Arise and Walk, Easter Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Arnold Hall Seminar for Priests, Pembroke, MA
“Great Priest Saints of Eucharistic Revival:
What We Can Learn From Them To Live and Catalyze the US Eucharistic Revival”
Wednesday of Easter Week
April 3, 2024
Acts 3:1-10, Ps 105, Lk 24:13-35

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• In the readings of the Easter Octave, the Church helps us to ponder the dramatic transformation that Jesus’ Resurrection is supposed to have in our life. We have seen over the course of the last two days the stunning metamorphosis in Mary Magdalene and the 3,000 people listening to St. Peter on Pentecost Sunday. Today we see the massive change wrought in the crippled man at the Beautiful Gate and the astonishment and amazement of all those who were accustomed to seeing him at the gate. We also see the transformation in the disciples on the road to Emmaus.
• It’s important for us to resist the temptation for Easter to become routine, seen in the biggest change in us resulting from the liturgical remembrance of Jesus’ resurrection being that now we can consume the food and beverages we gave up for Lent. The celebration of Easter is supposed to lead us to the newness of life St. Paul described at the Easter vigil, helping us to be dead to sin and alive for God in Christ Jesus. The power of Easter is meant to bring about in us the long litany of effects the Church sang about in the Exultet on Saturday night. The whole Church — Peter, John, their successors and the entire Mystical Body — proclaims during the Easter season to us and through us to others, “Arise and walk,” be raised up and start on pilgrimage, freely and enthusiastically following the footsteps of the Risen Lord, knowing that he journeys with us along the way. The power of Easter is meant to do something in us far greater than what happened in this crippled man in Jerusalem. But for that to take place we need to participate in this transition.
• Let’s examine the change that’s supposed to occur by entering into the experience of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus in today’s Gospel. And, insofar as we are looking it in the midst of the ongoing Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in our country during a Seminar on Great Priest Saints of Eucharistic Revival and What We Can Learn from Them let’s look at the Emmaus scene from within a Eucharistic key, helped by the saint the 19^th anniversary of whose natus spiritalis the Church marked yesterday.
• As we spoke about last night, the pilgrim Church on earth’s journey throughout time is essentially a Eucharistic procession in which the risen Eucharistic Lord Jesus accompanies us like he accompanied Clopas and the other disciple, to the way he used to accompany his disciples as they traversed the cities of Jericho and Jerusalem and the towns and villages of Galilee, Samaria and Judah. The Road to Emmaus was only seven miles; the four Eucharistic pilgrimages that the Church in our country will be making starting 45 days from now will be closer to 7,000 miles. But what takes place is meant to be the same: a life-changing encounter with the Risen Lord Jesus, who has chosen to remain with us until the end of time in the Holy Eucharist in order to accompany us on the pilgrimage of life. Let’s see four ways he meets us and bids us to rise and walk with him.

