Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan, NY

Easter Thursday

April 8, 2021

Acts 3:11-26, Ps 8, Lk 24:35-48

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.8.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* At Easter, Jesus wants to work a transformation in us like he worked in the first disciples. And as we’ve been seeing during these days, there’s a very familiar pattern to the metamorphosis he worked on Easter that we’ve been seeing in each of the readings this Easter week:

* At first the disciples who encounter Jesus are bewildered, shocked, fearful, unbelieving in his resurrection; no matter how many times Jesus told them exactly what would occur to him, they still didn’t believe when they saw him a couple of days after his brutal execution.

* The second stage is that Jesus convinces them that he’s real, that he’s alive, that he’s risen from the dead and he begins to instruct them, to show them that everything that happened to him was supposed to happen to him.

* Third, once they hear and see Jesus, they come to faith in his Resurrection and living Presence in front of them.

* Lastly, Jesus sends them out on a mission to complete his own mission.

* On Monday and Tuesday we see how this happened with Mary Magdalene from the perspectives of St. Matthew’s and St. John’s Gospels respectively. Yesterday we saw it with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus. And in today’s Gospel, we see these same four stages occur with the apostles in the Upper Room.

* Jesus enters the other room while Cleopas and the other disciple are briefing them on what just happened on their journey home to Emmaus. The disciples were “started and terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost.” They couldn’t believe that it was Jesus, even after the witness of the Emmaus disciples, of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary whom Jesus met on the way. Just like the two disciples of Emmaus, their hearts were slow to believe: their will wasn’t yet in it, they were too dejected, too afraid, too holding on to their wounds and hurt feelings. Jesus confronts those fears and that hardness straight on. He says, “Peace be with you!” He asks, “Why are you troubled? And why do questions arise in your hearts?” He asked not about their minds but their hearts. Then he removed their cardiac doubts about his physical reality by saying, “Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have.” After showing them his wounds and his feet, he proves that he’s not a ghost even more powerfully by eating a piece a baked fish, which only a real person could digest. And then he started to do for them what we saw him do with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus yesterday. He reminded them that he had to suffer, just as he and the prophets had foretold. “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.” St. Luke stresses that, having opened their hearts, he then opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, saying, “Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” Doubtless their own hearts began to burn like the hearts of the Emmaus disciples and their minds got that warmer blood of faith and they began to believe. Then Jesus gave them their mission as he similarly opened their mouths: “You are witnesses of these things.” They were to be witnesses of Christ’s resurrection,