Readings: Isaiah 61:1–3, 6, 8–9 | Revelation 1:5–8 | Luke 4:16–21
“Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing”
1. The Year of the Lord’s Favour
Brothers and sisters – my dear priests and deacons – every year we gather in this cathedral for the Mass of Chrism, and every year I find myself sitting with the same question before we begin. Not a complicated question. Just this: do we actually believe what we have just heard?
Because the Church places some astonishing words on our lips today. The words Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth. Words that rang out then and ring out still:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
Jesus’ words are on our lips! And he said: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Today. Not eventually. Not once we have organised ourselves sufficiently. Not when we have enough resources, enough people, enough certainty. Today. In the hearing of this congregation gathered from across the Diocese, in our Cathedral, in Belfast – this scripture is being fulfilled. Or it is not being fulfilled at all.
It sounds simple. It isn’t simple. But it is true. And the Chrism Mass, year after year, will not let us off the hook.
2. We Have Been Watching It Happen
The Church has not simply dropped these words on us today without preparation. Every Sunday of Lent, the liturgy has been showing us Jesus fulfilling the mission he declared in the synagogue – scene by scene, person by person, life by life.
We began in the desert. Jesus, driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, tempted to use his power for himself – and refusing. Refusing to turn stones to bread. Refusing to grasp at kingdoms. Refusing the world’s way of doing things. The mission begins not with a flourish but with a ‘no’.
Then the mountain. The Transfiguration. Peter, James and John given a glimpse of who walks among them – dazzling, luminous – and the voice from the cloud: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him.” A promise held out before the long walk down.
And then – do you remember? – the woman at the well. A Samaritan woman, alone at midday, because the other women of the town would not walk with her. She was damaged. Unworthy. Written off. And Jesus sitting beside her, asks her for water, and sees her – really sees her – in a way no one had in a very long time. In being truly seen, she is freed. She runs back to the town: “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.” The captive, set free.
Next the man born blind. Sitting at the roadside his whole life, the world passing him by. And Jesus stops, anoints his eyes, and he sees. Not a metaphor. An actual man, blinking in the light of the world for the very first time. Recovery of sight to the blind. The mission, unfolding.
And last Sunday, before Palm Sunday – Lazarus. Dead four days. Already in the tomb. Martha’s heartbreak speaking for all of us: “Lord, if you had been here…” And Jesus weeps. And then he calls: “Lazarus, come out.” And he came out. In this mission even death does not get the last word.
And then Palm Sunday, and we walked with Jesus into Jerusalem knowing what was coming. We heard the Passion proclaimed. We sat with the weight of it. The one who freed others, bound. The one who gave sight, blindfolded. The one who raised the dead, killed.
And now, today –the Mass of Chrism – the Church does something remarkable. She takes us back. Back to Nazareth. Back to the synagogue. Back to the very beginning of the mission. As if to say: before you go any further into Holy Week, before you stand at the foot of the cross on Friday and before the empty tomb on Sunday morning – remember what this was always about.
And so the question the Church places before us today is not a comfortable one. It is this:
Are you part of the mission? Or are you watching from the crowd?
Even as we speak, the mission is being fulfilled somewhere in this diocese. Someone is being freed from the weight of what they have been told they are. Someone is beginning, finally, to see. Someone is being called out of a tomb of despair, addiction, loneliness or grief. Is that happening because of us? Or is it happening regardless of us?
The Chrism Mass is an invitation. Not a judgement. An invitation to stop being onlookers and to become participants – to take our place inside the story we have been watching unfold since Ash Wednesday. To be part of the fulfilment, not just witnesses to it.
3. Chrism – Baptised and Sent
The oils blessed and consecrated at this Mass – the Oil of the Sick, the Oil of Catechumens, the Sacred Chrism – will be carried from this cathedral to every parish in the diocese. They will anoint the newly baptised, the sick and dying, those preparing to receive the sacraments. They will anoint hands – hands like the ones I see before me today. Specifically, this year, they will anoint the hands of Thomas Hampton and Esteban Rosales.
