It is very important to ask why and what was the purpose of Our Lord’s Passion - all that it cost him, the repeated horrors that the Passion offers us. We live in an age where God’s mercy is looked upon as infinite and therefore nothing else matters. God made us and he loves us and he is going to save all of us. But what is he saving us from? That we don’t know because of course nowadays there is no devil and there is no hell and so we are all going to die and go to heaven and there is not much point in being good because sin now is quite unimportant. Even the most serious sins now are looked upon as nothing but just a bit of fun, as they said in an Irish questionnaire which was sent out recently. There is nothing wrong, so therefore God is going to take us to heaven, so why worry?

That is the world we live in, and we have got to think where the falseness in this lies. I don’t think good parents are prepared to ignore their children’s wrongdoing; forgiveness comes only when they say they are sorry. So Our Lord died for us, he is prepared to forgive our sins but (a) we have to recognise them, and (b) we have to be sorry for them. So many people I have heard say, "It does not matter missing Mass" and that they don’t see very much point in going; God is going to forgive them. They are going to God and are breaking his law, but that does not matter. They are living a good life. This was actually said more or less in those terms by a woman from South America on the underground in London, who came over and started talking and promised she would start going to Mass again. I hope she did, but she had been imbued with this heresy that you can go on intending to sin and God will forgive you. Of course, if we look at it, it is a thoroughly mean attitude.

We should go back, as so many theologians do, to salvation history, salvation theology, that the Jews were saved from something real. They were saved from the slavery and the cruelty of Egypt. In our own era, beginning with John the Baptist, he really had one message, the gospel - godspell - the good news, and that was the forgiveness of sin: that people could be told that now their sins could be forgiven and the time of fear ended, and that they should show that they wanted their sins forgiven by being baptised. But John, of course, was preaching as the last of the great prophets, foreshadowing the one who was going to bring the true good news, the true forgiveness of sins.

And so we get through the gospel a number of people who come to Our Lord saying "Master, how shall I be saved?" and again and again "Repent" - it is so important: repent and believe the gospel. Repentance was important, depending on believing the gospel and keeping the commandments, as he told the rich young man who had not the courage to follow him. The young man said he kept all those commandments but still he had not the courage to go all the way for a special vocation. Our Lord’s death was to make that forgiveness of our repentance operative, working. And so Our Lord lived his life and came to the Last Supper when he could give himself as the one coming to us - and think of this in communion - that Our Lord chose at the Last Supper to come to each one of us to be with us and to forgive our sins. If you are unfortunate enough to have sins on your conscience when you go to communion it is a fact that Our Lord will forgive those sins in holy communion. Grave sins of course have to be confessed and Our Lord wants us to show that positive and real repentance.

What is not noticed is that the forgiveness of sin was the completion of the Passion story. It was on Easter Sunday evening that Our Lord appeared to the eleven and probably the two from Emmaus and a few others there in the upper room where the whole thing had started, and there was only the one thing he did apart from the very important spreading of the good news, making Easter Sunday such a happy day for him and all his friends. He chose that day for just one action, and that was to give the church in the form of that group of ten apostles (Thomas was missing and Judas of course was gone) a new power.

He then said those words instituting the sacrament of confession. Confession is necessary: "Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; whose sins you shall retain, they are retained," showing that the church with its representatives, the priests, has to be in a position to know what the person is asking for and to judge the genuineness of that person’s state of mind in repentance. And so the church again and again and again begs us to use this sacrament. One of the most depressing things a priest can experience when he goes on supply is going down to the church on a Saturday morning and a Saturday evening and sitting in the box. In two half hours he may get two people in the whole day who come to confession - he may not. It is so terrible that our sense of sin has died within us and we don’t see the need of showing repentance, the sacrament, the grace giving sacrament of confession, or as the church says nowadays the sacrament of reconciliation and counselling, although that sacrament is of such incredible importance.

I used to work quite often at a hospital in the Wirral with a huge cancer department where it would take me about eight hours to visit all the Catholics, with Liverpool being such a Catholic city. There were all those who were under the threat of death with cancer and on eight or nine visits, I never once went round the cancer ward without at least eight major reconciliations. I’m not talking about people who had been away from the sacraments for three or four years but had still been practising, I am talking about people who perhaps you would say were "non active" or "dormant" Catholics.

A huge percentage of them felt that it was unfair to ask God for forgiveness now they were in trouble, but what they were asked was that if their son or daughter arrived bedraggled on their doorstep one morning having been away, viciously away from the home and the family for years, would they slam the door on them or welcome them in and accept their actual coming as a sign of repentance? Nearly all parents would imitate the forgiving father of the prodigal son.

There was one young man of twenty nine, full of fun, teased everybody and got teased himself, who the local minister of the eucharist said was great fun but absolutely dead - there was nothing there at all and there was no hope which was very sad. I gave communion and the last sacraments, or the anointing of the sick, in his section of the ward and then turned to him and said "Patrick, is there anything I can do for you?" and he said, "Yes, Father, you can be hearing my confession." This was just out of the blue and I sat on his bed and helped him with his confession and anointed him. The minister of the eucharist was at the end of this huge ward and she very nearly fainted when she saw me giving the sacrament and she said she would never, never forget the face of that boy as I left, of absolute peaceful ecstasy. That is what confession can do. On one occasion I had about fifteen major reconciliations like that, and it is clearly terribly important that we should not allow ourselves to lose our relationship with God through the confessional. One woman was transformed from the absolute depths of depression, not wanting to go home for Christmas and thinking that it would be awful. In three minutes she had completed her confession, been anointed and received communion and was so looking forward to getting home, it was going to be wonderful - a complete transformation from bottom to top. That is the value of this sacrament, the relief and the happiness it brings.

There is a very strongly held misunderstanding that God loves us infinitely and he is infinitely merciful, and therefore he could not have created hell, therefore hell does not exist and so nobody goes there. We are all all right Jack. But again that is misunderstanding creation. It is absolutely true that God did not and could not create hell, but God could and did and does create perfection. For each one of us God has designed heaven as absolute perfection for us and that perfection is the complete fulfilment of our absolute ultimate needs, and if we reject the fulfilment of those needs we ourselves create their opposite. That is hell. Saint Augustine put it brilliantly in his confession: "Thou has made us for thyself, O God, and our hearts shall find no rest until they rest in thee." So if we reject God there is no rest in the strongest possible terms. We create our own hell.

