Homily 5th Sunday Easter – A – Fr Jeremiah Browne (National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies #southafrica #Swaziland #eswatini #Botswana)
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me.” Do you ever find yourself with a troubled heart, worrying about this, that or the other thing?
I recently heard a short clip where a man shared his grandmother’s wisdom. She had a simple way of looking at life. She would say “In life, there are only two things to worry about, whether you are healthy or whether you are sick. If you are healthy, then there is nothing to worry about.
But if you are sick then there are two things to worry about – whether you are going to get better or whether you are going to get worse. If you get better then there is nothing to worry about. If you get worse, there are two things to worry about – whether you are going to live or whether you are going to die. If you live, there is nothing to worry about, but if you die there are two things to worry about, whether you are going to heaven or you are going to hell. If you go to heaven, then there is nothing to worry about. If you go to hell, you have two things to worry about – original – or extra crispy!
That’s a fairly humorous take on life, but it does speak to the reality that we worry far too much about things that do not deserve the space we give them.
Think about it. How much of your day is taken up with worry? Worry about money, about health, about what people think, about what might go wrong. We replay conversations, we imagine worst-case scenarios, we carry burdens that may never happen. The small stuff begins to dominate our thinking, and before we know it, our peace is gone.
Jesus speaks about that reality in today gospel. (John 14:1–12). He looks at his disciples – anxious, uncertain, unsettled – and says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me.” Notice what he does. He doesn’t remove the difficulty. He doesn’t give them a detailed explanation of what lies ahead. What he does do is to invite them to trust him, to trust God.
At one level, Jesus is speaking about death. He speaks of going to prepare a place. He reassures the disciples that there is more beyond what they can see. Death is not the end. But if we stop there, we miss the deeper point. He is not only preparing them for death; he is challenging them about how they are living now. The real issue is not death. The real issue is trust. Do we trust in Christ? Do we trust and believe in God, or not?
If we truly trust him, then worry begins to lose its grip, not because life becomes easy, but because our perspective changes. We no longer live as if everything depends on us. We don’t need to treat every problem as if it is the measure of our lives.
Look at the things that unsettle you. A comment someone made. A plan that didn’t work out. A delay, a disappointment, an inconvenience. We react as if everything is urgent, everything is critical. Yet, in the bigger picture, most of it is not.
If you believe that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, then why do we allow small things to disturb our peace? If we believe that our life is held in God then why are we so anxious about outcomes we cannot control?
The truth is, much of our worry comes from trying to control what was never ours to control in the first place. We want certainty. We want guarantees. We want everything to unfold according to our plans. When it doesn’t, we become restless, irritated, even fearful. But Jesus doesn’t offer us control – he offers us the fullness of life – he invites us to trust that in him the true meaning of life is to be found.
When he says “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he is not making a suggestion, he is inviting us to make a deliberate decision – to place our trust in him, to surrender the need to control everything, and to live with a deeper confidence that our lives are held securely in God.
So the question becomes very practical: what are we going to do with the small stuff? The daily irritations, the unnecessary anxieties, the grudges we carry, the fears we rehearse over and over again. If we really believe in him, then those things cannot be allowed to run our lives. They are not worth it.
The invitation of the Gospel is to live differently – to live with a deeper steadiness, a quiet confidence that comes from knowing that our lives are part of something bigger. It means choosing trust over anxiety, forgiveness over resentment, perspective over panic. It means recognising that not everything deserves a reaction, not everything deserves our energy.
Because in the end, what will matter is not how much we worried, but how well we lived. Did we trust? Did we love? Did we allow God to shape our lives, or did we spend our days caught up in things that were passing?
Think of things that you worried about a year ago, or five years ago. You probably can’t even remember them now, but at the time they seemed so important, so urgent, so overwhelming – and yet now they have faded into the background of your life. Life has moved on – and here you are, still standing.
So the next time something unsettles you, take a moment and ask yourself: does this really matter in the light of eternity? Is this worth losing my peace over? Then make a decision – again and again – to trust. God knows the bigger picture – and we do not.
Because if we believe that Christ truly is the way, the truth, and the life, then our lives are not as fragile as we sometimes imagine. They are held, guided, and ultimately fulfilled in him.
The real question is simple but decisive: do I trust? Do I truly believe that Christ has risen from the dead? That changes everything. We are here because we believe that he did. The question is – do we live it?
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Please consider praying a decade of the rosary on a daily basis for the evangelising Mission of the Church and the Pope’s intentions.
The pope’s prayer intention for May is “That everyone might have food”
Let us pray that everyone, from large producers to small consumers, be committed to avoid wasting food, and to ensure that everyone has access to quality food.
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Blessed Pauline Jaricot, Pray for us. 🙏🏼🙏🏼
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