Homilies
Sixth Sunday in Easter, May 10, 2026
Easter Time enters its last two weeks. I suspect this is a difficult time for many of us to comprehend. It is more than celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. And it is also certainly more than reviewing the shalts and shalt nots of being a Christian. It is more than questions of morality, of being good. Easter time, for me, is about reflecting on who we are. Who am I as a Christian, a follower of the risen Lord, and even who am I as a human being? Yes, what does it mean to be human? Yes, Eastertime is much more significant than Lent.
We are living in a time marked by much fear and anxiety. Many are looking for certain answers to what ails us. I don’t think there are any simple solutions to what is happening to us but we Christians have been given the way, the direction to understanding. Easter capitulates what this is all about. In the last five weeks the church has reminded us of our baptism, the Eucharist, our personal relationship with Christ. Today we are promised an internal presence to help us be who we are.
At the Last Supper, in his farewell address, Jesus told the apostles, and us, that his death and resurrection were the opening to the presence of the Holy Spirit. Let us recall what we just heard:
“I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive… You know him, because he abides in you, and he will be with you.”
Recently in another homily I shared a quotation from Thomas Merton. It somehow hits the mark of the presence of God in our lives. Let me repeat it here.
“At the center of our being, is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.”
This “point of nothingness” is not a point where there is nothing present. It is a point of total presence. It is totally present at the simplest level: to ease our way out from the thoughts and feelings and images and emotions that distract us.
We look for the meaning of ourselves in the use of power and accomplishment. We seek it through technology and the information we can get from computers, artificial intelligence, in smart phones. These are all good enough but deep within us is the real meaning of our lives. As Merton says, we cannot directly access this presence but we can get out of the way of it being known and effective to us. Through beauty, through truth, through nature, through silence, we can let go of what keeps us distant from our true selves. Above all, by getting past our own inflated egos, we can open ourselves to the true self immersed in the presence of the divine. We can come to know, really know, that we have been made in the image and likeness of God, that God dwells within us. We can encounter the fears and anxieties that beset our society and we can know there is something, someone, deeper within our very selves. It is a presence of love. We are truly loved and learning to love opens us to this love. Merton says this is inaccessible to our willing it. But I believe there are moments when we know, when we are touched by its presence.
Our religion, our spirituality calls us to return to the goodness of creation, to truth and beauty and the love that binds all things together. Easter teaches us that God, in the humanity of Jesus Christ, has broken through all the bonds that bind us, even the bonds of death. We must not be overcome by the anger, the contempt, the arrogance that tears us apart.
Maybe if you are now more aware of the divine presence within us, we can listen again to the words of today’s gospel:
“I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. You will know that I am in the Father, and you in me and I in you….”
Fr. Timothy Joyce, STL, OSB