I would like to draw a picture for you and go back thirty or forty years to the film Lawrence of Arabia. When Lawrence joined the Arabs they had to cross a stretch of desert known as the Sun’s Anvil, where the alignment of the mountains concentrated the sun’s rays making one of the hottest places on earth, hot and dry. Imagine three people, men or women, separately crossing that desert and that in that lethal heat and dryness these three have one incapacity, they are incapable of dying. They are not incapable of suffering. They are capable of suffering all that human nature will have to bear in their situation. Imagine them all crossing that desert for three days, completely dehydrated, burnt, their feet burnt by the heat of the sand, the glare and the burning heat coming down on them with no protection. Then after three days they realise there is something different. They can smell water, then they can hear water falling, they can suddenly feel the coolness of the ground under their feet and they find themselves in a great oasis with a lake and a waterfall. Beside the lake there is a tent, a palace, a cave or what have you and somebody comes out of the cave and says to each one "You are very welcome. I love you. This is all yours." The first one looks up, blinks, and realises who it is and turns round and goes back into the desert for ever, still unable to die, only able to live where he has chosen to be. The second one opens his eyes and receives the welcome and is absolutely horrified. "I just cannot accept what you are offering. I’ve done too much. I’ve been such a fool. I’m going back into the desert for another three days and then I will return." The third one says, "My love for you has been as great and I could not understand how great it was. I love you," and with joy he falls into the water. And there we have a meaning of hell and purgatory. Our own choice, our own judgement.

In that scenario we can put Judas. If Judas was able to see Our Lord and his love that he showed and we know he gave St. Peter that day, we can’t be certain that Judas would have gone back into the desert. He might have said that he was going back into the desert for months and he might possibly have said "And then I’ll be back." We can hope that he did. I hope that parable makes sense.

We have got to realise is that traditional teaching of the church was quite right, one is to die and after that the judgement, but it has always been "as the tree falls so it lies." I don’t see how God’s infinite mercy can apply there. I think that it is Christ coming out of the cave and not saying right, hell, purgatory, heaven, but leaving the choice to each individual. It is there that we make the judgement and we must make sure we make the right choice when it comes. I can assure you without any doubt at all that the easiest way to ensure that we make the right choice is to have the habit of confession. The person who goes down in penitence and repentance to tell the priest that he has sinned - there is no way, it is inconceivable that that person could be the first traveller. He could easily be the second, might be the third, but which of the two is relatively unimportant.

In 1988 three universities, all using the same technique, carbon-dated the Shroud. There was quite a discrepancy between the three but they took the mean and declared categorically that the Shroud could be nothing other than a forgery of about 1326, but there were problems about that. The carbon dating was only one of many disciplines used, and one professional in it said that if nine disciplines say "a" and the tenth, even if it is carbon dating, says "b," you have to go with the nine and look for something wrong.

And the first cat among the pigeons was a Dr. Rosalie David of Manchester University Museum. She sent to three universities two samples from a mummy, a sample of flesh and a sample of cloth, and she got three identical answers back with something like two thousand years difference between the ages of the body and of the cloth - meaning that the cloth was far, far younger and that if you believe that, somebody had had the great expense of rewinding the corpse two thousand years after death, which is a little bit doubtful.

Then this woman met an American, Garcia Valdez, who discovered that a huge number of old artefacts from the native Indians of Central America, from Egypt and so on, were host to a strange and unrecognised fungus which takes its nourishment from the air r and not from its host. All these artefacts are covered in the living fungus which means they are absorbing current carbon-14. The carbon daters said "Rubbish, we put our disinfectant on of up to six times strength. It was absolutely clean - there was nothing on it." Garcia Valdez said, "I tried twelve times and it failed." Professor Hall said that if he was going to make anything of it he would have to prove a 60% error and Garcia Valdez wrote back that it was exactly 60% that he had found, so I think we are quite well justified in believing that the Shroud is genuine and quite extraordinarily.

Father Francis Philas, a Chicago Jesuit and a top-rank professional numismatist, as far as a Jesuit can be professional in anything other than being a Jesuit, has said that a disc on the left eye lid of the man on the Shroud can be nothing other than a Pontius Pilate lepton minted in 28 and 29 AD. That has been endorsed twice by international numismatic conferences. So this is the terrific miracle of the present age - how the Shroud is categorically said to be a forgery and yet nobody has come anywhere near finding how the forgery could be perpetrated. Ian Wilson, a great man on the Shroud, has shown theoretically how it could have been done but it would have taken so long (a minimum of six days) and such heat that the body would have corrupted half way through.

The other thing about the Shroud is the absolute uniqueness of the picture. Using a box Brownie or any other camera to photograph the Shroud would always produce 3D. There is not a single picture, photograph, painting, whatever, other than the Shroud which on the one single picture is a 3D image. (Professor Jackson used to carry a small 3D image that he had got from the Shroud in his pocket and when he was travelling on the ’plane or a Greyhound bus in America, he would take the picture out of his pocket and say, "Would you be able to recognise this." And 100% always said, "Oh, yes, that is Christ.") And the reason for that is that every other photograph is taken by light and shade whereas the Shroud is a picture taken from proximity and distance. The image gets stronger the closer the distance and that can be registered in 3D and nobody yet has been able to reproduce this 3D effect on a cloth even of mediaeval age.

So those are the grounds for believing that the Shroud is a first century artefact connected to the time of Pontius Pilate and a man who went through far more suffering than any mediaeval painter was able to register in the paintings of the time right up until now. There was so much that when Constantine abolished crucifixion, the memory of it was so terrible that the church waited many, many years before reproducing the crucifix. When they did, the mediaeval or dark age artists used their imagination - the holes through the hands, the body slumped, if there was blood flowing it was a straight blood flow. On the Shroud the blood flows in a zigzag because the arms were moving all the time. The nail wounds are in the wrists. The Shroud shows quite clearly the stains of blood and water under the back, low down upon the right side. The most extraordinary thing - very, very rare in pathology - is to find a person dying with absolutely fully distended lungs. The body of the man in the Shroud looks as though he has got a very, very well developed chest and that is because his lungs were full of gas, carbon dioxide by that time, and it was that accumulation of carbon dioxide in his lungs which would cause death.

