Homily of His Excellency Earl Fernandes
Bishop of Columbus
Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025
Cathedral of St. Joseph, Columbus
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I wish you and your families a Happy and Peace-filled Easter as we celebrate the Victory of our Risen Lord! As Pilgrims of Hope during this Jubilee Year, we exclaim: He is Risen!
“Christ, our Paschal lamb, has been sacrificed!” On this Easter Day, the newness of the Resurrection rings forth in these words from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. The central symbol of salvation history – the Paschal Lamb – is identified with Jesus.
Last night at the Easter Vigil, the deacon sang the Exsultet, which included these words: These, then, are the feasts of Passover, in which is slain the Lamb, the one true Lamb, whose Blood anoints the doorposts of believers. This is the night, when once you led our forebearers, Israel’s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them pass dry-shod though the Red Sea.
Through His suffering and death, Christ revealed Himself as the Lamb of God, “sacrificed” on the Cross, to take away the sins of the world. His Blood anoints our doorposts. He died at the very hour when the lambs in the Temple of Jerusalem were sacrificed. He was, in the words of St. Ambrose, “the Priest, the Altar, and the Lamb of Sacrifice.”
The meaning of His saving sacrifice was anticipated during the Last Supper, when He substituted Himself – under the signs of bread and wine – for the ritual food of the Passover meal. He is the Bread of Life; the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world; the Chalice of our salvation. In the Paschal Mystery, He brought to fulfillment the tradition of the old Passover and transformed it into his Passover. He journeyed from death to life, thereby opening for us the way to Salvation. By dying, He destroyed our death. By rising, He restored our life. His Resurrection makes all things new!
He gives new meaning to the Paschal Feast! From this, we also see how St. Paul uses the term “leaven”. Clear out the old yeast, so that you may become a fresh batch of dough, inasmuch as you are unleavened. For Christ, our Paschal Lamb, has been sacrificed.
At Passover, the Jews had to remove from the household every tiny scrap of leavened bread. This recalled what had happened when they escaped from Egypt. They left their old life in haste, bringing with them only unleavened bread. This “unleavened bread” was a symbol of purification: removing the old to make space for the new. In Christ, this Hebrew tradition acquires a new meaning, derived from the new “Exodus” – Jesus’ passage from death to eternal life.
Since Christ, the true Lamb, sacrificed himself for us, we, his disciples – through him – can be the “new dough”, the “unleavened bread”, freed from every remaining element of the old yeast of sin. As insignificant as we seem in the world’s eyes, we can, to paraphrase Paul, do all things in Him who strengths us. Saint Paul reminds us that even a little yeast leavens the dough! This is what our world needs – the Presence of Christ – who makes all things new, witnessed in the lives of those changed by the Risen Lord.
Let us celebrate the feast, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. This is an invitation to open our hearts to Christ, who has the power to forgive us and renew us, to make us whole again. If we ask Him, He will remove the poison of sin and replace it with the life-blood of the Holy Spirit.
About three weeks ago, I was at the Newman Center at the Ohio State University, and a student asked me, “Bishop, what’s been the highlight of your Lent?” The question caught me off guard. At first, I answered that it was Ash Wednesday, with more than 1000 students gathered for Mass in the Student Union. I added that second beautiful moment was the feast of St. Joseph, when this cathedral was packed with pilgrims from around the diocese, as we had a Jubilee Pilgrimage Day. But when I thought about it more, I thought about a visit I had to the Comunità Cenacolo in Birmingham, Alabama.
This community is specifically set up for those recovering from alcohol or drug addiction. The men have to commit themselves to being there for three years. They pray three rosaries per day, make a daily Hour Hour, have a daily review of life. They have no money or phone. They chop wood. They till the soil. They raise chickens and pigs. They have a rule: Other than for meals, they cannot sit down; they must stand or kneel, which requires a degree of discipline. What I witnessed there was beautiful.
The men got clean and sober. They rediscovered what it meant to be forgiven and loved. They had a real sense of fraternity and brotherhood. They had an experience of the merciful embrace of the Church. In a sense, their old life of sin and self-destruction was put to death, and the Risen Lord brought them from death to life.
There are so many challenges in our lives, in our world, to maintaining hope. We see our own failures. We are tempted to think that the poison of malice and sin have so infected us that death will have the final word. We are tempted to think that evil will win, that we will be swallowed up by the violence and cruelty of sin that confront us every day. Today, we remember that God’s love is stronger than Death. Certainly, these men showed it to me.
Christ our Risen Lord gives us hope – hope for a better life, the hope of newness of Life in and through Him. Baptized in hope, we belong to Christ, the source of our strength. And because we will one day rise with Him, we profess our faith in union with the whole Church: “I look forward to the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”
The newness of the Resurrection stretches even to the darkest regions of the human heart and calls even to those who seldom come to church: “Let us celebrate the feast…with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” We are all invited to celebrate the feast, not only in church, but with a manner of life that is “unleavened” – for He is truly Risen.
In the early Church there was a custom whereby the Bishop or priest, after the homily, would command the faithful: “Conversi ad Dominum” – turn towards the Lord. This meant in the first place that they would turn towards the East, towards the rising sun, the sign of Christ returning, whom we rush out to meet when we celebrate the Eucharist. But this external gesture was merely a sign of what was to happen interiorly: conversion. Thus, we leave behind the old dough of sin – rejecting Satan and his evil works and empty promises – and turn toward the Lord – with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Conversion is really the turning of our soul towards Jesus Christ and thus towards the living God, towards the true light. The Paschal Candle reminds of the Light of Christ. He is the one Morning Star who never sets, who coming back from death’s domain, has shed his peaceful light on humanity and lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen. Alleluia!