Press Releases08 Apr 09

Archbishop of Armagh's Easter Message

2009 Easter Message The Most Revd Alan Harper, OBE, Archbishop of Armagh

The Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, the Most Revd Alan Harper, in his Easter Message this year speaks of the solidarity shown after the events in Northern Ireland of recent weeks and how we must walk by faith and not by sight, keeping our nerve to build a respectful peace and a shared future.

Text of Easter Message

One of the glories of Easter, with the news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the realization that having laid to rest the old body, a new body – unconstrained by the limitations of the past, recognizable as the one who once was yet filled with a new energy – has sprung into being. When rooted in but not captive to the past, exciting new possibilities abound.

When the people of Ireland, North and South, their political leaders and the representatives of all the churches, spoke with a single voice after the killings in Antrim and Craigavon they were speaking the language of the resurrection: recognizing the past but witnessing that we have moved on. The new place, the new peace is life giving and life affirming and it is where we want to be. Not that all that is good from the past is abandoned. Rather, like collectors of ancient treasures, we cherish those things that are the useful and beautiful outcomes of previous eras but do not try to live in that era.

We must live as children of the resurrection as much in secular as in sacred things. When the first disciples heard that the Lord had risen, some believed but others doubted. As word spread and the presence of the risen Christ became an experienced reality, doubt turned to acclamation. The Spirit was given and the Church began fully to inhabit that new, Paschal, reality. Even then, some expected to see the consummation of all things quickly and it became difficult to sustain 'white hot' levels of initial expectation. Similarly, the early phases of peace building, after an initial burst of energy and with occasional set backs, are the hardest to sustain. As the first witnesses to the resurrection did, we also must walk by faith and not by sight, keeping our nerve, resolved to build a respectful peace and a shared future that is truly of God.

ENDS