20.04.2025
Easter Message 2025 from the Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson
… a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise … psalm 51.17
Easter 2025 is celebrated in the Christian tradition across a world that is in turmoil and in tears. Each of you can choose your own location, shut your own eyes and picture the suffering of women, men and children, younger and older, without distinction of creed or class and always without respite. The picture may settle before you, or it may grow more intense. This is our world as we have made it today.
The church liturgically and prayerfully has come through a week which it continues to call holy, rooted in Holy Scripture. Its holiness is populated by exuberance and fulfilment, disillusion and betrayal, suffering and death, confusion and now, all of a sudden, resurrection. There is a lot to assimilate. The events are too powerful and too immediate for our tired religious imaginations. Yet resurrection is God’s gift to us on Easter Day when holiness and joy combine forces and reset our agendas.
Christmas and Easter offer us different dimensions of happiness. Happy …, after all, is our greeting to one another on both days. Both speak of life. Christmas speaks of new birth. Easter adds the chasm of death to the human experience, mirroring, in this, further glimpses of the divine reality. Happiness is the journey which God’s church has today taken as we exit Lent and Holy Week on the day of resurrection. It is this kaleidoscope of light and darkness that gives us the materials of a new picture which remains work in progress but has, at the same time, become a living possibility.
What is it? And how are we to share it with a disinterested world? We are to start small and to start sincere. We are to continue strong and to share generously. We are to identify with the people we do not know or understand. We are to let ourselves be tested in the encounters that will be sprung upon us. We are to let God talk through us much more than we are to talk about God. We are to avoid talking up the best in ourselves and talking down the best in other people. In ways like this, the light of Christ will show itself in the post–resurrection world of today as a force of compassion in a world of wounds.
I wish you all Happy Easter and joy in being the new creation in Christ that you truly are.
+Michael Dublin and Glendalough