“The Christ Would Suffer” So That Our Sins Would Be Forgiven, Easter Thursday, April 8, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan, NY
Easter Thursday
April 8, 2021
Acts 3:11-26, Ps 8, Lk 24:35-48

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• At Easter, Jesus wants to work a transformation in us like he worked in the first disciples. And as we’ve been seeing during these days, there’s a very familiar pattern to the metamorphosis he worked on Easter that we’ve been seeing in each of the readings this Easter week:
  • At first the disciples who encounter Jesus are bewildered, shocked, fearful, unbelieving in his resurrection; no matter how many times Jesus told them exactly what would occur to him, they still didn’t believe when they saw him a couple of days after his brutal execution.
  • The second stage is that Jesus convinces them that he’s real, that he’s alive, that he’s risen from the dead and he begins to instruct them, to show them that everything that happened to him was supposed to happen to him.
  • Third, once they hear and see Jesus, they come to faith in his Resurrection and living Presence in front of them.
  • Lastly, Jesus sends them out on a mission to complete his own mission.
• On Monday and Tuesday we see how this happened with Mary Magdalene from the perspectives of St. Matthew’s and St. John’s Gospels respectively. Yesterday we saw it with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus. And in today’s Gospel, we see these same four stages occur with the apostles in the Upper Room.
• Jesus enters the other room while Cleopas and the other disciple are briefing them on what just happened on their journey home to Emmaus. The disciples were “started and terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost.” They couldn’t believe that it was Jesus, even after the witness of the Emmaus disciples, of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary whom Jesus met on the way. Just like the two disciples of Emmaus, their hearts were slow to believe: their will wasn’t yet in it, they were too dejected, too afraid, too holding on to their wounds and hurt feelings. Jesus confronts those fears and that hardness straight on. He says, “Peace be with you!” He asks, “Why are you troubled? And why do questions arise in your hearts?” He asked not about their minds but their hearts. Then he removed their cardiac doubts about his physical reality by saying, “Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have.” After showing them his wounds and his feet, he proves that he’s not a ghost even more powerfully by eating a piece a baked fish, which only a real person could digest. And then he started to do for them what we saw him do with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus yesterday. He reminded them that he had to suffer, just as he and the prophets had foretold. “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.” St. Luke stresses that, having opened their hearts, he then opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, saying, “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.” Doubtless their own hearts began to burn like the hearts of the Emmaus disciples and their minds got that warmer blood of faith and they began to believe. Then Jesus gave them their mission as he similarly opened their mouths: “You are witnesses of these things.” They were to be witnesses of Christ’s resurrection, but not only his resurrection. They were to be witnesses of how Jesus fulfilled “written about [him] in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms,” that “the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead … and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached in his name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem.”
• We see St. Peter fulfilling that very mission in today’s first reading. As the crippled man they healed in yesterday’s Gospel was clinging to him, he started to explain the significance of the man’s healing to the assembled crowd in Solomon’s Portico in the Temple: this man was walking and healed not because of Peter or John, but because of the saving name of the Living Jesus. He used the man’s obviously miraculous healing as an opportunity to preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins in that same holy name to all nations, beginning right there in the heart of Jerusalem. “Why are you amazed at this, and why do you look so intently at us as if we had made him walk by our own power or piety?” It wasn’t their power; it was the power of Jesus, “whom you handed over and denied in Pilate’s presence, when he had decided to release him. He told them they preferred Barabbas over the “Holy and Righteous One” and murdered the “Author of life” — both of the latter terms expressions that Jesus was God. “But,” St. Peter said, “God raised him from the dead; of this we are all witnesses. And by faith in his name, this man, whom you see and know, his name has made strong.” So after he helps them through their period of incredulity or hardness of heart, he seeks to get them to the stage of faith by demonstrating how all that happened to Jesus was supposed to happen, and offer to them the same mercy through repentance and the forgiveness of sins that Jesus had offered them. Putting into practice almost to the letter what Christ himself had said to him and the other apostles on Easter Sunday evening in today’s Gospel, he said, “Now I know, brothers and sisters, that you acted out of ignorance, just as your leaders did; but God has thus brought to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer. Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away.” God had also foretold the times of reconciliation, he said, so that the “universal restoration of which God spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old. For Moses said: ‘A prophet like me will the Lord, your God, raise up for you from among your own kin; to him you shall listen in all that he may say to you. Everyone who does not listen to that prophet will be cut off from the people.’ Moreover, all the prophets who spoke, from Samuel and those afterwards, also announced these days. … For you first, God raised up his servant [Jesus] and sent him to bless you by turning each of you from your evil ways.” Just as much as Peter who had his mind and mouth opened by the Lord to be a witness of all the things that happened to Jesus, he also became a witness by his life and not just by his lips. St. Peter had said that God prophesied that “his Christ would suffer,” and that’s not just a reference to Jesus the “anointed,” the “Messiah,” (which is what the Greek word “Christ” means) but for everyone who is anointed by God in union with Jesus. Every Christian is, literally, a little Christ and will suffer on account of our witness to him. Peter and John, immediately after this scene are going to be arrested by the very same people who conspired to have Jesus crucified. But they were unafraid because if God could raise Jesus from crucifixion on the third day, then there was no need for any of his followers to fear even brutal death. That’s why they were able to preach with a holy parrhesia, a Spirit-inspired boldness, that no one could intimidate. They weren’t afraid to suffer any longer because they knew that their sufferings would be salvific and their death would be merely a change of address, to a place where Jesus had gone to prepare for them.
