Giving the Reason Always For the Hope Within Us, Sixth Sunday of Easter (A), May 10, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, New York
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A
May 10, 2026
Acts 8:5-8.14-17, Ps 66, 1 Pet 3:15-18, Jn 14:15-21

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• As we move more deeply into the Easter Season during which we’re being renewed as witnesses to the Risen Jesus together with the Holy Spirit, St. Peter tells us in the epistle something we had the chance to ponder at length throughout 2025 during the Jubilee Year: “Always be ready to give an explanation to any one who asks you for a reason for your hope.” The first Pope’s statement implies three things: that because the Risen Lord is with us, because the Holy Spirit has been sent to us, Catholics are supposed to be persons of hope; that we’re supposed to know the reasons for our hope; and that God wants us to be ready and willing to give those reasons always to anyone who asks us — at home, Church, work, school, on the streets, in hospitals and nursing homes, in prisons, even, in concentration camps and Gulags. This proclamation of hope that is credible yet towering is an essential part of the Good News each of us is called as missionary disciples to experience and proclaim.
• Peter’s testimony calling us always to be ready to give the explanation of the reason of our hope is particularly compelling because in his lifetime he himself faced many challenges to hope. His first words to Jesus were that he was a “sinful man” (Lk 5:8) prone to weakness (as he showed in the high priest’s courtyard [Mt 26:48]). He was surrounded by a bunch of other very ordinary men, sinners all, one of whom accounted Jesus less valuable than 30 silver pieces, and all of whom abandoned the Lord when he was arrested. Yet Jesus made them, respectively, the Rock (Mt 16:18) and the living stones (1 Pet 2:5) on whom he was to build his Church. When Jesus gave them the mission to change world history, they easily could have despaired because that task far exceeded their human abilities, but they didn’t. They counted on the Lord to give them what they needed. That’s why Peter’s words to us today in his first letter are so important. The challenges we face are not greater than the challenges he faced. After Pentecost, he became a witness to hope and was always ready to give the explanation of his hope to others, doing it so powerfully that 3,000 people converted the first day he preached. Today we ourselves need to focus within on those reasons for Christian hope, so that we might likewise be able to take this Gospel to every corner.
• The fundamental reason for our hope has nothing to do with our individual talents, cheery personalities, upbeat ideas, past accomplishments, supportive friends or helpful connections. The essential reason of our hope is GOD. Hope is based on the deep conviction that God is with us, that he is faithful to his promises, and that he will always give us what we need and what is best for us. He who is the omnipotent Lord of the universe loves us with an everlasting love, from which no human situation, no matter how seemingly desperate, can separate us (cf. Rom 8:39). During this Easter Season, we celebrate the fact that not even public execution on a Cross can extinguish hope! God the Father loved us so much that he sent his own Son to die for us and our sins, so that we might live with Him forever. As St. Paul asked the Romans, “If God did not even spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all, will he not give us, with Him, everything else besides?” (Rom 8:32). That’s why he was able to say, “We know that everything always works out for the good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28). That’s another way of saying that in every circumstance we should have hope because God is at work and wants to bring good even out of evil, victory out of seeming defeat, resurrection even out of crucifixion.
• We can further specify some of the fundamental ways that our hope comes from God.
  • Our hope is based first on God the Father’s providential love. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes aim at our worrying, which can cause us to lose hope, and tells us instead to trust in the loving care of His Father and ours: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. …  Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? … Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt 6:25-34). The heavenly Father knows all that we truly need and will give us everything we truly need. That fills us with hope!
  • Our hope is also based on God the Father’s Mercy. No matter what we’ve done, he loves us with the love of the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son (cf. Lk 15:11-32). There’s nothing we’ve done that will cause him to withhold his loving mercy. So often the source of our despair comes from the fact we cannot forgive ourselves for what we’ve done. The guilt eats us alive. But if God the Father can forgive us for the sins that lead to Jesus’ crucifixion, nothing we could do could ever be as wicked as that. The only thing that can prevent us from receiving this gift of his mercy is our refusal to seek it in the sacrament his Son established to take the guilt and despair away (cf. Jn 20:19-23). His mercy is part of the reason for hope we’re called to give to everyone who asks.
