Jesus’ Final Preparations of His Witnesses, Third Sunday of Easter (B), April 14, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Third Sunday of Easter, Year B
April 14, 2024
Acts 3:13-15.17-19, Ps 4, 1 John 2:1-5, Lk 24:35-48

To listen to a digital recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• What was the point of all of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, like the one we have just heard in tonight’s Gospel? It wasn’t just to celebrate the greatest victory in all of human history, his own over Satan, sin and the death to which sin leads. It wasn’t just to cheer the apostles and disciples up, after the traumatic experience of his arrest, sham trial, brutal crucifixion and death, not to mention Judas’ suicide, their betrayals and more. It wasn’t just to prove to them the reality of his rising from the dead, allowing them all, and Thomas later, to see and probe his wounds as well as to watch him eat some fish, which a ghost obviously couldn’t consume. It was ultimately to prepare them to carry on Jesus’ mission of the salvation of the human race. Jesus, with his earthly life, public ministry, passion, death and resurrection had completed his mission, taking upon himself all the sins of the human race from Adam’s and Eve’s, to yours and mine, to those who will be alive when he returns for the second coming, forgiving us of them, and making possible for us to live anew in a communion with God that is meant to last into eternity. Now, in the appearances he would make over 40 days between his resurrection and ascension, he wanted to finish his preparation of the apostles, the disciples, and the Church to complete our part of his saving work, and bring the fruits of all Jesus has said and done to the ends of the earth.
• That’s what he was doing in all of his appearances. He was convincing them he was real. He was helping them to understand the meaning of the Scriptures and how everything that happened to him was foretold to happen. He was clarifying them exactly what their task was and empowering them to do it. Much like universities have traditionally sought to do at the end of students’ tenures on campus, through comprehensive exams, theses and dissertations, and graduation exercises in which various speakers — university presidents and deans, student standouts and leaders, and famous invited speakers — try to summarize the point of all their labors and inspire them to use what they’ve received to make a positive impact on the world, so Jesus was concluding three years of formation of his apostles and disciples for the mission for which he had chosen and called them. He was engaging in a sporadic 40-day commencement as he was preparing to launch his fishers of men on the seas of the world.
• What Jesus did for them nearly 2000 years ago, he wants to do for us tonight. He wants us to grasp the same lessons and to be inspired for the same mission. He wants not only to teach us but empower us to carry out our part of his saving work just like his first followers were faithful until death in doing their part and getting the whole mission of the Church, meant to continue until the end of time, rolling. That’s why rather than a party, Jesus, on the night he rose from the dead, with a certain urgency, turned the Upper Room into a vocational training school to finish the apostolic formation of the members of the early Church. By this point, Jesus had already spent three years with the apostles, teaching them, sending them out to preach in his name, cure the sick, expel demons and even raise the dead. He had already shown them the example of service, washing their feet in the Upper Room three days earlier and instructing them to go to do the same. He had already ordained them priests on the same night and given them the ability to bring down his body and blood to the altars and later to forgive and retain sins in his name. He had already given them his whole life as a model to follow, living for God and dying out of love for God and for others. The last stage was to prepare them to be witnesses to him, to his words, to his life, to his triumph over death, to his incredible self-sacrificial love for every member of the human race. Jesus says at the end of tonight’s Gospel, “You are witnesses of these things.” And in the first reading, we see Peter, several weeks later after Pentecost, giving that testimony after healing a crippled man at the beautiful gate. He was preaching, as Jesus had instructed, “repentance for forgiveness of sins … to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” He cut them to the heart by reminding them that they had “denied the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released” to them, but added that he knew they had “acted out of ignorance,” just as their leaders, and then told them, “Repent, therefore, and be converted that your sins may be wiped away.” The summary of the Good News, that conversion and forgiveness of sins was possible, was when he said, “The author of life you put to death, but God raised him from the dead, of this we are witnesses!” He was inviting them through repentance, through baptism, through reconciliation, to share in that resurrection.
