Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, Vigil
April 13, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.13.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3
The following text guided the homily:
* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us as we look forward to the Third Sunday of Easter.
* If ever there were a day for a party, it was the day Jesus rose from the dead! It was the happiest day in all of human history, made more jubilant by ending the terrible despair and dejection of the disciples over the previous two days. And once the immense shock of seeing Jesus risen from the dead walk through the closed doors of the Upper Room to greet them had worn off, St. Luke tells us that the disciples were “incredulous for joy and amazed.” But they didn’t run out for gallons of wine or ask Jesus to convert water into champagne. Jesus didn’t call for cakes and fruit and other Middle Eastern celebratory fare. Instead, in the midst of the joy of his resurrection, Jesus turned the Upper Room into a vocational training school and began to finish the training of the disciples and apostles to fulfill his saving mission. There was a certain urgency involved in this that Jesus didn’t want to put off until later: the fields were white and ready for the harvest (Jn 4:35) and Jesus wanted the apostles, and the disciples with them, to get ready to go out to take in that harvest. He wants his conversation with us in this Sunday’s Gospel to be as formative and consequential.
* There were three steps to his finalizing their and our preparation so that they and we might become his witnesses to all nations.
* First, he allowed himself to be seen, encountered, and embraced. The apostles were troubled and Jesus came to give them his peace. Jesus wants to have a similar encounter with us in prayer so that he may give us his peace. Jesus showed them his body and invited them to touch him. This was to communicate that he wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t imaginary. He was real. This points to the need for us to recognize that Jesus’ presence with us isn’t phantasmic either, but real. He’s not a ghost but he’s got real flesh and blood. We can see him. We can touch him and not just on the “outside” but on the inside. This obviously points to the importance of the Eucharist, which is meant to amaze us and make us, like the first apostles, “incredulous for sheer joy.” This truth that seems too good to be true actually is true: God is with us in his risen body and blood, and he comes to give himself to us. Any apostle needs to live a Eucharistic life, to be amazed at God’s gift of himself to such a degree that that joy overflows to others. The Eucharist, I repeat, isn’t a ghost, isn’t an imaginary presence, isn’t a thing at all, but the same Jesus who appeared to his first followers in the Upper Room; he just looks different under sacramental form. This is something that the ongoing Eucharistic Revival in the United States is meant to help us grasp, and to respond with faith, gratitude, amazement and love.
* The second stage in the finalizing of their vocational training is that Jesus “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” Just like he had done a couple of hours with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, whose hearts he had made burn as he interpreted to them the things about himself in the scriptures, so Jesus filled his apostles with a similar fire, showing them, too, how everything foretold had been accomplished.
