Press Releases
Extract from the Most Revd Richard Clarke's Easter sermon
Most Revd Richard Clarke,
Bishop of Meath and Kildare
Extract from the Sermon preached at the Easter Day Eucharist in St Patrick?s Cathedral, Trim
Sunday 16 April 2006
Preaching in Saint Patrick?s Cathedral Trim on the account of the resurrection of Christ in Saint John?s Gospel, and in particular on the words of Christ to Mary Magdalene, ?Do not hold on to me?, Bishop Richard Clarke suggested the reason as to why this phrase should be taken seriously by Christians in every generation :
'The hint comes immediately in the words that Jesus then says to Mary Magdalene ? "Go to my brethren and say to them.."
Go and tell them. What I think Jesus was therefore saying to Mary and to us is this - I cannot be your private property, I cannot just be yours, and if you try to make me yours alone or try to make me just for you and for people like you, I will run from you. Go and tell people.. go away and convince people of the truth of the resurrection.
The power of the resurrection is not our private property. It is for sharing or for losing.'
The Bishop continued:
'Part of what we need to build up in these dioceses is a confidence, a full-blooded confidence that we really want to allow Christ to run riot in the world around us. We need the spirited confidence to assert that Jesus Christ - crucified and risen - is not our property but is for the whole world. Let us be in no doubt that the resurrection of Jesus Christ that we celebrate today, in the midst of all the post-modern incoherence and relativism that surrounds us, is emphatically neither a metaphor for positive thinking nor a grandiose symbol of wish-fulfilment. It is an event. But if we seek only to hold on grimly to Christ, whether for our comfort or our satisfaction, we are diminishing him in the eyes of the world. Christ does not need our timid protection, he needs our courageous witness.
The risen Christ - in an Ireland where racial difference is taken to mean inferiority, where vicious violence is the instant response to insult (great or small), where material voracity is the only game in town, and where celebrity status is based on the infantilised willingness to invite the entire world into what should be one?s private life ? is not the winsome if ineffectual ?survivor? in the over-familiar plot of a first century soap opera. He is the definitive cipher for our coming to grips with all that we are, all that we might become, and everything that we could make of the world in which we live.
He not only deserves better than our cloying approval. He demands of us, as he demanded of Mary Magdalene, that you and I let him out of our self-absorbed clutches, so that we may more determinedly proclaim him, and so that he may be let loose into a culture which so desperately needs, not our cowardice and reticence, but his power, his love and his invincible glory.'
Further information from:
Tel: Belfast (028) 9023 2909 Dublin (01) 497 8422
Press Officer: Janet Maxwell (duty phone) 00353 (0) 87 948 4412