  • That leads to the third reason for our hope: Christ Jesus’ own love and friendship. Twice during the Last Supper, Jesus said, “I love you.” He said first, “Just as the Father has loved me, so I love you” (Jn 15:9). Later he added, “As I love you, love one another” (Jn 15:12). One of the great causes of sadness and despair is when a person begins to think that no one else cares, when one imagines that he or she is alone in facing all of life’s daunting challenges, when one lives without love. St. John Paul II wrote in his first encylical, Redemptor Hominis, in 1979: “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being who is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” The great antidote is to remember how madly Jesus loves us — a madness that made him willing to be tortured and killed so that we might never be alone but live forever with him. Jesus is the solution to, and the light and salvation for, the greatest problems we face, and his love for us is our great hope. Alone we can do nothing. But with him as our Good Shepherd, we really do have it all (cf. Psalm 23:1) and can do it all (Mt 17:20; Lk 1:37; Phil 4:13).
  • The final reason for our hope I’ll mention is the Holy Spirit. This Thursday we will celebrate the Lord’s Ascension into heaven and immediately afterward, like Jesus’ first followers, the whole Church will begin a decenarium — or 10 days of prayer — to the Holy Spirit. In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that when he goes the Father will give us “another Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, who will be with us forever.” The word Paraclete means an advocate, a helper, a defender, a coach. He says the Holy Spirit will be “another Paraclete,” because Jesus is our first advocate, helper, defender and strong-right arm. Later on during the Last Supper, Jesus tells us that it is better for us that he go, because unless he go, the Holy Spirit will not come (Jn 16:7). He’s telling us that if we had to choose between having Him with us or having the Holy Spirit, that we should choose the latter! Because many people do not have the same relationship with the Holy Spirit as they do with God the Father and God the Son, they often do not know how the Holy Spirit wants to help fill them with true hope. But we can briefly sketch the ways:
    • The Holy Spirit fills us with hope by teaching us how to pray. Prayer puts our hope into action. St. Paul tells us, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Rom 8:26-27). Prayer helps us to recognize that no situation is hopeless!
    • The Holy Spirit fills us with hope by making us aware of our dignity as beloved sons and daughters of God. “Because you are children,” St. Paul says, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God” (Gal 4:6-7).  The Holy Spirit convinces us that we are “heirs” of all God has promised us — including the promise of heaven! — which obviously fills us with Christian hope. With St. John we can say, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are! … We are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him for we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:1). Recognizing our divine filiation by the help of the Holy Spirit is a great source of hope.
    • The Holy Spirit makes us hopeful by leading us “into all truth” (Jn 16:13) and teaching us everything (Jn 14:26). Sometimes we can feel so lost and bewildered by events that we begin to despair that there’s any meaning to it all. The Holy Spirit works within us — through his gifts of knowledge and understanding, wisdom and prudence — to allow the truth about God, about ourselves, and about His love for us, to set us free (cf. Jn 8:32). The Holy Spirit does this objectively through the Church, so that we can be even more certain that we’re not deceived and find God’s light when we’re walking in the valley of darkness. This light fills us with hope even on dark days.
    • The Holy Spirit lifts up our hearts by “remind[ing] us of everything Jesus has taught us” (Jn 14:26). He prevents us from forgetting all that Jesus said and did, and Jesus’ words and actions for our salvation fill us with a deep, imperishable hope, no matter what situation we’re in.
    • Finally the Holy Spirit makes us hopeful by allowing us to share in God’s life here in this world. He is active in all the sacraments, making and keeping us a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19). In Baptism, he comes down upon us, as he did on Jesus in the Jordan (cf. Lk 3:22). In Confirmation, like Peter and James confirmed the Samaritan converts in today’s first reading, he seals us with his strength for the Christian life. By the Holy Spirit’s power, men are made to be other Christs in the sacrament of Holy Orders. By his dynamism working through the priest, our sins are forgiven and the bread and wine in a priest’s hands become Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity. The Holy Spirit’s mission is to overshadow us like he overshadowed Mary, so that we, like her, may become tabernacles of God. When the Lord is with us, and we’re aware of it, we, like Mary, cry out “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior!” (Lk 1:46-47). A soul and spirit filled with the Holy Spirit in this way cannot but be hopeful!
