Our Easter Heart Transplant, Easter Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Wednesday of Easter Week
April 20, 2022
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 points were attempted in the homily: 

• In these readings of Easter Week, 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 total changes 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, that the biggest change in us resulting from the liturgical remembrance of Jesus’ resurrection be 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 Exsultet on Saturday night. The whole Church — Peter, John, their successors and the whole Mystical Body says during the Easter season — say to us and through us to others, “Arise and walk,” be raised and start journeying, freely, following the footsteps of the Risen Lord knowing that he accompanies you along the way. The power of Easter, however, 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 enter into the change that takes place in the disciples of Emmaus in today’s Gospel. We could describe the change as a heart transplant. At the Easter Vigil, Ezekiel prophesies that the redemption will involve God’s sprinkling clean water upon us — our Baptism — removing from us our “stony hearts” and replacing them with “hearts of flesh,” placing his own spirit within us. We could rephrase that heart transplant in the words of today’s Gospel as a transition from “slowness of heart” to a “burning heart.” When Jesus anonymously and gently upbraids the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, he didn’t say “How slow of head,” “How dull of mind, you are not to believe all that Moses and the prophets taught,” but “How slow of heart.” Their hearts were literally retarded because they were unwilling to let go of some of their previously conceived notions. Eventually, after Jesus takes them on a journey, their hearts were racing, their hearts were burning, as Jesus spoke to them along the way. That journey was a retracing of the steps of salvation history showing how all of it pointed to how the Messiah needed to suffer to help the two disciples — who had been leaving Jerusalem and symbolically the place of God, and who had been heading into the sunset instead of the rising sun — see that Jesus’ crucifixion and death were not a contradiction of the Jews’ Messianic hopes but a confirmation. Jesus helped them to see that what happened to him was the fulfillment of the killing of the just man Abel, of the sacrifice of Isaac, of the Passover lamb led to the slaughter, of the just man beset, of the Suffering Servant, of Psalms 22 and 69 and so many others. That spiritual pilgrimage on which the anonymous wayfarer led the two disciples during their seven mile walk into the darkness of the night reawakened their hearts and heads. They were transformed. They first asked him to stay to stay with them to keep the experience going. Then they recognized him in the breaking of the Bread, because their hearts and their eyes had recalibrated. And finally, even though they had journeyed seven miles down hill as dusk was descending, they were now willing to run seven miles uphill in external darkness but internal illumination to share what they had just heard.
• What Jesus does with the disciples on the road to Emmaus shows us the path of our being evangelized and the path of our being instruments in the new evangelization. This is what Pope Francis said on July 28, 2013 speaking to the bishops of the world gathered in Brazil for World Youth Day. He asked poignantly there the stinging question whether we today in the Church — and specifically the bishops, priests and preachers — still have the ability to warm people’s hearts. The truth is that we can’t light the tapers of others’ hearts unless the paschal candle of our own heart is lit by Christ. But that’s the essential question: are we on fire with the flame of God such that we can light others on fire? What does having that fire require? We can identify three clear elements from today’s Gospel.
• The first is an ardent familiarity with Sacred Scripture. Jesus lit the two disciples’ hearts aflame through Sacred Scripture. Holy Writ still has that capacity to ignite us, but we need to know it. We need to hunger for every word that comes from God’s mouth. We have to relate to Jesus in his word as giving us the words of everlasting life. We have to care for every crumb of Sacred Scripture, St. Jerome said, just like we would care for every particle of the Eucharistic host. When with spiritual poverty, we approach the treasure of Sacred Scripture in this way, then we become capable of doing what St. Peter did to the crippled man at the gate: giving Jesus Christ’s light, giving his healing, giving him. “Silver and gold I have not, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, rise.” That’s the first means by which we bring people to share in his resurrection.
• The second element is a willingness, even a hunger, to allow Jesus to enter into our conversation, into our daily life — and he enters far more subtly than he did with Cleopas and the other disciple on the Road to Emmaus! — and then, together with Christ, approach people and enter into their conversations, especially those who are wandering away from “Jerusalem” into the “sunset” westward away from the east of Christ the “rising sun.” This requires a courage, first, to be a disciple full-time and, second, then to meet people where they’re at, to enter into their night without losing our light, to go to the peripheries not just of geography but of existence and try to accompany them back toward the Lord. Jesus didn’t say to the two disciples on Emmaus Avenue, “Where the heck are you going?,” but entered into their conversation, their questions, their doubts. Pope Francis says that this is part of the New Evangelization that we learn from Jesus.
• The third element is to recognize that the reasons for people’s departure from Jerusalem contain within the seeds of their return. What makes someone downcast, like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, contains the seeds of seeking things above. The two disciples were leaving because they thought that Jesus’ crucifixion showed that he couldn’t possibly be the Messiah, but after Jesus opened up their hearts and their minds to the fact that the Messiah had to suffer, they embraced the reality in its fullness. The same thing still occurs. If a teenager has left the faith because of the death of loved one for whose healing the teen prayed, the reason is fundamentally because the teen believes that God should love the teen’s loved ones even more than the teen does and want that grandmother’s happiness and health. But we can enter into the night of mourning and show that God’s desire is for that person to be full of life and happiness forever — and that’s what we pray for whenever he comes to call a loved one. If someone has abandoned the Church over the clergy sex abuse scandals, it contains the seeds of a desire that God’s ministers should be holy; when the person finds holy ministers, it lays the ground for the route of return. If someone abandons the Church over the Church’s supposed homophobia, because the person things that everyone should be loved and embraced no matter what the person’s sexual attractions, we can show that love and embrace that goes beyond simple superficial hospitality, but rather a concern for the person’s eternal well being, opening the person up to the fact that the Church’s teachings on chastity are not to stifle love among those with same sex attractions but to keep those persons truly loving rather than using. If a person has left because Mass is boring, or the preaching is poor, or community is inhospitable, these are all signs pointing to the seeds of return when this Mass is celebrated by clergy and communities on fire, where preaching is on fire, when the community is like the early Church. When we find ourselves wandering, we must ask why, see what is presently lacking, and then see how Christ through the Church wants to fulfill or transcend those desires. We we find others wandering into the night, we need not to condemn but to enter into their journey to ask why they’re leaving, where they’re going, and discover what they’re truly seeking, in order to help them grasp, concretely in their experience, how they’re really seeking Christ and what he has made them to receive.
• Are we still capable of warming hearts? The answer is an emphatic yes. But whether we do or not depends on how we respond to Easter graces. Christ still has the fire to ignite our hearts just like these two disciples, just like Peter, Mary Magdalene, the 3,000 on Pentecost, and so many saints. And if we allow him to do that to us, we will be able to go out along the paths of the world to encounter so many for whom Christ 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 God wants to do to them!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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