So there we have the Shroud and it shows so many things: the damaged cartilage of the nose where the temple guard hit him in the face for his answer to Annas; the thorns, a bonnet of thorns; the string that was holding the bonnet of kindling thorns around his head, and so on. The actual scourge marks are identical with the wounds that would have been inflicted with the flagellum of which examples have been preserved. The wound in the side is the exact measurement of an officer’s javelin. The shoulder was bruised just like that of French railway workers when they were laying sleepers down the railway track. And the people examining the body had terrible trouble finding whatever was on the knees of the man in the Shroud, and then some brilliant man discovered that it was just dirt from Our Lord’s falls - just ordinary dirt from the street - and so many things like that. There was a coin on the right eye but it has not come through in the development of the picture.

The more we look at it the more we can learn what Our Lord chose to suffer for us - the scourging and nailing, the being on the cross, the body heaving up and down for every single breath. Some people - we do not know whether they were nailed or tied - survived on the cross for two or three days. Our Lord had been through worse suffering before his Passion than any normal victim of crucifixion, and crucifixion was considered by the Jews, and quite rightly by everybody, as a most terrible punishment. During the war of which Josephus gives the story, Herod the Great’s wonderful castle Machaerus, that was partly carved out of solid rock, was well defended and well fortified against the Romans. They managed to capture the commander when the garrison went out for a sally, so carefully out of bow shot from the walls they erected a cross to crucify him, and his men were prepared to surrender and go into slavery rather than see their commander crucified.

I think that gives us an idea of the enormity of the people, that they should demand the death by crucifixion of the one who Peter described even to the Romans as "The man who went about doing good." The man who had just raised Lazarus from the dead. The extent of that hatred that the authorities of the Jews satisfied only by Our Lord’s death. And so as the afternoon got cold, when the sun was obscured or whatever it was - there is no talk of an eclipse at that time - an earthquake, and several of those who had joined in the jeering went home beating their breasts at such a terrible and wicked thing and its immediate terrible reaction.

And so Our Lord was taken down from the cross and Joseph of Arimathea turned up with the Shroud. Hearing it described by the evangelists, we can be reasonably certain that that artefact of early first century Jewish domestic work is still available for us to see. The only difference according to Professor Valdez (and everybody notices this) is that if you rub your fingers across the surface of the Shroud it has a feeling of velvet, and Professor Valdez has managed to photograph that and show that it is the fungus he discovered which makes it feel different from other cloth. And that cloth was preserved.

It would have to be preserved very secretly because anybody who had any contact with a dead body or anything to do with the funeral would be barred from any Jewish ceremony - they were unclean because a dead body was unclean. This was why the priest and the Levite refused to help the man who fell among thieves. If they had tried to support him, to look after him, and he had died on them, the priest would have been debarred from perhaps his one and only chance of being a senior priest at the ceremonies in the temple. The Levite would have been suspended from duty for quite a considerable time, and that at the expense of the sacrifice of purification. So they avoided the man. And so this is why one can estimate that the apostles got rid of the Shroud as soon as possible to the King of Edessa who allegedly wrote to Our Lord to invite him to come to Edessa to cure him of leprosy.

A historian of the fourth century claims to have seen these letters in the archives at Edessa, and the story there was that this disciple, one of the eleven, when he came into the court held up the Shroud and the king was cured instantly, and Christianity was established there right outside the realm of the Roman Empire in the first century. It was there the Shroud remained until it was discovered again in the sixth century. They gave it an extraordinary name (in Greek) "The picture not made with hands," and also the "Eight-folded picture" - the amount showing the face would have been an eighth of the Shroud.

There are many indications in the Shroud that give us clues to its history. Prior to 600 Our Lord is depicted clean shaven and very often represented as the god Apollo. We can tell the difference because in most of the illustrations of that time if the figure has a cross as his halo you find that he is then a Christian symbol of Christ as the sun. After 600 when the Shroud was re-discovered at Edessa, and this artefact was accepted as the Shroud, the picture of Christ "not made with hands," the Bearded Christ became the standard picture, as it is till now. A French priest, Fr. Vignon, found about 20 marks on the Shroud that are not meaningful in portraiture. But they have been carefully copied in early Greek icons.

It was taken by the Emperor of Constantinople with the help of the Muslims when he offered to forego a huge ransom for a large number of Muslim princes provided that the Shroud was given to him, so eventually the Shroud was forcibly taken from the people. It went to Constantinople where it probably became the loot of one of the so-called crusaders of the Fourth Crusade who sacked Constantinople in 1204, and nobody knew what happened to the Shroud, but it was probably sold secretly to the Knights Templar who made it their very special and great treasure. When they were murdered, one of the last two was of the de Charnay family. About forty years later the Shroud turns up in the possession of a de Charnay who was considered to be the ideal of knighthood and certainly above all suspicion.

In 1350 shortly after the Battle of Poitiers in France, the de Charnays built a wooden monastery where this artefact was shown. The big problem at that time was that there was a huge market in false relics and so the local bishops, especially Henry of Tours and Bishop Arcis, wrote condemnatory letters saying this should not be allowed. But the Pope in Avignon, not a Roman pope at the time, wrote very, very firmly that the Shroud must continue to be exhibited, and the family who owned it seemed to have evidence, and we can guess what that was by the name of the family. So probably the provenance of the Shroud was that it had been in the hands of the Knights Templar who had quite recently been condemned for heresy and therefore they kept it dark, and they were still showing the Shroud to which they had great devotion. The de Charnays were very poor, and the amount of money they could have made for it was vast, but suddenly out of the blue the mother, the widowed mother, the owner of the Shroud, gave it to the family that owned it up till a few years ago. The Royal Family of Savoy, then of Italy, gave ownership of the Shroud to the Pope and equally to the Archbishop of Turin.

The office and the gospels and everything are concentrating on Our Lord’s love for us. "And Jesus knowing that His hour was come loved those that were His own and He loved them to the end." And for the whole of the Last Supper Day we have Our Lord preparing for this and saying the most extraordinary thing I think He said in His life. Remember the Jewish clock started and finished at sunset, so the Last Supper according to their clock was on Friday, and Jesus had already reached the last day of His life. He knew, as nobody else could know or understand, what was going to befall Him on that day, what suffering He was going to have to endure. Nevertheless He could say, once the Last Supper was going, once He had shown signs of His love by washing the feet of the Disciples and welcoming them all, He said, "With the greatest longing I have looked forward to this meal with you before I suffer."