  • So God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — is the principal cause and reason for our hope. His past deeds for us — all the events of salvation history in the Old Testament and New — make us confident that he will keep all the promises he made to us. His living presence within us through the diving indwelling of the Sacraments, making us “temples of the living God” (2Cor 6:16), is the deep inner source of our hope and joy.
  • And this reality should make very clear to us what is the cause of the loss of hope in us and others. If the principal driver of our hope is God and being with him in the world, the principal reason for despair is separation from God through sin. All the problems in the world and in human hearts are all a direct or indirect result of sin; and the despair that often flows from these problems occurs when we don’t respond to them by turning back to God, but rather allow them to drift away from the Lord.
  • Today’s readings address this connection between sin and despair. Before St. Peter tells us to be always ready to give an explanation for the hope within us, he exhorts us: “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts!” And immediately after his summons for us to be witnesses to hope, he says, “keep your conscience clear!” He knows, from personal and pastoral experience, that unless we’re sanctifying Christ as God in our consciences, unless we’re living moral lives based on his promises, we cannot and will not be people of true hope and therefore will not be able to bring that hope to others. If our hearts and consciences are not “sanctifying Christ as Lord,” then we will be at least partially separated from God and suspectible to the despair, sadness and lack of peace that flow from our sin and others’. Holiness and hope go together, as do sin and despair.
  • Jesus points to the same reality in the Gospel in another way. He points to the connection between love of God and keeping his commandments. The commandments are divine gifts, heavenly road signs to keep us on the path to holiness. “If you love me,” he tells us, “you will keep my commandments.” Later he reiterates the same point twice: “Whoever accepts my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me” and “Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one that loves me.” Love is ultimately a union with the beloved, a holy communion, which is the source of hope. Jesus tells us that we cannot have that communion with him unless we do what He commands. There’s a clear reason for this: because Jesus is the Word-made-flesh. We cannot separate Him from the word he put into flesh. We can’t truly love him and at the same time choose not to love his will expressed in the commandments. Jesus gave us the commandments so that we might be filled with his peace and joy and become people of hope, witnesses to the triumph of sanctity over sin, light over darkness, life over death.
  • Today we have two great witnesses to hope. The first is St. Damien of Molokai, whose feast the Church remembers on May 10, the day he entered the leper colony in Kaluapapa in 1873. The leper colony was a place of deep despair, not just because of the physical consequences of the disease but because of the way those who suffered were cut off from all of society and even, for a length of time, from the Church, due to fear of contagion. The Catholic lepers in Kaluapapa — 200 out of the 816 in the enclave at the time — wrote Bishop Louis Magret of Honolulu begging him to send a priest so that they might at least suffer and die with the consolation of the sacraments. The bishop knew what he was proposing: a slow martyrdom, as chaplain to a walking graveyard. He couldn’t force the assignment on anyone; he asked for volunteers Fully conscious of the consequences, Fr. Damien, a Belgian missionary who had been laboring on the island of Hawaii for 9 years, stepped forward to take the assignment. Bishop Maigret prophetically introduced him to the colony of lepers as “one who will be a father to you, and who loves you so much that he does not hesitate to become one of you, to live and die with you.” The 33-year old priest got right down to work — every type of work. He built churches, homes and beds. He created farms and schools and worked to enforce basic laws. He fought to have medicine sent and to get his people whatever medical care was possible. At first, it was hard for him to approach the lepers because he had a natural revulsion to the fetid odor given off by their leprous sores. To overcome this repugnance, he began to smoke a pipe so that the smell of tobacco would make it possible for him to approach the lepers with dignity as he began to dress their ulcers. While what he could do for their deteriorating bodies was limited, he knew that he could help prepare their souls to meet the Lord, to help them live with an eternal purpose, with hope. If they could focus on the joys after the pangs of childbirth in this