Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, C, Vigil

April 30, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.30.22_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 on the third Sunday of Easter. Last week, as you remember, we pondered the Lord’s Divine Mercy and reflected on Jesus’ rehabilitation of the faith of Saint Thomas the Apostle. Today we ponder that same mercy and Jesus’ rehabilitation of St. Peter. Peter didn’t have the same doubts as Thomas about the resurrection. He was the first to enter the tomb. He saw the Lord enter through the closed doors of the Upper Room. Together with the other ten apostles, he rejoiced at Jesus’ triumph over death. But he still wasn’t whole. The obstacle was that he still wasn’t able to forgive himself for what he did on the night Jesus was betrayed. Peter sincerely thought that he would die for the Lord. He tried to defend him in the Garden of Gethsemane with a knife, even cutting off the ear of Malchus, the high priest’s servant, but as Jesus had told him earlier in the Garden, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” (Mt 26:41) and we would just how weak Peter’s flesh was in the High Priest’s courtyard when in response to a conversation with a maid who recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter denied three times that he even knew who Jesus was. That’s when the cock crowed. When Jesus was brought out and looked at him, Peter, remembering Jesus’ prediction, went out and wept bitterly.

* The pain of that experience was very much with Peter even after Resurrection. Mary Magdalene, when she finally recognized Jesus as he called her by name in the Garden on Easter Sunday, rejoiced so much that she clung to his feet never wanted to let him go. The disciples on the road to Emmaus, as soon as they had recognized Jesus in the breaking of the Bread, ran seven miles uphill in pitch-black darkness to share the joyful news of Jesus’ resurrection with the other disciples. And even though the evangelists tell us that the disciples rejoiced when they eventually recognized that Jesus wasn’t a ghost on Easter Sunday evening, Peter still harbored his humiliation and was struggling to forgive himself for having been a spiritual Benedict Arnold. That’s what Jesus needed to address.

* As we see in this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus did it first through a miraculous catch of fish. Peter had gone back to what he knew well, probably to divert himself from his sorrow as well as to get some food. He and the other disciples, however, worked all night and caught nothing. In the morning, a seeming stranger on the shore — whose appearance and it seems also his voice had changed after the Resurrection — told them to cast the net onto the other side of the boat. They did and caught an enormous draft of fish. That’s when St. John, who was present on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus originally called him and his brother James, Peter and his brother Andrew three years earlier, grasped that it was the Lord. That original scene of their calling is highly significant to the post-Resurrection scene. Peter, Andrew, James and John had on that previous occasion worked all night and had caught nothing. They had come in, had cleaned their boats and net, and Peter had allowed Jesus to use his boat as a pulpit to move a little from the shore because the crowd was crushing him. After that favor, Jesus told Peter to put out into the deep water and lower his...