Homily by Father Penna, April 21, 2026
Christ is risen, Alleluia. He is risen indeed, Alleluia.
As I get older, I face a great temptation and that is to become a person who lives with the motto “après moi, le déluge,” as le Roi Louis said. “After I die, it’s all going to fall apart. It is very easy, even at a younger age, to fall into into doom thinking, catastrophe thinking, always seeing everything as falling apart… being real pills. You know, the kind of people that when you have to have supper with them, you just don’t want to sit near them because they’re always complaining about how everything’s going to hell in a handbasket… really negative types. And Christians, perhaps merited, have reputation of being these kinds of negative thinkers.
Easter puts paid to that. Easter forbids us from having that outlook in life.
Today we meet the consequences of Stephen, the eloquent witness and deacon of the Church of Jerusalem, becoming the first martyr. Persecution is unleashed upon the community. Everything goes bad. Would not they have had every right to say, “It’s all done. We’re all falling apart.” Instead, that moment of persecution, that moment of murder is the beginning of the complete transformation of the world. But forced out by people who thought they could kill it through violence, the Church no longer remained within Jerusalem’s confines but began to spread throughout the whole world. That’s how God operates in Christ Jesus. Apparent failure is really the moment of new life.
Do we really believe what the Risen Lord has said to us today [in the gospel]? “The will of him who sent me is that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. … I will never drive you away.” That is an assurance that has been proven to us over and over again through the long story of the Church. At the moments of death, persecution, and martyrdom, new life, new power emerges. So too in our lives.
At the moments when we feel most broken and abandoned, when sin overwhelms us, these, by the power of the Lord, can be grace moments of discovering new life if we but believe. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I said to you that you have seen me and do not believe.”
Do we come to church and see the beauty and power of the Lord, and then walk outside and start living like people who have no hope, who are negative, controlling, and miserable people? This would be a sign that we have not yet believed.
The word believe comes from a Germanic word meaning ‘to love’. To believe means to accept a reality into our lives and in the power of love that comes from God, who is Love and who is Resurrected, we live lives that are transformed so that our faces show the world the face of those who are redeemed.
St. Stephen’s face shone with power as he was being murdered. And we? When we have a crick in our neck, do not our faces often look like the world has ended?
Our faces are those upon which the Lord has chosen His glory of Resurrection. Let our faces proclaim to the world that in Christ Jesus, we have no fear, that we know that Resurrection is our future in Him, and if it is our future, it is our reality now. “avec nous le déluge de l’amour”
Let us be holy. Let us be saints. April 22, 2026