world, he believed, they could better endure the sufferings of leprosy. So he had them focus on the great hope of eternal life. The first thing he did was to give increased attention to funeral rites. He knew that if the lepers saw how much care he showed them at their death, they might begin to sense the value of their lives and grow in the great hope of heaven. He brought them the sacraments at their bedsides and tidied their rooms and beds to await the imminent visit of the Lord Jesus. He formed choirs, taught them how to sing beautiful hymns at Requiem Masses, and trained others to play musical instruments. He cleaned the cemetery and adorned it with flowers. He even made coffins. The second thing he did to help them get ready for eternity was to bring them into eternity in time through instituting perpetual adoration, so that the lepers would know that the Lord Jesus our hope was with them always and they could pour out their hearts to Him in need 24/7. Father Damien knew, too, that this was what sustained his hope, too. “I find my consolation,” he wrote in a letter, “in the one and only companion who will never leave me, that is, our Divine Savior in the Holy Eucharist.… Without the Blessed Sacrament a position like mine would be unbearable. But having Our Lord at my side, I continue always to be happy and content.” It is unsurprising that his witness began to win over the members of his community. Six months after his arrival, he had 400 people — half the village and two thirds of those who were not Catholic at his arrival — preparing for baptism. A cheerful spirit of hope began to radiate in the community in place of the former dejection. In December of 1884, Fr. Damien discovered that he had contracted leprosy, but didn’t lose hope. He wrote, “My eyebrows are beginning to fall out. Soon I will be disfigured entirely. Having no doubts about the true nature of my disease, I am calm, resigned, and very happy in the midst of my people.” To those who asked him how he was holding up, he expressed the hope that flowed from his prayer: “Our Lord will give me the graces I need to carry my cross and follow him, even to our special Calvary at Kalawao.” The Lord did give me those graces and allowed him to follow him to the Lord’s right side. St. Damien shows us that no matter where we are, no matter how seemingly desperate the situation, we are called to be not just missionaries of faith and missionaries of charity, but also missionaries of hope even to the places that humanly are most devoid.
  • The second great witness we have today of hope is our mothers, biological and spiritual. Many of us have been first taught the Gospel by our moms, who were to us the first apostles of hope. Many of our moms and grandmothers have been the ones who have sustained us in hope, encouraging us, never ceasing to pray for us. Spiritual moms do that for the whole Church, like St. Monica, like St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, like Our Lady, whom we call Mater Spei,Mother of Hope. Today we give thanks to God for all our moms, natural and supernatural, who individually and collectively are a great cloud of witnesses who never cease to be sources of hope for us along the pilgrim way. We also pray today for all of those married women longing to become mothers, that the Lord will fulfill their hopes and reward their trust.
  • In order to help us become disciples of hope capable of becoming apostles of hope to everyone, the Lord Jesus instituted the Mass. It’s here that God wants to fill us with hope — by giving us his word, by feeding us with his very self, by helping us to experience not only his extreme love but the love and friendship of his family on earth, the Church. God comes to dwell with us and within us so that we are able to bring Him to others as the true hope of the world. There’s a beautiful prayer after the Our Father that summarizes what we’ve been pondering today, both the reasons for our hope and how our hope is squandered. The priest turns to God the Father and implores, “Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our savior Jesus Christ.” The “blessed hope” is the hope of eternal life and love with God, with the communion of saints, with, we pray, all our loved ones, both deceased and alive. Here on earth the Mass is the foretaste of that blessed hope as we receive God within, alongside each other. May the Hope we here receive in Jesus, by the love of the Father and the power of the Holy Spirit, fill us with enduring hope and help us to go, always and everywhere, just as St. Peter did in his own time, and bring that hope, the reasons for it, and the Source of it, to a world ever in need. This is the Gospel of hope Jesus at the end of every Mass sends each of us with his blessing to announce, giving to everyone the explanation for the reason of the hope we have within!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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