On the last day of His life, which was going to end in the agony of crucifixion, "the greatest longing" and that greatest longing must have been the one thing in the Last Supper which was to Him the most important, the most moving of them all. It was the completion of the Jewish Law, the final Passover that had gone on for well over thirteen hundred years since Moses, and now He was bringing it to an end and replacing it with something that was so much more. His sacrifice on Calvary was being anticipated by His sacrifice at the Last Supper and He was offering that sacrifice in the fullest possible sense of the Jewish law in that the victim was sacrificed and then the body of the victim became the food for those who worshipped. From that moment onwards every single believer, disciple, follower of Jesus would be welcomed into union with Him, into communion, and that communion becomes the most important thing in our life because of our relationship with Jesus who gave us this at the Last Supper.

This was the day that Our Lord had lived for in his mind the whole of his life and yet he began a meal with this extraordinary "With the greatest longing have I looked forward to this meal with you before I suffer." In all those years of his childhood and youth; his working years and his years of preaching, this day and all it meant was on his mind, a source of pressure until the end, and yet he could say that this point was the one he had looked forward to most. It would mean that during this Mass he was going to use his Passion and death as the sacrifice, the sacrifice of the new covenant with God which would enable him to be united with all those he loved. That by taking the bread and wine and consecrating them to be his real body and blood, by separating them and showing his death, he was prefiguring the death of the following afternoon, but by this prefiguring he was going to make it possible for all those whom he loved right down the centuries to be united with him, physically and completely through holy communion.

This was not the first time that the teaching of holy communion would be a problem or a source of incomprehension. After the feeding of the five thousand, when they were sure that he was the one to lead them, he talked instead about the sacrament he was going to give and he made the most extraordinary promise: he who eats my flesh will live for ever. The most important thing was to eat his body and drink his blood, and this audience argued and argued with him trying to make him concede that it was not the full literalness that he was meaning, it was a spiritual idea and to be interpreted as a method of giving the sacraments. But each time Our Lord reiterated that it was the exact meaning. They had to eat his body. He used the words of eating, of drinking the blood, more and more exactly and each time reiterating the promises that would come from receiving.

So it was this union that he had formed. With the agony in the garden and with picking up his cross the whole burden of sin would be offered, but here at the Last Supper was the opposite of that burden of sin. He could be united with each one of his friends, each one of those who loved him and whom he loved, and he wanted this union, communion. So we should ask Our Lord to help us understand how much it is he who wants the union, how much he wants us to come to him as often, as frequently as we can. This is what is so important, that we use communion as Our Lord wants us to us it, not as we find it convenient. Even if it is awkward, try to get the habit of frequent Mass.

So on Maundy Thursday, the whole day was devoted to holy communion. The other thing which comes across repeatedly during the Passion but so very, very much on this day is Our Lord’s love. The first point is, I think, that Our Lord was going to have the Last Supper at his friend’s house. It is very strange that we know the name of the son of the house, we know the name of the rather feeble-minded maid, Rhoda, which has come down to us through the Acts of the Apostles, but we do not know the names of the householder or his wife. The son was John Mark - almost certainly the one who wrote the gospel - and there is enough in his gospel and in the Greek Orthodox tradition to know that it was from that house that St. Mark came.

One of the gospels gives us the extraordinary story of how Peter and John were not told which house to go to. They were told how to find it. They were to go into the city and look around until they saw a man carrying a water pot - women’s work, because men did not carry water pots. They were to follow him home and tell the householder "The Master wants to eat the Passover at your house." This was his care for that couple and their home, because Our Lord would not want Judas to know where the Last Supper was to take place. If all the apostles had known there was nothing to stop Judas going off and warning the High Priest. Because of this little subterfuge of Our Lord’s the location was kept secret except from Peter and John. They would prepare the meal and then Judas would not find out until he arrived.

Our Lord would then let Judas go on his mission at his own time. Our Lord would know how long it would take for the forces to be gathered for the arrest and he would have that amount of time to institute the Blessed Sacrament and ordain his disciples as priests and give them his last teachings which are so beautiful. It is so worthwhile to read Chapters 14, 15 and 17 of St. John’s gospel - so much of Our Lord pouring out what he wanted his disciples to know and learn and so much of it is there.

Our Lord did not want to be arrested in this house. He wanted to be clear - exactly the same as the principle of the English Martyrs, not to be arrested in any house. (Campion slipped up and was arrested and caused harm in Lyford Grange, where one of the servants reported his presence, through disobeying the order never to return to a house he had visited because people had missed Mass by being too late.) So Our Lord went to Gethsemane to have his last prayers to his Father and be taken prisoner in the open air. He wanted to show his love for the disciples and to stop their squabbling and to show his love by washing their feet.

And so we have come to the meaning of love. I don’t think there is any doubt at all that the word "love" could be considered the most abused word in our language. The Greeks of course divided the idea of love into two completely separate parts, philein and eros, and Our Lord was showing the philosophy that the philein was the essential part of love. Somebody said that love could not be defined, everybody knew what it was (which I think is very doubtful) but it could not be defined, but I think that was completely wrong. It is very important to see that with real love, there is only one sort. Parents love their children without any thought of "what’s in it for me." Love is unconditional - no worry at all about what is in it for me - just as parents have given all along and continue to give despite what happens. It is like the love of God in making us, continuing to keep his hearth and his door open to welcome us, to help us. A definition can be "love is the earnest desire for the happiness of the other" and I think that takes in all love - as for parents for children, children as they develop for parents, friends, and then in the family husbands and wives, brothers or whatever. Love is the earnest desire for the happiness of the other.

And so we get Our Lord on this night with absolutely unconditional, universal, infinite love, love for his apostles, love for his host and hostess and their family and then extending through his experience in the agony in the garden, through his taking up his cross, through his behaviour throughout the story of the Passion, Our Lord was showing this complete unconditional love. He loves us despite everything. St. Paul says that for somebody really good, a person might be willing to sacrifice himself, and he said the extraordinary thing is that God sacrificed himself for us, while we were still enemies he loved us and Our Lord was prepared to sacrifice himself. So let us ask Our Lord to give us a love and appreciation of the Eucharist and help us to appreciate and to know what we can do to give him more and more the love that he requires.

