Second Sunday of Easter

“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”

The Father sent Jesus to reveal the personality and mind of God. Our vocation is to do just that. We have a vocation. A mission.

We are here, as was Jesus Christ was, to enable people to live “life to the full’ (Jn 10,10) by controlling our destructive tendencies – our sins - and acquiring the virtues of love that St Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, identified as patience, kindness, humility, trust and hope.

The first is patience. Everything takes time. As I have aged, this has become ever clearer. You can’t speed up toasting bread or brewing a cup of coffee or tea – or accelerate a teenager’s journey through their puberty. Give time to time and the young will become 25 year-old and once again appreciate the intelligence of their parents.

Sometimes, decades have to pass before people see sense and repent – to face God. Just one example. St. Olga of Kiev, which, as you know, is now in Ukraine (d. 969), was a mass murderer. Queen of the Kievan Rus, she defended her crown by murdering her enemies en masse – a habit picked up by Stalin and Putin. 

However, on her visit to Constantinople, she was baptised and her life transformed her. She spent the rest of her life trying to make up for the damage she had done. After Olga’s death, her intercession wrought the miraculous healing of her grandson, St. Vladimir the Great, who brought the Russian people to Christ. For her role, she’s known as ‘Equal to the Apostles’ in the Byzantine Church.

In order not to test your patience, as you know, I keep my homilies short.