That anointing is ontological – it changes something in you that can’t be unchanged. It is not ceremonial. It is not decorative. Isaiah knew it: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; he has anointed me.” The anointing came first. The mission followed. You cannot have the mission without the anointing, and you cannot receive the anointing and refuse the mission.
So what is our mission? The readings today are unambiguous. Good news to the poor. Liberty to captives. Sight to the blind. Freedom to the oppressed. John’s vision in the Book of Revelation shows us Christ – the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead – who has made us “a kingdom of priests serving his God and Father.” Not a kingdom of administrators. Not a kingdom of institution-keepers. A kingdom of priests. Servants. People on their knees before the living God and before the needs of the world.
The Catholic Church is at its most authentic, most fully itself, when it is a Church that serves. When priests and deacons are holy men who pour themselves out for their people. When a holy people, fired by the faith their priests and deacons have kindled, go out into the world to be Christ where Christ is most needed.
This is the crux of it – holy priests and then a holy people who serve the mission in the world.
a) The Holiness the World is Waiting For
I want to speak to you directly now, my brother priests, because this Mass is yours in a particular way.
The renewal of our priestly promises we make together is not routine. It is not a formality. It is, or it should be, one of the most searching moments of our year. Ignatius of Loyola used to speak about the importance of consolation and desolation – of noticing, honestly, the movements within us. So let me ask: what is the honest movement in you as you come to renew those promises today? Relief? Tiredness? Frustration? Joy? A mixture of all of those? Whatever it is – bring it. God meets us where we actually are, not where we think we ought to be.
People are not looking for priests who are efficient. They are not even, primarily, looking for them to be competent – though God knows we should be competent and efficient. What people in this diocese, and in every diocese, are desperately hungry for is priests who are holy. Priests in whom they can glimpse something of God.
We all know what it looks like when a priest is running on empty. And we all know what it looks like when he isn’t. People can tell. They can always tell. A man who has spent time in prayer, who has sat with Christ in the silence and let himself be loved – that man walks differently into a room. He listens differently. He presides differently. Something in people relaxes when he’s present, because they sense they are in the presence of someone who has been with God.
That is holiness. Not perfection – none of us is offering perfection. I say this to myself as much as to any of you. But a life genuinely oriented toward Christ, in the Ignatian sense of finding God in all things – in the visits, the funerals, the arguments at the parish council, the phone calls late at night – that is what gives a priesthood its power. Not competence. Not strategy. Holiness.
Holiness is not a private achievement. It radiates outward. It gives permission. It calls things forth. When a priest is genuinely holy – prayerful, selfless, present, joyful in the deep sense – something happens in a parish. People awaken. They start to believe that their own faith matters, that their own discipleship is possible, that they too are called.
The holy priest does not keep people dependent on him. He sets them free – free to follow Christ, free to serve, free to become the missionary disciples they were baptised to be.
b) Servants, Not Curators
Nobody ever fell in love with Christ because a parish kept excellent records. Though, believe I want the records well kept. The Church has never grown by becoming more comfortable – only by becoming more generous.
Jesus did not come to preserve the synagogue. He came to fulfil the scriptures and to send his people out. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me… he has sent me.” Sent. Not stationed. Not settled. Sent.
Ignatius understood this profoundly. The early Jesuits did not sit in one place and wait for the world to come to them. They went. They found God already at work in the most unexpected places and they joined in. That same instinct – to seek, to go out, to trust that God is already ahead of us – belongs to the whole Church, not just to religious orders. It belongs to every baptised person in every parish in this diocese.
c) Alpha and Omega – God is the Beginning and End, Not Us
John’s vision ends with a declaration that is also, I think, a mercy: “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
We do not carry the weight of the Church’s future on our own shoulders. We serve a Lord who is the beginning and the end, the one who was and who is and who is to come. The future of the Church is not ours to manufacture. It is his to give. Our part is faithfulness. Our part is to share in God’s holiness, to serve and to be sent.