So we have to look at the Mass, the first Mass of Maundy Thursday, the first communion. I was lucky enough to get a copy of Salvador Dali’s "Mystery of the Last Supper" which is a really beautiful painting showing Christ holding the loaf in front of His body. He is there as the man holding the loaf, and hanging from the rafters on a cross as the mystical crucified body, so in all three stages, Jesus Himself, Jesus the Bread of Life and Jesus the Victim of Calvary. I have never seen a picture which shows so well the spiritual nature and the holiness of a scene from the Gospel. But this is exactly what it was. When we think of communion, too often, so often, we think of ourselves. We forget what the word communion means and we think to ourselves, "Should I bother, shall I go or shall I not." Well, we might think to ourselves, "Well, I don’t want to. I’m feeling bored, I’m feeling whatever." But what does Jesus want? He wants the union with us far more than we want the union with Him.

A funny little scene occurred in Medjugorje last year. On the first morning we were there we went to a talk by one of the visionaries, Vizka, who is a wonderful person and who has had the most terrible suffering with brain cancer. She still has visions and we went to a meeting which I found of no value at all. She went off, it seemed, beautifully into ecstasy, but it left me pretty well dead cold, so I eventually jumped into a taxi and went back to the town in order to get to the English Mass which I was invited to say. I asked the Indian priest beside me, "Do we have a sermon at these masses?" and he said "Yes," so I had to think of something to say. I asked for prayers from the congregation for the problems that Stonyhurst was going through, and the Americans in the congregation were very sympathetic and promised prayers. The following day I was going to another talk by Miriana who only has a vision once a year on her birthday, the following day. She said that all the messages coming from Our Lady had just one point - getting to Mass and taking every opportunity of going to Mass and communion, and she said even if you are having a talk with a visionary you must leave the visionary and go to Mass. So I thought that was one straight to me from what happened the day before, and I was very grateful for that. She then promised to pray for the problems of Stonyhurst and within three days, or certainly within two weeks of that promise to ask Our Lady to pray, the problems of Stonyhurst were very largely removed, which was again wonderful. But it was that question of going to Mass that she was talking about and this is coming straight from Our Lady to us.

I think we should keep a thought about Our Lady during the night of the Passion and the trial. She would already have been in Jerusalem and felt a great tenseness in the air with a strong feeling amongst the people that something was going to happen. This expectancy was having different effects on different people. Many of the Galileans from Palm Sunday had been expecting an announcement that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. This expectancy is clear, not only in Palestine, but it comes clearly in Virgil and the Roman writings of the time of Emperor Augustus. The Jews had welcomed John the Baptist as a prophet and from what I can find out he was the last prophet whom the Jews recognise. There were thousands of Jews who realised in some way or other that it was Jesus of whom John the Baptist had been prophesying.

The extraordinary thing is that the powers, the High Priests and the ruling party, the Sadducees, could feel this expectancy and they allowed it to frighten them. You get this extraordinary inconsistency, hypocrisy in the powers at the top. Our Lord, specially during his preaching in the temple during these years, had repeatedly told the people to read the signs, to understand the signs, to understand what his preaching was. Quite clearly he was, to put it at the least, another prophet following John the Baptist. Here was a prophet who fulfilled more and more of the prophesies of the Old Testament. John had fulfilled the prophesy that he claimed, the voice crying in the wilderness, preparing, but Jesus was the one he prepared for. And when Our Lord met with opposition and scepticism in Jerusalem he repeatedly says "You don’t need to believe me, but see the signs. Then believe for the very signs’ sake." And it was these signs which were frightening the management of the government under the Sadducees.

They were the wealthy party, far, far right. Academically they were not very keen on the scriptures. A lot of them certainly did not believe in the resurrection. Whether there was an afterlife they did not know. God rewarded good behaviour by wealth, and God had rewarded them because they were all very wealthy and they had the power. If Our Lord was the Messiah, the Prophet, he was clearly not on their side and therefore a danger. And it was these signs, the miracles that Our Lord was working, that they kept on trying to denigrate, like the man born blind - that marvellous story in St. John of how the man who had been born blind but was now seeing said a marvellous thing, "Here is a man who has opened the eyes of one born blind and you don’t know where he has come from." I think that is the greatest marvel of all, and instead of listening to him he was excommunicated - a very, very heavy penalty.

Then the cynicism comes to the absolute limit when Our Lord came back to Judea at the time of great tension and raised Lazarus from the dead. The High Priests and others could dismiss the miracles in Galilee by saying "Look, they are a very backward lot. We don’t believe what they say" - like Lancashire when we are up in London! But here was Lazarus being raised from the dead in Bethany. You can go straight up the Mount of Olives out of Jerusalem, you walk past the Garden of Gethsemane up to the Chapel of the Ascension and just to the right on that route is the village of Bethany. A marvellous place. If the weather is clear you can even see the Dead Sea from the top. But it was there in Bethany, right at the gates of Jerusalem, that this man was raised from the dead, and I am sure Our Lord in all his love and kindness calculated that four days dead would make his miracle beyond question. You can remember Martha was worried about opening the tomb because after four days of death things would be very unpleasant in that climate, and Lazarus came out. How he came out is difficult to say. Did he just float out because his hands and feet were tied with the bonds of his funeral? Our Lord had to say to them, "Untie him. Let him go."

But what was the reaction in Jerusalem? Get rid of Lazarus. They did try and plot the death of Lazarus so he would not remain a witness against them. And so you have this situation where they have blinded themselves so strongly that they will lose out if Jesus is the Messiah, so they must get rid of the Messiah, for their vested interests. The miracles, the huge following must be ignored and Jesus must be got rid of, and so we have the plan, the bribery of Judas. Very briefly, Judas, as indicated about a year before by St. John, had been helping himself a little bit to the common fund. If he was taking ten per cent for himself you might see a connection between Mary of Bethany pouring the ointment on Our Lord. "Could this not have been sold for 300 denarii?" And so having lost his share of that he settles to receive 30 pieces of silver, his cut.

The authorities had tried to arrest Our Lord frequently and they only half believed that with Judas’ help they would get Him this time, so no preparations were made to arrest Him. Judas had no idea where the Last Supper was going to take place and a large force had to be gathered. Our Lord was with his eleven disciples, and if they went to the house, there would be the servants, so if they were to overwhelm this house there would be the Levitical temple guards who were under the orders of the High Priest and then the hangers-on, those who hang around waiting for jobs from the rich people. This was the crowd that both arrested Our Lord and shouted for his death.

