From our Pastors
Having made our way through Lent and Holy Week, we launch into the Easter season. As we look forward, we are invited to follow Jesus who “goes before us to Galilee” to meet us there. When the angel spoke these words to the women who came to the tomb and as they related them to the disciples, what could they possible mean?
Jesus was not simply giving them a geographical spot for them to regroup and continue together. Rather, Galilee was the place where they first began their relationship with Jesus and one another. Galilee was the place, the experience, of first miracles and newfound love of God and Jesus. Galilee is the experience, the dynamic of wonder and awe into which Jesus brought those whom he touched.
Jesus goes before us as he calls us to recall our first love experience of God, our moments of transformation. These are not meant to be faded memories, but ones which come alive again for us in the transformation power of Easter. When did God touch you, Jesus heal you, the Spirit empower you? Follow Jesus to that inner space and allow that faith to be born anew in these weeks of Easter.
The call to Galilee is also a call to the peripheries. Pope Francis is keen on reminding us of this. In his book, Let Us Dream, (highly recommended for book groups and small groups and for all to read LetUsDream) he is convinced that the way forward for the Church is to look to the peripheries and to those whose lives are lived there. He proclaimed this as well in his homily from the Easter Vigil in Rome: “Galilee was an outpost: the people living in that diverse and disparate region were those farthest from the ritual purity of Jerusalem. Yet that is where Jesus began his mission. There he brought his message to those struggling to live from day to day, the excluded, the vulnerable and the poor. There he brought the face and presence of God, who tirelessly seeks out those who are discouraged or lost, who goes to the very peripheries of existence, since in his eyes no one is least, no one is excluded. The Risen Lord is asking his disciples to go there even now, to the settings of daily life, the streets we travel every day, the corners of our cities.”
Life cannot be lived looking over our shoulders to the past. Let us make our way to Galilee this Easter season, and be transformed for the future.
Fr. Michael Callaghan, c.o. and Fr. Mark Lane, c.o.
