary human being – a fact which seems to find confirmation in Saint Paul’s sobering words: I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want (Rm 7:19). However, perfection is our goal, not our point of departure. Jesus calls all God’s children, saints and sinners alike, to come to him with full confidence, so that through his divine power they may overcome the darkness of evil and experience the joy of a new life. Let us, then, never lose hope, mindful of what our Redeemer said to some Pharisees who were less sympathetic than Nicodemus: ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’ (Jn 8:12).