Our Lord knew what was going on and timed everything as he wanted, and went off to the Garden of Olives. I think there are only two or three olive trees left that go back to that age and a very beautiful Chapel of Gethsemane at the bottom of the Mount of Olives. It gives you a little bit of an idea what it was like - very, very dark, because the olive trees make a very, very dark woodland, and there he was even deprived of his disciples. He wanted their company, he wanted their strength, but they let him down. So he made his prayers. He showed that he, as a man, had his own terrible fear of what was coming, that his own will was so strongly pressed against what he had to go through. At the beginning of the gospel when the devil tempted Our Lord the story ends with the devil leaving him for a time; this would be the time when Satan came back.

I am sure that the greatest part of that agony was the feeling of waste - the waste of his passion by those he loved so much, who would disregard it. We have only got to look into our own time now where the whole idea of wrongdoing is thrown out, it is not wanted. All we know as grave offences against God are now declared unimportant bits of fun. So he went through this period sweating blood and with no real reproaches for his three disciples, his three special ones, when he wakens them and joins the other eight disciples to meet Judas and the gang which was with him. We get the extraordinary story of the little boy, St. Mark who was only a child though he puts in his Greek "the young man," but he was there. I think he was quite a small boy, but he would have been wakened when the troops came to the house to arrest Our Lord who was not there. He would have tried to get ahead of the group to warn Our Lord, but he himself did not know and so it was a hopeless task, but he followed and Mark points out "I was there." There are several places at the end of Mark’s gospel where he mentions himself as when Jesus was driving the buyers and sellers out of the temple; and he mentions his friends Alexander and Rufus, the sons of Simon of Cyrene.

So Our Lord was arrested having shown once more the great sign that they could not touch him unless he let them. "Who are you looking for?" "Jesus of Nazareth." "I am he." And they went backwards and fell to the ground. There was no way they could have taken Our Lord unless it was his will. So eventually having healed the ear of Malchus, one of the "rent-a-mob" and the High Priest’s servant, Our Lord allows them to take him to the house of the Chief Priest. Clearly still not ready, they don’t summon a court until they have Our Lord as a prisoner. Caiaphas would definitely not want to be made a fool of again - getting everybody to come and no prisoner to try. So he goes to Caiaphas’ father in law, Annas. He was the real power in Jerusalem. He had been High Priest several times. All his sons had been High Priests and now his daughter’s husband was High Priest, but he pulled the strings and organised everything. To show you his power, he was the "owner" of the market in the temple which Our Lord had destroyed. It was known as the market of Annas and he would have had ground rent from everybody with stalls in that market in the temple, so he was the cause of the great desecration of the House of God. He only wanted political knowledge from Our Lord, who says "You will find my politics quite clear from those who heard me in the temple. Ask them."

Then when the picked court were gathered, those members of the Sanhedrin who thought like Caiaphas, the main trial started. A completely illegal affair. The faults have been studied by lawyers of all kinds and the Jews have said there were so many in this trial that the story just can’t be true - it is a concoction. But the main and most obvious one was that in the law of Moses a capital trial could not take place at night. If a man’s life was at stake it had to be in the light of day. The other thing was that if people were proved to have made false accusations they suffered the penalty for whatever they were accusing the prisoner of, just as the men in the story of Susannah were stoned to death because they had accused Susannah of adultery. Here in this trial we get none of that protection for Our Lord in that the accusations were proved one after another to be false.

And so Caiaphas, realising that everything was going wrong, used his authority as High Priest. As far as Our Lord and all the Jews were concerned, Caiaphas held the position of John Paul II. He was the Pope. And so as a representative of God on earth he ordered Christ under oath to answer his question, and Our Lord accepts that authority and answers it; but he answers it extremely carefully so there will be no just accusation of blasphemy against him. However, Caiaphas had got the answer he wanted and with great ceremony he tore the weak patch in his mantle. The priests had this marvellous idea that in the neck of the tunic there would be a slit covered with weak cloth, and if they heard a blasphemy they tore the weak cloth and this did not damage the garment at all. Their wives could then stitch another patch on. That was the formality of hearing blasphemy.

So Our Lord is condemned to death - another extraordinary act when the members of the court go completely haywire and there is this horrible scene. It was a moment of relief to have "won" - to have got what they wanted: the condemnation of Jesus. They went berserk and beat up Jesus there in the court. Then for a few short hours he would rest - bruised and bleeding - in a cell.

Start thinking of Our Lord and what Easter Sunday meant to Him as a person. One of the greatest joys in life is passing on and spreading good news, telling people that something wonderful has happened, and really Our Lord must have terrifically enjoyed Easter Sunday because He did not do anything else. He went round spreading the good news, talking first to His mother and secondly to Mary Magdalene - such a happy event for her. The Gospel translation is inaccurate, the Latin not following the Greek. There is the famous Titian, "Noli me tangere" - (do not touch me) with Our Lord giving her a warning, whereas the Greek does not carry that meaning at all. The Greek means "Don’t keep on" and it is not "touch," it is "grab," so as Our Lord moved she was embracing His legs in her love and Our Lord says, "Don’t keep on doing that. I am not going away. I’m still going to be around, so that is not necessary." Our Lord is much kinder to her than saying "Don’t touch."

She goes back and tells the Apostles and we are told that they would not believe her straight out. They thought it was idle words. Then the meeting with St. Peter. Our Lord sees Peter alone, not with the others. The kindness; giving Peter the opportunity, which was quite unnecessary, to say "sorry." St. Peter is the prodigal son who made the journey. Our Lord is the Father who would greet him with forgiveness, and wisely or not Peter finds himself there on Easter Sunday, restored as the Leader of the Church. Again, think of the happiness of Our Lord.

