3^rd Sunday of Easter 2002

.... our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel .... Luke 24:20-21

The incident of the two disciples meeting the Risen Lord as they traveled from Jerusalem to Emmaus is a most appropriate and revealing encounter for our situation as Christians in the early 21^st Century. Like the disciples, many Christians today find themselves discouraged and perhaps even with little hope in the kind of society we live in, and the situation of the Church and believers in general. The two disciples were profoundly discouraged and demoralized by the events that had taken place on that previous Friday in Jerusalem. They had hoped that Jesus was the one who would change their lives, redeem Israel and establish God's Kingdom on earth. But they saw him condemned as a blasphemer and criminal, abandoned by most of his own apostles and other disciples, which perhaps lent some credence to the charges, and then put to death. With his death, their hopes were crushed, and their faith in him thrown into confusion, and they were so despondent that they had dismissed the account of the empty tomb and the women meeting Jesus as foolishness since the men who went and checked out their story found only the empty tomb but did not see Jesus as they claimed to have seen him alive.

The disciples were in a very real sense experiencing the emptiness and abandonment of man during Jesus' descent into Hell that we confess. It seemed that God had abandoned them, abandoned the world, that their hope was gone with Jesus, into the pit of death, and they were still reeling from this shock and sorrow. They are not unlike so many men today, who might want to be believers, or others who are believers yet very weak and confused in their belief in Jesus, both of whom cannot commit their lives to faith because they sense that the atheistic prophets of the modern world seem to have the evidence of history on their side that God is dead, that God is no longer credibly alive in our world, active in our history, the hope of man and creation.

Even believing Catholics, though they may not be without hope, can experience this ennui, this sense of emptiness, God's apparent absence from our world, and can be terribly discouraged with the scandals that rock His Church, and wonder how this could happen if Christ were really alive and present in and guiding his Church. We live surrounded by a world of unbelief, by massive evils, attacks on innocent human life which are unparalleled in man's history, terrible affronts to God's moral law even within the Church, and among her members consecrated to a sacred ministry. All of this can shake our faith and hope, and, if we are not careful, extinguish our own charity. We can find ourselves like the men walking along that road on Easter Sunday, stunned, confused and struggling to hold on to our faith, and hope.

But what happened to those men that day is what should be happening to us today if we can forget our own misery for a moment and listen to the Lord who walks with us even when we are too distraught to recognize his presence. They are almost despairing because they are convinced Jesus is dead, and there he is, suddenly walking along with, them, trying to open their hearts and minds to the truth of his resurrection, and his own presence with them at that very moment.

Jesus then begins to redirect their attention to God's word, not to what they witness about them with their eyes and fallible minds which err so often in interpreting life and what goes on in the world, but to the true key for understanding themselves, God, the world and its history, the events which they personally experience. He shows them the meaning of the prophets of the Old Law who spoke words that needed a key to interpret them, and he was of course that key, for they all spoke of Him. And he shows them how they spoke of his death as the means of their redemption and His resurrection as the means of a whole new life, the life that raised his very body from the tomb.

His words made them forget for a while the events that had shattered their peace of mind and their hope, and now they hungered for more of God's Word and his words which enabled them to understand their own scriptures, really for the first time. Later they would understand the link between Jesus as the interpretive key to God's Word in their scriptures, that he was the fullness of God's Word, and thus the key to understanding that Word from of old, and Himself as its fulfillment.

But they still did not recognize him yet, except as a great Rabbi whose teaching opened up the Word of God and enabled them to see that the reports of the women had a foundation in the Prophets, when truly understood, and that their reports were possible true after all! But then they have their own direct experience of the Risen lord, and come to recognize that the one who spoke to them, who walked with them and instructed them, was in fact the Risen Christ Himself! And how? When he blessed and broke the bread at table the veil was lifted, and as they testified to the Apostles later, Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread. Theirs was a different kind of recognition than that of the women, of Mary Magdalene who recognized him in his loving address to her, his call of her name.

But these disciples come to recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread, in that action which we now call the Eucharist, for it is the Lord's gift to us par excellance of his risen presence. Jesus walks with us in our daily life, but we do not often recognize his presence, so distracted are we by the things going on around us which grab our attention. But here, in the Eucharist he speaks His words to us and interprets for us the Word of God, which He Himself is. And then having prepared our hearts - recall these disciples' account: Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures? - Jesus not only reveals his presence but gives us Himself as our heavenly food in the breaking of the bread. It is in the Eucharist, through faith, that Jesus renews our hope and joy so that we can go back to the world and bear testimony as the two disciples returned to Jerusalem and bore witness to the world, beginning with the company of the Apostles.

Dear brothers and sisters, do not be discouraged by the world, or even by the scandals that shake the Church itself. Keep your hearts and minds fixed on the Lord and the Word he speaks to us in Himself, especially in the breaking of the bread. Remember why Christ died, for sinners, and that we receive Him in the Eucharist only after he has offered His saving sacrifice to the Father once again for the salvation of the world, for the sins of mankind, beginning with his own members. Jesus warned us that there would be such scandals:

Woe to the world because of such scandals! Such things must come, but woe to the one through whom they come! [Mat 18:7]\

His Church would not be free from scandals nor more than his Church would be free from sinners. His risen life would make it possible for men, for all men, to be recreated, to be saints, but it would not force such a result, guarantee such a result, and thus scandals were inevitable, but as he declares, woe to those who cause such scandals.

My faith, your faith, does not depend upon the sanctity of any man, the fidelity or infidelity of any man, but ourselves. Our faith, our hope, is founded not on man's fidelity to God's Word and God's grace, but God's fidelity to His own Word and God's fidelity to His own offer of Grace. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, and that is enough for us. His resurrection is God's promise of a new life, a life of truth, justice and all the virtues of Christ himself, a divine life lived already here in a fallen world. Jesus' resurrection is not only the promise but the source of this new life, and this is the basis of our hope, and the truth that we have to keep our minds and hearts fixed on as we travel the troubled road of life in an unbelieving and seriously disordered world. No age has any special hold on sin or sanctity; no age is exempt from scandals or the Cross. Faith and Grace enable us to make our way to Heaven through all this, and only faith and Grace. Jesus is truly risen and walks with us every step of the way, feeds us with His Risen body and blood, and fortifies us with His Spirit. What else do we need to find joy and peace in the midst of this world?