• Nine years ago, in a powerful Regina Caeli meditation to tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis, reminded us that “every baptized person is called to give witness, with their words and with their lives, that Jesus is risen, that He is alive and present among us. We all are called to give witness that Jesus is alive!” But he asked, “Who is the witness?” and what we need to do to become the witnesses Jesus wants and needs? He said that there are three qualifications of a witness: “The witness is one who has seen, who remembers and who recounts. To see, to remember and to tell, are the three verbs that describes the identity and mission” of the witness.
• The first criterion is to see Jesus. That was easy for the first disciples and apostles who had seen Jesus physically in his earthly life and in his glorified body after the Resurrection. But as we heard last Sunday, when Jesus blessed Thomas for having seen him, but blessed all those who had not seen him but still believed that there is a way of seeing by faith that is just as real. We are able to meet the same Lord Jesus in prayer, in the Sacraments, in Sacred Scripture, in the disguise of those we care for. We need to give witness that Jesus is alive. This encounter with the Lord Jesus cannot be taken for granted. There are many Catholics who keep the Ten Commandments, who are engaged in good, charitable works, but who really only know aboutJesus rather than truly know him personally. They “say their prayers” but don’t enter into a genuine prayerful dialogue with the risen Lord. They go to confession and forensically audit their soul, but do so as if they were engaging in a good spiritual exercise rather than meeting the Lord Jesus who out of mercy died to take those sins away. They come to Mass as if they were attending just a commemoration or sacred ceremony, rather than truly meeting the same Jesus who was wrapped in swaddling clothes, walked the dusty streets of the Holy Land, hurdled the saves of the Galilean Sea, was hammered to the Tree on Calvary, rose from the dead, and entered the Upper Room risen. In my work as a parish priest, high school chaplain, and even here at Columbia, I have met many young people who often live by the solid Catholic values they’ve inherited from their parents, grandparents and godparents, but who haven’t yet made those values personal. They’re comfortable answering the first question Jesus asked in Caesarea Philippi, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?,” but not the second, “Who do you say that I am?,” because they really don’t yet have a personal relationship with Jesus that comes from really encountering him as he presents himself. The same Jesus who in tonight’s Gospel said, “Touch me and see,” and showed them his hands and his feet, wants us to hear him speaking to us live in Sacred Scripture, to see him in prayerful adoration, and touch him in Holy Communion, which is meant to be the most intimate experience in human life. Jesus wants to have a personal relationship with each of us. He not only calls each of us his friends, because he has revealed to us everything he has heard from his Father, but he wants to be our best friend. He wants us to receive that gift and reciprocate that commitment. If we’re tempted to go through the motions in our relationship with him, tonight he wants to wake us up from our sleep walking and notice that he’s really here, out of love, risen from the dead, and to have us encounter him deeply in faith.
• The second step of giving effective witness, Pope Francis said, is to remember Jesus. In tonight’s Gospel, similar to what he did with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, he turned the Upper Room into a Sunday Bible School. “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,” he said, as “he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” He probably started with the proto-Gospel of how the offspring of the woman would stomp on the devil’s head. He doubtless talked about how he was the fulfillment of Abel unjustly killed by his brother; of Isaac, who carried the wood for the Sacrifice like Jesus carried the wood of the Cross and was the Lamb Abraham said would be provided; of Moses, as he completed the ancient Passover rite and was leading the people through the desert of death into the eternal promised land; of the just man beset by evil doers and the suffering servant announced by Isaiah; and of Jonah who would rise from the belly of the earth on the third day and fulfill Ezekiel’s prophecy of the dry bones, so that Isaiah’s, Jeremiah’s, Ezekiel’s and Daniel’s prophecies that God’s salvation would be brought to the end of the earth would all come true. Jesus finished today’s account by summarizing all of this: ‘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. You are witnesses of these things.” They were to be the eyewitnesses of the person of Jesus, of his suffering and death, of his resurrection, of his call to a new life, of his truth that sets people free, of his words that lead to eternal life. The witness Jesus calls us to make obviously will include what Jesus said and did in the Gospels in fulfillment of all of the prophecies, but, to be credible, it must always include what Jesus has done in my life and yours. Even if Jesus is the most important figure in history, he’s much more than an historical figure. He is meant to be the most important person in any person’s life today. That’s why Pope Francis will say that the kerygma, the essential proclamation of Jesus, isn’t just about his saving passion, death and resurrection, but rather, “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you” (EG 164). We remember not just what did 2,000 years ago but what he has done for me, what he is still doing for me, the graces given in prayer, the conversions big and small, the miracles major or minor, the insights, the sacramental encounters, the joys, the accompaniment through sorrows and more. And we thank him in the one-on-one dialogue in prayer and are willing, unabashed, to thank him publicly.
