JAMAICA
Easter is the celebration of good over evil, life over death, light over darkness. It is the celebration of the end of the long reign of sin and death which now must give way to life in Jesus, the Risen One.
In his Easter message to faithful, Bishop John Persaud of Mandeville asserted that the preoccupation with death, in all its forms in the world, is “evident”.
He mentioned some years ago, that Pope John Paul II spoke of the modern world’s preoccupation with a culture of death.
“The signs are all around us, crime and violence, domestic violence, unkindness and lack of charity in all strands of relationships, the holding of grudges and seeking of revenge, the destruction of family life and decency. Faced with these situations of death, we must look to Jesus,” Bishop Persaud said in his six-minute, video-taped Easter message.
He spoke of everyday “death-like situations” of inequality, injustice, suffering, lack of charity that must be transformed through the Resurrection of Christ.
“We who have been brought back to true life with Christ must be the leaven that transforms death to life, darkness to light, hatred to love,” Bishop Persaud said.
The Bishop said that faithful’s pilgrimage into the desert of Lent now gives way to a new day of Resurrection as the Risen Lord is encountered in an embrace that promises new life.
The passage through death to life has been experienced in so many different ways throughout the centuries, and expressed in old mediums available to humans, he said.
He commented each year is lived through this passage in the Church with the celebrations of our liturgies of Holy Week.
“It is the time of year when the Church tells its best stories and celebrates its best liturgies. We sit down with Jesus at the table of the Eucharist, we accompany Him on the painful road to Calvary, we experience the silence of the tomb and we rejoice with Him on the day of Resurrection.”
Bishop Persaud recalled this year’s gospel reading of Easter Sunday recounts the story of Mary of Magdala who came to the tomb in search of Jesus, the crucified one, but found an empty tomb.
In the second reading, St Paul in his letter to the Colossians says. “Let your thoughts be on heavenly things, not on the things that are on the earth, because you have died, and now the life you have is hidden with God, with Christ in God” (Col 3:1–2).
Death, Bishop Persaud asserted, is to experience a surrender to God’s will. When this occurs, the “space” is created through forgiveness to live a different reality, the way of love, and true brotherhood, sisterhood.
To this end, Bishop Persaud hoped that this Easter will lead each as a community to be the voice of truth, light that dispels the darkness of sin and forgiveness that creates a space for a new beginning.