April 18, 2022
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for Easter Sunday on April 17, 2022 at St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9.
Welcome, welcome! Welcome to our regular parishioners, to those visiting from out of town, to those who haven’t attended Mass in over two years, and to those who didn’t regularly attend Mass even before then. We’re glad you’re with us today!
This is the day of the year when we go looking for the Body of Christ, but when we get to where we expect to find it, it’s not there. Today, on the holiest day of the year!
And that’s why, today, even more than any other day, we welcome you. We are reminded in an especially vivid way today, that the Body of Christ is present in our gathering. WE are the Body of Christ. Your presence today makes us more fully the Body of Christ we profess to be.
Just as the disciples emerged from the darkness of the empty tomb into the light of the restored creation, may we emerge from the darkness and isolation of the pandemic into the Easter light we experience every time we gather for Eucharist!
When I was first ordained, I was overwhelmed by the actions I was supposed to do while leading everyone in praying specific words of the Eucharistic Prayer. The actions we priests perform are called “rubrics,” from the tradition going back centuries that the instructions are written in red ink. My aunt and uncle realized the anxiety I would be feeling, so they bought me a special coffee mug for my ordination. It simply said, “Say the black. Do the red.”
The words and the rubrics make a big deal about four verbs associated with what Jesus did at the Last Supper. On the night before he died, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and shared it with his disciples. At every Jewish ritual meal, the main points are the blessing and the sharing. The blessing recognizes that this bread is set apart for holy things. The sharing is a sign of communion with one another. For the Jewish ritual, the taking and the breaking are of secondary importance. You can’t share the bread with others unless you break it, and it’s hard to break the bread unless you take it into your hands.
I think most of us understand the cosmic significance of the breaking of the bread. On Holy Thursday, as he held the bread, Jesus proclaimed, “This is my body.” And less than 24 hours later, his body was broken open in a horrific, graphic way.
Today, our Easter joy arises from the fact that the blessing, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, is shared with us. But here’s the rub, the mystery that we Christians wrestle with: like the bread blessed at the Jewish meal, the blessings of Christ cannot be fully shared with us until after Christ has been broken.
For us Catholics, the Eucharist is one of the central mysteries of our faith. We ponder it throughout our lives, gaining occasional insights about the cosmic reality in which we participate. We believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is somehow really, truly present in this bread and wine, present as body and soul, as spirit and divinity. That’s amazing, profound, terrifying, and awesome, but that’s only the half of it. We believe that through baptism WE are the Body of Christ. We, like the bread at the Last Supper, and like the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, are blessed, we are graced, we are set apart for holy things. And we somehow must recognize our brokenness before we can share our blessings with others.
Last night, there were 10 people with us here who – like untold thousands throughout the world – became fully initiated Catholics. Why would anyone choose to become Catholic as an adult? Well, my experience is that adults desiring to become Catholic recognize better than most people their own brokenness. They also possess a fire to share themselves with others. My interactions with this year’s RCIA cohort was limited, but even with them, I heard their stories about how they recognize that they are blessed, that they are broken, and that they are called to share themselves with others.
The bread and the wine that we will place on this altar represent all of who we are. Each of us is like a single grain of wheat crushed or an individual grape smashed so that it may be combined with others in a way that can never be undone. The bread and the wine represent our gifts and our flaws, our joys and our sorrows, our hopes and our failings. And, then, through the miracle of the Eucharist, they are transformed.
Jesus Christ is blessed. Jesus Christ was broken. Jesus Christ shares himself with us. In the Eucharist, we are transformed into the body of Jesus Christ.
We come to church not because we are perfect. We are blessed and we are broken. We come to share our lives with each another, both our blessings and our brokenness, so that we might be changed by the Risen One.
But what about that first verb? Why does the Eucharistic Prayer emphasize that Jesus took the bread? How are we “taken”?
Think of being “taken” as being chosen. When the priest takes the bread and the wine into his hands, it’s a reminder of what Jesus said at the Last Supper: “It was not you who chose me; it was I who chose you.” Each of us has been called by God to a unique vocation, but somehow, inexplicably, it is only together that we can carry out our individual vocations. The Eucharist is our covenant with one another. The Eucharist is our covenant with God.
The Eucharist also celebrates another central mystery of our faith: the resurrection. Today is one of the few days of the year when Jesus Christ is not present in our gospel passage. Some people complain how the stories of Easter don’t seem as compelling as the rest of the gospels, because they don’t focus on Jesus in the same way. Actually, it makes a lot of sense that they’re not as focused on Jesus. The resurrection stories are about other people coming to recognize they are sharers in the mission of God, sharers in the mission of Jesus Christ.
Pope Francis has been remarkably consistent in calling each and every baptized Christian to share in the mission of Jesus Christ. He has given us countless examples in his words and actions of focusing outwards instead of focusing inwards. But the quotation of his I’d like to share with you is from the month before he was elected pope. He said:
We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world: when a church becomes like this, it grows sick. It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one.
Francis’ words speak to the heart of Easter. When we look outside the doors of the church, we see the blessedness of the world, but we also see the brokenness. We, like countless imperfect disciples before us, have come to know Jesus Christ as our savior so that we can have life in abundance. We are blessed. We are broken. We must share… because we are taken, or chosen, by God. Jesus calls us to share our good news with this world, and we take our lives for what they are. We are a people chosen by God, for God. And in this, we rejoice.
Podcast photo credit: Michael Porter via Flickr/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0