• That leads to the third step in being a witness: telling others what Jesus has done. The litmus test as to whether we’ve really encountered Jesus in the way he wants to be met is if we are able to say from the deepest parts of our innards, like St. Paul, “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16). We see this holy compulsion in the Gospels. Once Andrew had met Jesus, he ran to bring his brother Simon to meet Jesus, and Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter and said he would eventually build his Church on him. Once the Samaritan woman met Jesus at the well, she ran to her townspeople and encouraged all of them to come to meet Jesus, too, and they were able to find for themselves that he was the savior of the world. Once various people had been cured by Jesus, they couldn’t help but spread word of Jesus and what he had done for them to others, even when he instructed them to tell no one. If we’ve really encountered Jesus, we can’t help but share him. In the most beautiful paragraph of his apostolic exhortation on The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis said that the Christian, the true witness, is one who is “convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. It is not the same thing to try to build the world with his Gospel as to try to do so by our own lights. We know well that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything. This is why we evangelize” (EG 266). Jesus wants all of us to be ready to give witness of what the Lord in his goodness has done for us in our need. He wants us to encourage others to open themselves up for his blessings. He wants us to tell them, not just by our words, but by our whole life, that we are his disciples. We call to show his way of being, acting, and interacting, and the way he changes us for the better. Everyone we meet should be able to spot in us someone who knows Jesus in faith, who remembers him and his words, who has grateful had his or her life totally changed by him, and who recognizes that the greatest gift he could ever give to anyone else is the gift of the Lord. This means, obviously, that we seek to live like Jesus lived. St. John the Evangelist, who did seek to pattern his entire life after Jesus and to try to help the first Christians do the same, stressed in today’s second reading the importance of this Christian integrity and the example that flows from it. “The way we may be sure that we know [Jesus Christ],” he said, “is to keep his commandments. Those who say, ‘I know him,’ but do not keep his commandments are liars and the truth is not in them.” A Catholic for example who holds grudges rather than prays for persecutors, who uses others for pleasure, who dishonors parents and other family members and elders, who thinks that other things are more important that Jesus even on the Lord’s day, who lies or steals or blasphemes or places his faith, hope and love in money and what money can buy other than in God, is a counter-witness. Correlatively, the one who tries to live like Jesus, even and especially when it is hard, is the most powerful witness of all, like we see in the lives of the martyrs. The fact is that all of us we give witness to what we believe whether we want to or not. We show our faith or our lack of faith. The question for us is whether we will give witness to the Risen Christ and his unbelievable gift of salvation, his teaching, his love, his presence, his Church, or whether we will give witness that we don’t really believe what we profess we believe.
• To help us give effective and convincing witness, Jesus does not leave us on his own. He gives us his own divine help to perfect our human powers and even to prepare and soften the ears and hearts of those with whom we’ll share the Gospel. The culmination of all of Jesus’ post-resurrection formation of the members of the early Church was to get them ready to receive the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Jesus would astonishingly say during the Last Supper that it was good for him to go so that the Holy Spirit would be given to us. He taught us throughout his public ministry and particularly during the Last Supper that the Holy Spirit would teach us how to pray, because we don’t know how to pray as we ought. He would help us to cry out “Lord, Lord!” in personal encounter as well as to help us learn how to pray to God the Father as beloved sons and daughters, exclaiming, “Abba, Father.” The Holy Spirit, he promised, would remind us of all that Jesus has taught us, so that we might live by those words and be able to transmit them to those we meet. He would lead us into all truth so that we could apply Jesus’ words to every context that might arise over time. He would help us to live according to the Spirit and put to death whatever in us is earthly, so that we might be effective witnesses of the risen Christ and seek the things that are above. He would give each of us a “manifestation of the Spirit,” a special gift or talent, for the common good of the Church and the world, and help us to use it. But most of all, just like he came down upon the members of the early Church as tongues of fire and rested on them, so he would fill us with himself that with our tongues we might proclaim the risen Christ with ardor. The Holy Spirit would help us give witness together with him (Acts 5:32). Jesus promised us that even should we be betrayed for our faith and brought before the authorities, we shouldn’t worry about what we are to say, because “we will be given at that hour what we are to say, for it will not be [us] speaking but the Holy Spirit” (Mk 13:11).
