April 15, 2024
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter (Year B) on April 14, 2024 at the Paulist Center in Boston, MA. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 2:1-5a; and Luke 24:35-48.
Our first and second readings today talk a lot about sin. But the main focus of these readings is forgiveness. The concepts of God’s grace, God’s mercy, and God’s forgiveness don’t make a lot of sense to us in concrete terms unless we also consider our sinfulness. Our first reading is especially interesting to consider, since Peter is talking to other people who denied Jesus, when he had famously denied Jesus himself only two months earlier!
On the other hand, our gospel passage probably downplays how much the disciples were thinking about their sinfulness when the resurrected Jesus first appeared to them in the Upper Room. This was the first time they were seeing their friend and teacher after abandoning him on the day he was arrested an executed.
Today, we hear Luke’s account of that first evening of Easter. Let’s set the scene. There are probably about 120 people gathered in the Upper Room: almost all the disciples who journeyed with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem for the week of Passover. The two disciples who encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus have just run the seven miles back to tell everyone about their experience.
Unlike those 120 disciples in the Upper Room, we’ve experienced Easter joy for years. As we are sprinkled once again with the waters of baptism, let us reflect: what graces have we experienced recently? What does God invite us to do next?
It seems that many of us struggle to remember this particular resurrection story. Nevertheless, it fits well into the scope of Luke’s entire gospel. Easter is the singular event in salvation history and yet, Luke gives us a sense that we’ve completed a circle.
First of all, Jesus is eating. In Luke, one out of every five sentences is about Jesus having a meal. And he’s eating fish, which takes us back to when Jesus shared fish with 5,000 people. (He also shared bread with the 5,000, just as he has recently done again in Emmaus!)
Jesus’ eating demonstrates that he’s not a ghost or an angel… in contrast to the very first scene in the Gospel of Luke more than thirty years earlier, when the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah in the Jerusalem Temple. Not more than a thousand yards away from the Upper Room, Gabriel had told Zechariah that God’s time of fulfillment had come. Zechariah was surprised and fearful, didn’t believe Gabriel, and was struck mute.
The disciples in the Upper Room, upon seeing the risen Jesus, are initially surprised and fearful, too. In contrast to Zechariah, however, they quickly move from fearing the supernatural and feeling shame about betraying Jesus to trusting in his forgiveness and rejoicing in God’s triumph.
Luke says that Jesus “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures,” explaining how he is the fulfillment of the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets. Why, oh why, doesn’t Luke give us some direct quotes from Jesus here? If we’re not supposed to be struck mute like Zechariah, wouldn’t it be great if we could directly quote Jesus’ spoken proof that he is the Messiah?
Apparently, that’s not how God intends it to work. All four gospels make clear that it is now our job, as members of Christ’s Body, to proclaim the gospel through our lived experiences. The Acts of the Apostles is Luke’s sequel to his gospel. In it, including in today’s first reading, Luke gives us the words of people proclaiming Jesus as Messiah. Through their witnessing of their lived experiences in Jerusalem, then Judea and Samaria, and eventually in further-flung regions of the Roman Empire, Peter, Stephen, Philip, and Paul proclaim the gospel to an ever-more-diverse group of people. In the Book of Acts, Luke completes a second cycle of the proclamation of the Paschal mystery.
So today is great day to wrestle with a paradox: our lives are constantly evolving, and yet we go through repeating cycles as well. There can be a danger of thinking, “ho hum, it’s just another Easter season,” without reflecting on how the Easter event has, once and for all, changed the very essence of our lives. Are we completing another cycle, or are we just wandering around in circles?
Jesus tells the apostles that they are to preach “repentance, for the forgiveness of sins” in his name. That sounds like a theme for Lent, not Easter. In fact, two months ago, many of us received ashes as a minister used the first words that Jesus speaks in the gospels: “Repent, and believe in the gospel.” Why are we still talking about it now? Because conversion is a life-long process. We are born into a personal relationship with God, but it is our responsibility to continue to nurture that relationship our whole lives. Even Jesus’ appearance to the disciples in the Upper Room is a story of reconciliation, restoration, and even greater hope for the future.
We, too, are called to an ongoing conversion, an ongoing deepening of our relationship with God. As it was for the apostles, it is also for us: God always takes the first step in the deepening of our relationship; we just need to respond to the grace that God offers us. But conversion is also about deepening of our relationships with one another. Each of us, at every moment of our lives, is in need of reconciliation with God and reconciliation with one another. As the first letter of John says, if we keep Jesus’ word, the love of God will be “truly perfected” in us.
Even though it may not be our first Easter season, there are always some people among us who are experiencing their first Easter… or who are perhaps experiencing a painful, extended crucifixion. We need to be Christ’s reconciling agents to them. When we’re able to look people in the eye and say, “We’re glad that you’re here!” we help each other reach the peace and the perfection that Jesus Christ desires for us. In other words, we witness to how Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets.
And in that way, Easter Sunday doesn’t merely remain a historical event. It becomes the energy to propel us upward and onward. Instead of feeling that our lives are just going in circles, we sense that we are spiraling ever upward within the cloud of witnesses, growing ever closer to God.
Photo credit for preview photo: Justin Hanes via Flickr/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0