Dear Parishioners,

This week we celebrate the third Sunday of Easter and we are still reading about the Resurrection experiences of the Disciples.  The resurrection is about the goodness of God, His lavish love for us, His faithfulness to our lives and to our realities, His abundant mercy and peace and so much more.  So, if we still don’t feel alive/resurrected or we need more from Him we can take comfort in the fact that He continues to reach out to us as He did with the disciples.  He met them in His resurrected form various times until they understood and had a personal experience of Him.

Reading this Sundays Gospel, I was really struck by the initial reaction of the disciples to Jesus’ presence: they were “In a state of alarm and fright, they thought they were seeing a ghost.”.  His presence startled them and our experience of Jesus in our life can be the same too.  He can appear in our lives sometimes in unexpected moments, in unusual situations, in a new way and we may not recognise Him and can be startled to find Him there.

But Jesus knows us as He knew His disciples.  He knows how to lead us to recognise Him, He knew to show His wounds to the disciples, He knew to eat in front of them, to show them that He truly was real.  He desires to do the same with us.  No matter what moment we are in in our lives (joyful, happy and full of excitement or sad, struggling and anxious about many things) He is with us, He wants to come to meet us there and He wants to bring His peace, joy, mercy and healing to us.

And with this experience of Him, He leads us to mission.  We are invited to share with others what we have experienced and know of Him.  Perhaps this is through our actions such as reaching out to those who need us or by sharing our experience with others or in more subtle ways through the testimony of our lives.

So, I invite you to find a moment to reflect on what has been your personal experience of the resurrection so that you too can respond to the call from the Gospel to be a witness of His resurrection in your life.

Have a blessed week, Sr Ann Marie, FMVD