So we have these early appearances. Apart from Mary Magdalene, no details. Mary Magdalene taking time to realise who was talking to her and then recognising His voice. Then the lovely story of Clopas and his companion leaving the city and walking the seven miles to Emmaus. (I think the greatest miracle of all is that a man who had had nails through each heel was able to walk seven miles forty eight hours later. It completely puts outside possibility the theory that Our Lord was not dead and risen from the dead but was resuscitated.) And there you have these wonderful words of one of those two showing the complete despair, the deep love. "We had hoped that He was the one to redeem Israel." The real, terrible disappointment and despair, the loss of love, the loss of expectation, and Our Lord rebukes them gently. "Oh foolish and slow to believe all that the Prophets have written." The simplest, "And thou will not let thy Holy One seek corruption." All the indications from Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. The terrible disaster for the one mentioned, for the Messiah, and then the wonderful conclusion: if He suffers like this, He will see His followers to umpteen generations that will come. Maybe the prophetic stories of Jonah and the whale, one that Our Lord Himself used. He may also have quoted a huge number of times that He Himself had told the Apostles that he was going to die and after three days He would rise again and that seems to have been a closed book to them, that He would rise again. I think Our Lady would have been the only one who might have been putting her hope in those words of her son. And Our Lord remains hidden from them all the way, a good two hours or a bit longer walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus, even in the cool of the evening. Their invitation to this man who could speak so burningly, so strongly, so lovingly. They did not want to lose him. They invited him to stay. They recognised Him in the breaking of bread and again those wonderful words of these two, "Were not our hearts burning within us," not realising, not fully understanding what was happening to them as joy and happiness seeped right through them and then up and away and another seven miles back to Jerusalem to find that the good news had spread. The Lord indeed is risen! He has appeared to Simon. And while they are talking Our Lord appears as in Chapter 20 of St. John. St. Luke also says how on that occasion He showed that He was still able to enjoy a meal, and the Apostles would remember that "He ate and drank in our presence." He shows them that He is not a ghost although He has come through the wall to meet them.

It was then on that most solemn occasion in the joy of the Resurrection that He gave the Church the power to forgive sins. He gave the Church the power to share that huge happiness of forgiveness with Himself. The other meetings, five hundred brethren at once, St. Paul tells us, and that will probably be the same story as in St. Matthew where this large number were there and He revealed Himself, though he says some doubted. There is absolutely no room in the story of the Resurrection for wishful thinking. Everybody to whom Our Lord appears is doubtful for a few moments. St. Thomas, one of the greatest witnesses of the Resurrection, because of his anger and disappointment, "Unless I can see the wounds in His hands and His side I refuse to believe." It is very, very strong and not at all a nice way of talking: "I refuse to believe." And for that offence he is gently asked to "Bring your finger here. Bring your hand and put it into my side and be not faithless but believing." And He made us that huge promise, the promise that was shared by all the Church, "Blessed are those who have not seen me but believe." It was all there. The Thomas who doubted and his doubt has to be completely convinced that here was something in reality, not wishful thinking. The word going round that somebody who looked like Jesus had been seen, the conspiracy, they were all too quick.

There were so many meetings on the Sunday itself or eight days later with the Apostles present. There was no time for any cure unless it was a completely miraculous cure, so these meetings were so important. St. Paul said that he was as one was born out of due time when the Ascension was finished but "I too saw Him," and Paul was a very hard headed Pharisee. He was very well educated. He was certainly the equivalent of a university graduate He had studied under the most famous Pharisee at the time, Gamaliel ( it comes in Chapter 5 of The Acts) who was one of the wisest and the greatest. St. Paul was his student, much tougher than the professor, much more harsh, much more determined to preserve the law, but Paul, with that background, saw Our Lord, met Him on other occasions and believed.

So there we have the story of the Resurrection. There were two other meetings when Peter, back in Capernaum and wondering when they were going to see Our Lord again, was a bit bored, nothing much to do, so went fishing. (How many people in that circumstance, if they are that way inclined, would say "Huh, I’m going fishing." I had a Jesuit friend in Chicago who went off to Alaska and I know that is what he would have said on many occasions. He so loved fishing and he used to write poetry to the fish he caught. He wasn’t always too happy with them, but that was Father Burke.) And there He made the prophesy that Peter was now fully restored as Head of the Church - the shepherd of the whole flock and that he would repair any failing that there had been in his life by laying his life down for Our Lord. That scene on the side of the lake showing the great, great love. In St. John the great, great love in St. Peter and the greater love of Our Lord for them all.

And the sad thing is that this went right on until the day of the Ascension and you find that even in His teaching of the Twelve some of the ideas Our Lord had preached had failed to get through. As they left their last meal together on Ascension Day one of them, or more, remarked, "Is it at this time you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" - completely missing the point. And it was these men who were now going to found the Church under St. Peter and who were in urgent need of the Holy Spirit to come and correct all their misconceptions of what their Master had taught them.

So there we have Our Lord putting the last touches to that tiny little nucleus that believed in His Resurrection and was going to change the world.

Our Lord left a little group, too ineffective to be called a nucleus. But they had to change the world. The one thing that saved that group from extinction was the fact of the Resurrection. It is a very hard doctrine. It is the one which is attacked most strongly. As the new version of The Mikado said, "He had him on his list, the bishops who did not believe in God." David Jenkins with his denial of the Resurrection as "tricks with bones" cannot possibly be related to the mass conversions and the huge strength of what Paul Johnson in his History of the Church calls the Jesus Sect which grew up in Jerusalem and Palestine; because that is what the early Jewish members of the Church wanted.

Who are the people whom we can compare nowadays to the Jesus Sect? We should pray that they are successful. One of them, who some of you may remember from a completely different circumstance, is Helen Shapiro. Do people remember her as the singer? She has now written an autobiography and the most important part is the establishment of what she calls the synagogue of the Messianic Jews. She wants to stay a Jew and persuade her co-religionists that the Messiah has come. The Messiah was and is Jesus Christ and the religion He formed must be spread for the conversion of the Jews. The Messianic Jews tend to have Anglican affiliations in this country and they have very strong Catholic affiliations in France. But that is what the Church tried to establish and certainly in its early days we find the Apostles and the others taking part fully in the sacrifices in the Temple, in using the Temple to pray and to preach and then returning to their own homes to celebrate together in community the breaking of bread. And this continued.

There was a big hiccup in AD 70 when the Romans came down on the city after three years of war and the Christians left the city and went to Pella and other places. As the Jews then tried to recover their position in Palestine they became more and more to rely on the book. The law and the book rather than the law and the altar. There was no priesthood and no Temple. Then at the Council of. Jamnia of the Jews in 80 AD they decided to expel all followers of Christ and so it was then that after the death of all the Apostles, (maybe John was still alive - we just don’t know - tradition said that Peter and the others would all have been dead by then) the Church had to establish its own independent existence. By that time too, it had established its leadership in Rome as the most important city in the world.

But south west Asia and the coasts of Europe and Africa had huge numbers of converts. So we have this rare phenomenon of a little group without a leader slowly finding themselves outcast, having to take on the power of the Jews, having to take on the power of the Roman world, having to take on the learning and the powers of the Greek world. And what was it that made the difference? The difference was Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit and the power that came to the Church from and through the Holy Spirit.

