7th Sunday of Easter B

7th Sunday of Easter -  As You Sent Me – I Have Sent Them

What is important about this weekend? What is it that comes to your minds? Is it that you are off, maybe? Or that the sun is shining? Or that you have a particular family celebration? Yes? Does this sound about right?

Well, I can completely understand this and within my own home, we are certainly looking to see how we can celebrate having some work on the house completed and over and done with at last after about a year of waiting. But we too will also be looking to see how we can get out as families and celebrate together. Celebrate our humanity, our community, our family, our lives and our freedoms and yes, maybe even celebrate our faith.

Do you know that we are still in the season of Easter? We are coming toward the back end of this season for sure but we are still here. We are still celebrating the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour, aren’t we? This is the time when we should, as a faith-community, be shouting from the rooftops what we understand, what we believe to be true, that we are saved! That God so loved humanity that He sent His only Son to live for us, to die for us and then to rise from the dead for us and save us from our sins for all eternity. That is what we are celebrating this weekend! That is what we celebrate over the season of Easter!  That we are loved and saved by God.

Jesus sent His apostles out into the world to spread this message of love, to tell the whole of humanity that we are saved, if we but believe. If we believe this message of love, of care for our neighbour and acceptance of God into our lives. As He was sent by God His Father, so He was sending out his messengers, His apostles, to proclaim this message of salvation to us, for us. For us to pass on in kind.

We have been sent as messengers into the world to proclaim this message too! Proclaim! This means that we have to live our lives as active witnesses to the message of Christ. It means that we should celebrate life and the living of it. We should rejoice that we are alive. We should be glad that we have family, relations, friends and neighbours with whom we can be happy, be ecstatic and maybe even go out this coming week and have a bite together, celebrate. We should celebrate. We should laugh, shout, sing and dance. We should.

But we should remember why we are doing this. And at least a small part of this why, should still contain a remnant at least, of our resurrection story. We are still in Easter. Christ DID die for ME. He suffered and died for ME. He rose from the dead for ME. He took on the sins of humanity for ME. He did all of this so that I might live. I need to recognise this and I need to rejoice in this.

And I need to bear witness to this by living this rejoicing in my everyday life. By living an example of Christ crucified and Christ born again: an example of joy, an example of rejoicing, an example of celebration!

We are messengers! Through our baptism, we are messengers! Through our lives as Christians, we are messengers! Through the sacraments we receive, we are messengers! Through everything that we have been taught and that we believe, we are messengers!

And the message that we are delivering, that we are proclaiming to the world, in our words, our actions, our lives, is that we are saved! That Jesus died so that we might all be saved! If we but believe in Him and in the message that he gave us to deliver, “God is love. Love each other just as I have loved you. Love each other as you love yourselves.”

Our message is one of love. Our witness is to that love. Rejoice! Celebrate! Sing! Shout! Dance and rejoice! This week more than ever as we come to the end of our Easter season, let us rejoice as the family of Christ, as the family of God, in what we know to be true. God loves us. Jesus died for us. He rose from the dead for us. We are saved!

Just as Jesus sent his apostles, so is He sending us out into the world to proclaim His message, to live His message, to show His message. His message of love and rejoicing; of love and celebration; of love and salvation.

“Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard You calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if You lead me. I will hold Your people in  my heart.”