• The first is in our conversations, in what we are thinking and speaking about. As the two disciples were leaving from Jerusalem and all that it symbolized and heading downhill and downcast into darkness, Jesus, whose risen physical appearance and voice they didn’t recognize, drew near, walked with them and asked, “What are you discussing as you walk along?” They wondered whether he was the only person in Jerusalem who was oblivious to the things that had happened to Jesus of Nazareth, how they had placed their hopes in him to redeem Israel, but he had been crucified, and how women had returned from the tomb saying his body was missing and angels had appeared announcing that he was alive. Jesus, the seemingly anonymous wayfarer, calls them “slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke” and revealed to them how Moses and all the prophets had shown it was “necessary that the Messiah suffer in this way and so enter his glory.” In other words, the crucifixion wasn’t a contradiction of the messianic prophecies, but a confirmation. As Jesus opened up the Scriptures and helped them to understand the fulfillment of Cain’s killing his just brother Abel, the sacrifice of Isaac, the Passover lamb led to the slaughter, the just man beset in Wisdom 2, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, Psalms 22 and 69 and so many other passages and scenes, their slow hearts began to burn. Notice the problem wasn’t so much with their heads, but with their hearts; not with their reason but with their will and emotions. They didn’t want to believe what Jesus had said three times before, that the Son of Man must be betrayed, handed over to the religious authorities, be crucified and raised. But the Risen Lord Jesus entered into their disappointment, accompanied them, and sped up their hearts by showing them how the reason they were sad and departing Jerusalem contained the seed of their return. The same Jesus wants to enter our lives, and whatever crushed expectations, doubts or disappointments we may have. He wants to help us with the Word of God see things, including the hardest things like the suffering and death of loved ones, in the proper light. And he seeks to do this each day in the Holy Eucharist. In the liturgy of the Word at Mass, on Sunday and each day during the week, the Church starts with Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms, and adds the very words of Jesus as well as of his apostles to help us see our day-to-day life in his light. Similarly in personal prayer before Jesus in Eucharistic adoration, Jesus speaks to us “heart to heart” to burn away whatever slows and weighs down our heart and ultimately give us the heart transplant prophesied by Ezekiel in the Easter vigil’s seventh reading. We are celebrating with joy and thanksgiving during the Eucharistic Revival the Lord’s accompaniment at Mass and in the tabernacle and monstrance. And in the Eucharistic Pilgrimage, we show how Jesus wants to join our journey on the very streets we live, walk, bike, and drive.
• The second moment of the scene we can ponder is when the two disciples, reaching home, turn to Jesus, still not recognizing him, and urge him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” That invocation has turned over the course of the centuries into a great Christian aspiration. Mane nobiscum, Domine! It even became the title of a Eucharistic apostolic exhortation St. John Paul II left us 20 years ago which was the subject of the first Arnold Hall Seminar for Priests. “Stay with us, Lord!” Jesus wants to be invited in. He wants to remain with us. But he won’t force himself on us. The Risen Lord Jesus, as he was preparing to ascend to the Father, promised us that he would be with us always until the end of time. But we can structure our life either with him or without him. He wants us to bid him to stay with us full-time, to stay with us in the rectory and the office, to stay with us in the morning, midday and evening, to live our whole life in communion with him. And he keeps that desire in the most concrete way in the Holy Eucharist, as he stays with us in our tabernacles full-time and, for a while after each Holy Communion, literally dwells within us. The Eucharistic Revival is meant to help each of us appreciate the incredible gift of the Lord’s real presence and to bid him to stay with and within us always.
• The third moment of the Emmaus scene we should examine is what Jesus did in the disciples’ home. St. Luke tells us that “While he was with them at table, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it and gave it to them.” We know what the sequence of those four verbs means: we hear them every Mass. Jesus, three days after the Last Supper, after the liturgy of the Word along the seven-mile trek, was celebrating the liturgy of the Eucharist at their table, changing the bread into his Risen Body. “With that,” St. Luke continues, “their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight.” As soon as Jesus made himself present in the Eucharist, the unrecognized traveler disappeared, but all that had happened is that the Risen Lord Jesus had changed appearances again, as he continued to fulfill their hope to stay with them. Later the disciples recounted how Jesus made himself known to them in the “breaking of the bread,” one of the expressions the first Christians would use to refer to the celebration of the Mass. Jesus wants all our eyes to open to recognize him in the Eucharist. There are many Catholics — and, sadly, some Catholic priests and bishops — who, despite Church teaching, still relate to the Eucharist in practice as a thing, rather than as Someone, rather than as Jesus Christ. Like the disciples on the journey, their eyes don’t recognize Jesus even when he walks with us, even when he seeks to speak to us. The Eucharistic Revival is meant to heal our blindness and deafness with regard to the real, true and substantial presence of the Risen Lord Jesus in the Holy Eucharist and to help us respond with love to Jesus as he reveals himself in the breaking of the bread.
• The last element we can take up is what happened next. They couldn’t keep the joy of meeting the Lord Jesus to themselves. Even though they had journeyed seven miles downhill into darkness, even though they were doubtless drained by the drama of Christ’s crucifixion, St. Luke tells us, “They set out at once and returned to Jerusalem.” They hastened seven miles up hill, at least a two-hour journey, so that they could share with the eleven apostles what had taken place along their journey home and how the Lord had made himself known to them. This points to the joy we should have at meeting the Risen Lord. It points to the way we ought to leave each Mass or our time with Jesus in prayerful adoration. We encounter the same Lord Jesus the two disciples did; he just looks different. St. John Paul II wrote in his exhortation Mane Nobiscum, Domine, “Once we have truly met the Risen One by partaking of his body and blood, we cannot keep to ourselves the joy we have experienced. The encounter with Christ, constantly intensified and deepened in the Eucharist, issues in the Church and in every Christian an urgent summons to testimony and evangelization. … Entering into communion with Christ in the memorial of his Pasch also means sensing the duty to be a missionary of the event made present in that rite. The dismissal at the end of each Mass is a charge given to Christians, inviting them to work for the spread of the Gospel and the imbuing of society with Christian values.” This is what the Eucharistic Revival is meant to provoke in us, this urgent vocation to witness and sharing our faith, especially the greatest news of all, that God-with-us, Emmanuel, is still very much with us, just as he promised, until the end of time. In the Eucharist, the Risen Lord wants to enter into our conversations, doubts, journeys — in short, into our whole life — bringing the light of his Resurrection, making our hearts burn, and helping us to recognize him at our side. And he wants to inspire us to share news of this love with others, so that they, too, may learn to say to him, “Stay with us, Lord!”
• So today, here and now, during the heart of our Seminar, the risen Lord Jesus — as the altar proclaims, Panis de caelo descendens — wants to come to us and warm our hearts, to ignite us just like he did the two disciples, just like he did Peter, Mary Magdalene, the 3,000 on Pentecost, St. John Paul II and so many saints throughout the centuries. He wants to transform us so that we will be able to go out with him along the paths of the world to encounter so many for whom he died, help them to learn how to turn around toward the heavenly Jerusalem, and with them, go out to light the hearts of the world ablaze. He seeks to do it here, in the “breaking of the bread,” in the Holy Eucharist preceded by the heart-igniting liturgy of the Word. If we allow him to do his thing and stir into a flame these graces, we will be filled with God and his holy joy so that, like those in Jerusalem marveled at the healed former cripple, others will be “filled with amazement and astonishment” at what has happened to us and at the way God through us helps them to arise in the risen Christ and walk with him and us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Alleluia Ps 118:24

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
This is the day the LORD has made;
let us be glad and rejoice in it.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

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