St. Luke in The Acts (this is such an important and such a strongly provable historical work) says that the Church grew from that tiny seed. He says triumphantly that on the day of Pentecost there were three thousand converts and a few weeks later the number has gone up to five thousand. The power of the Holy Spirit was a bit frightening but still the people followed even if they did not want to be too close to the Apostles.

There is the extraordinary incident that through the power of Our Lord and the Holy Spirit, probably one of the most brilliant minds in the world, the fanatical Jew Saul of Tarsus, was converted without any more help than having witnessed the death of St. Stephen and his power to be able to forgive even while he is being killed by the cruel method of stoning; then Our Lord meets him on the road and he becomes a changed man. It sounds from the way he talks that he went out and spent a period as a hermit in the desert and during that time Our Lord taught him most of the things that the Disciples had learnt during Christ’s life.

He was a magnificent organiser, and it is completely unjust to label Paul as a misogynist. Vast numbers of people still believe firmly in that. There are anti-feminine passages in St. Paul but if you examine them and leave out the punctuation in these passages and just let it flow right through, you will see that it is Paul’s habit of Aunt Sallying, standing up a stupid argument and then knocking it down. So he says women should keep silent in church, they should ask their husbands when they get home, and then he says are you the only ones with the right doctrine? In Greek you have masculine, feminine and neuter for "only ones" and in the original text it is masculine. It is the husbands who are being asked, not the women, if they are the only ones with the right doctrine, and Paul is showing that so-and-so, you haven’t. So the women are perfectly right to ask their own questions and emphasise their own opinions if they want to. But if you realise that the person who translated it separated the tirade against women from the condemnation, you will realise that he has put a nice full stop and even started a new paragraph to separate it in the minds of the reader. So that is where the trouble comes, not with St. Paul but with his translators.

The Church, or the Jesus Sect, as it expanded met with opposition chiefly from Jews. Their first effort outside Palestine of trying to suppress the Church was in Corinth and a complete failure, and the synagogue leader who tried to lead a campaign got such a rap on the knuckles from the Roman procurator Gallio that his fellow members of the synagogue beat him up outside the law courts.

However, the Church survived and shortly afterwards there were riots in Rome. These were Jewish riots against the Christians, but for the peace of all Claudius expelled the Christians from Rome. And it is interesting that in these periods of persecution like the Pauline persecution in Jerusalem, the Roman war of 70, and Claudius’s persecution - each time, the Christians are driven out of Jerusalem or wherever and spread their missionary work. After the expulsion of the Christians from Jerusalem we find that these expelled Christians are making huge numbers of converts. In Samaria they came up against the famous magician Simon Magus who tried to buy the powers of the priesthood and so gave us the sin of Simony (buying holy things) and we also get the famous incident when one of the Christians in Samaria met an Ethiopian travelling in a chariot and converted him. So Christianity is taken south into Africa and the legend is that when the missionaries reached Ethiopia they found Christians, and that happened in several places - Francis Xavier found Christians in India who had lost all contact but knew they were different, and the legend is that they went back to the Apostle Thomas.

Extraordinary progress and spreading of the Church, but all the time from 60 to 64 onwards with the persecution of Nero and the killing of hundreds of Christians, from there to about 308, 250 years really, the Church was continually under persecution. Yet this group, founded leaderless, nevertheless continued and expanded. And persecution in the early three hundreds was particularly savage under Diocletian and Gallienus. Then in 312 suddenly the Church has taken over the Roman Empire.

That is most dramatic, but none of this would have been possible at all except for the two factors. One was the absolute conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead. There was no question that this was a religion founded by a good man; this was a religion founded by a miracle worker. This was not a religion founded just by a magnificent preacher or by an extraordinary story teller. None of that would have got out in the future. This preacher, this miracle worker, this good man rose from the dead. That was the thing that was absolutely essential and it is that witness, the crowd of witness, that they accepted. The words of the Twelve and the others who saw them and as St. Paul says, "The five hundred brethren at once in Galilee." That was accepted as fact.

And the other factor of course was the coming of the Holy Spirit and in the early years of the Church the repeated manifestation of the power of the Holy Spirit. On occasions of persecution the house to which those who had been persecuted returned was shaken as was the house on Pentecost. The preservation of St. Peter; God accepted the martyrdom of St. James, the son of Zebedee, John’s brother, but was not ready yet to lose St. Peter so he was taken out of jail. But Peter was very, very careful was in separating in his mind all visions in dreams from visions in fact, and he thought this was a dream until he found himself in the street and in no dream at all. He then went straight off to the house of the Last Supper and knocked at the door and this lovely maid, Rhoda, opens the little window in the door, sees who it is and leaves Peter hanging around in the street which was of course extremely dangerous, while she rushes into the house to spread the good news, leaving Peter stranded outside, which was not very clever. So we have her name but still do not know the name of her master and mistress.

And then tradition has it, and more than tradition, that every single one of the Eleven and Mathias who joined them was martyred, put to death. Tradition has it that St. John survived and did die of old age but suffered as a martyr although kept alive for longer. Not all the early Christian leaders are classed as martyrs but a huge percentage were. That these men and women maintained their faith in the face of this terrible persecution, or series of persecutions, for two hundred and fifty years was with the help of the Holy Spirit and belief in the Resurrection, and what the commitment to the Resurrection and the life that was offered to them through the Resurrection led them to perform.

Not all the early Christians were stalwart and people ready for martyrdom. We know that quite a large percentage recanted and gave up their Christianity under the weight of the persecution. But the numbers who continued accepted persecution, accepted death, and the death of the martyrs was as Tertullian said the seed of the Church, and as people were put to death so others came forward and accepted martyrdom. Like the 40 martyrs who were exposed on a frozen lake; two of them found it too cold and decided to give in, and immediately two of the guards took their place on the ice so the number was still 40. But the example of the early Church was "How these Christians love one another," and it was the loyalty to the meetings and the breaking of bread which was the touchstone of whether these people were faithful. So we should work hard by example and our prayers to persuade people nowadays to be faithful to Mass. If you are faithful to Mass then you are faithful to the Church, the Church that Jesus founded by His preaching but finally by His Resurrection, and we should ask Our Lord that we should be able to remain faithful to that Church and help it to recover its position in the world we live in today.

As a postscript, we cannot stress too strongly in the present time the effect on the world of the love that Christians showed each other. Can we say the same in our own time? We must pray and work for peace among Christians that they should love not hate each other. We must emulate too the love of the early Christians for all mankind. Then and only then can we be true followers of Our Lord.