Easter Sunday, Conversations with Consequences Podcast, March 30, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Easter Sunday
March 30, 2024

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to wish you and your family a Happy Easter as we enter into the consequential conversation the Lord Jesus, risen from the dead, wants to have with each of us on Easter Sunday. The Church gives us several Gospels that we can ponder. At the Easter Vigil this year, we have St. Mark’s version of the three women at the tomb seeking to anoint Jesus’ cadaver worried about who would roll back the stone from the entrance of the tomb, only to find the stone removed and an angel waiting for them inside, informing them that the crucified Jesus had been raised and that they were to go tell Peter and the disciples. At Mass on Easter morning each year, St. John describes how he and Simon Peter, having been informed by Mary Magdalene, ran to the empty tomb, beheld the burial cloths and the head covering, and John saw and believed. There’s a third Gospel that can be used at later Masses on Easter Sunday, one that involves a lengthy and consequential conversation between the Risen Jesus and the two disciples walking home to Emmaus that took place early in the evening of the day on which he rose from the dead. That’s the Gospel I’d like to consider this year.
• I thought it would be most appropriate because, as I mentioned in our reflection last week, the Church in the United States is preparing for its first national Eucharistic Congress in 83 years that will take place in July in Indianapolis and preceding it will be something unparalleled in Church history: a nationwide Eucharistic Pilgrimage in which priests and pilgrims will be making essentially a Eucharistic sign of the Cross over our country like a benediction through four national Eucharistic processions that will converge in Indianapolis. One pilgrimage will leave from the Canadian border in Minnesota; another from the Mexican border in Texas; a third from the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco; the fourth from the Atlantic in New Haven, Connecticut. All along the way parishes and dioceses will join those making the 65-day journey to celebrate our Eucharistic Lord and journey with him through the cities and towns of our country, much like Jesus’ first disciples traversed the cities of Jericho and Jerusalem and the towns and villages of Galilee, Samaria and Judah. What’s happening in these processions is essentially a continuation of what occurred on the Road to Emmaus, as the Risen Lord Jesus seeks to accompany us in his Risen Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, in the Holy Eucharist just like he accompanied Cleopas and the other disciple, perhaps Mary, the wife of Cleopas, on the journey from Jerusalem to their home. The Road to Emmaus was only seven miles; the four Eucharistic pilgrimages together will journey closer to 7,000 miles. But what takes place is meant to be the same: a life-changing between the Risen Lord Jesus, who has chosen to remain with us until the end of time under the appearances of Bread and Wine in the Holy Eucharist in order to accompany us on the pilgrimage of life that we and the Church make. The same Risen Lord Jesus who calls us to follow him journeys with us.
• I’d like to focus on a few of the elements from the Emmaus Gospel that are meant to be consequential in terms of our approach to the celebration of Easter as well as to the way we relate to the Risen Lord Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.
• The first is that the Risen Lord Jesus wants to enter our conversations. 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 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, 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, our crushed expectations, our doubts. 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 daily 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. We celebrate both of these during the Eucharistic Revival. 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. It even became the title of a Eucharistic apostolic exhortation St. John Paul II left us 20 years ago. Stay with us, Lord! Jesus wants to be invited in. He wants to stay 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 at home, school, and work, to stay with us in the morning, midday and evening, to live our whole life in communion with him. That’s what the Eucharistic makes possible. And he keeps that promise in the most concrete way in the Holy Eucharist, where 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 their 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 journey, 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. Later they 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 who, despite Church teaching, still relate to the Eucharist 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 speaks. The Eucharistic Revival is meant to heal our blindness and deafness with regard to 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, each time we’re with Jesus in Eucharistic Adoration. We encounter the same Lord Jesus the two disciples did. St. John Paul II wrote in his exhortation “Stay with Us, Lord,” “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 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!” The Lord has risen. He has truly risen. And in the Eucharist he wants to remain with us always, to journey with us, all the way through time into eternity. This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church. How privileged we are to profess and live it, in Christ our Lord. Amen! Alleluia!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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