• That’s why it’s so fitting tonight, as we focus on this commission of Jesus to be his witnesses, and of the help of the Holy Spirit he gives us to encounter him, remember him, and tell others of him, that we celebrate the confirmation of seven of our brothers and sisters, Cecilia, Agathe, Rodrigo, Elliott, Adelin, Gabriel, and Peter. The gift of the Holy Spirit that they receive tonight is meant to strengthen them precisely for this witness. It’s also meant to be a reminder to each of us of how the Holy Spirit has come down on us at our own Confirmation. The Holy Spirit comes to make us his Temple, to dwell within us as long as we remain in the state of grace, and to help us with his gifts of knowledge and understanding, wisdom and prudence, reverence and awe, and — perhaps most important today in the face of so many general anxieties not to mention pressures to have Christians enter a witness protection program — courage. We ask God the Father through the Risen Jesus, as he seals them with the gift of the Holy Spirit, to reinvigorate the gift of the Holy Spirit within us, so that we can all give collective witness, with the gifts we have in common not to mention our own manifestations of the Holy Spirit for the common good, of the risen life of Christ on Columbia’s campus and beyond.
• This Easter Season, this third Sunday of Easter, through the work of the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, Jesus wants to raise us all from the dead with him. He wants to give us new life. He wants to help us to experience the power of his resurrection, so that we will no longer by “troubled” with “questions aris[ing] in our hearts,” like his first disciples, but so that we will be “incredulous for joy,” “amazed” and eager to share that joy and astonishment with others. Just as much as St. Peter, instructed by Christ in today’s Gospel and filled with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, was out in the middle of the crowd in Jerusalem giving witness to the Risen Lord Jesus, so we, encountering the same Jesus here, are supposed to go out and give witness in Morningside and beyond.
• On Easter Sunday evening, Jesus didn’t throw a big party, but instead formed us for the urgent task of going out and inviting everyone to the greatest celebration that will ever be held. God is indeed planning a feast that will know no end and he is sending us out into the world with the invitation and the spiritual dress code. That garment, as Jesus indicates to us in one of his parables (Mt 22:1-14), is meant to be our baptismal garment, which on the day of baptism we’re instructed to keep unstained for the eternal life of heaven, to have it grow with us, so that we will always be found rejecting Satan, his evil works and empty promises, and not just believing but professing our faith in God the Father, in God the Son risen from the dead, in God the Holy Spirit, in the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. The Easter season is meant to help us to revivify these baptismal graces so that we might experience Jesus’ risen life in this world and forever. The Sacrament of Confirmation is meant to seal them. Tonight, we thank God for these gifts and beg for his grace to be faithful to them. At every Mass, as we enter into the Upper Room where Jesus first gave us his body and blood and 53 days later sent the Holy Spirit, God ultimately seeks to strengthen us for our Christian mission. Each Sunday, in fact every day, he meets us here, he teaches us, he strengthens us, he equips us, and he feeds us. He sends the Holy Spirit upon the altar to change bread and wine into himself and men and women into his mystical body. We receive him risen from the dead in Holy Communion. He comes to encounter us. We do this in his memory. And then at the end of Mass, he blesses us, and sends us with Holy Spirit to announce the Gospel of the Lord. Of this we are all witnesses, eyewitnesses, ear witnesses, tongue witnesses, heart witnesses. May our testimony do justice to this incredible gift. Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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