• What about us? At this point, nearly 2000 years after the Resurrection, we wouldn’t be here if we had doubts about whether it occurred. We certainly wouldn’t have given up so much to follow Jesus in the radical way we’re trying to. At the same that we don’t doubt the resurrection, however, we may be “slow of heart” to believe in the consequences of the Resurrection in us, that we were really crucified in Christ, that we died in him, and the life we now live we live united with his Risen Life. We are slow to realize in action that what has occurred in us spiritually is greater than what happened to the cripple at the Beautiful Gate physically. Jesus wants to take us through these stages, by meeting us and explaining to us that he wants to make us his living witnesses, icons of his Risen Life, becoming the message we announce on our lips, that Christ has truly risen from the dead, that his mercy is fully transformative, and that the joy we show is a certain proof that can warm the hearts of others that what Christ did and his Church proclaims is actually true. When Jesus appeared to St. Faustina in the 1930s and asked her to be his missionary to the world about his Divine Mercy, we see that he wants us to relate to him in his Risen life blessing us with the Mercy pouring out as blood and water from his heart, as we see in the Divine Mercy image. To live with the Risen Lord is to live by his mercy, a realization St. Augustine 1600 years ago grasped late in life. The Church doesn’t want to have us wait that long, but relate to Jesus in his mercy now.
• Someone who lived with the Risen Lord by living with Jesus’ mercy, and who helped me and so many others to see the “gaudium et spes,” the “joy and hope” of the Gospel was Father Joseph Henchey, of the Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata, who died last night at 8:15 in Chicago. I know that he preached some retreats for the Sisters of Life in years past and even, when he was on the faculty at Dunwoodie Seminary, served as spiritual director to some of you. But even if you did not know him personally, you all have benefitted from him indirectly, especially in the confessional. Because I had the grace of receiving the first inklings of my priestly calling at the age of 4, by the time I was ordained at 29, I already had 25 years of experience looking at the world through the eyes of a future priest. I would make some mental notes about the effective and ineffective homilies I would hear, trying to imitate the characteristics of the former and avoid those of the latter. From every confessor I would similarly grow, trying to emulate the many good ones and never treat others like the three ones I met when they were perhaps having very bad days. Father Joseph Henchey was the best confessor I ever met. When he was on the faculty of the North American College during my days as a seminarian, he would open the door to his room at 4 am for any seminarians who wanted to stop by for a word of encouragement or advice or to ask for confession. At the time, there would be outside confessors who would come to the seminary one night a week and many seminarians who go to confession to their priest spiritual director every other week or go to St. Peter’s whenever they needed. But Father Henchey wanted to make confession as convenient as possible. Eventually so many seminarians started to come that then Monsignor Timothy Dolan decided to have a confessional built in the chapel of the NAC so that those who were waiting would be able to do so in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel, rather than outside Father Henchey’s door, which just so happened to be outside of Monsignor Dolan’s door too! One morning I went to confession to Father Henchey. I don’t remember exactly what sins I was confessing, but I do remember, kneeling at the confessional screen and kneeler he had had made in his book-filled room right over by his sink, my sorrow and a sense of shame that as a seminarian I was still vulnerable to giving into temptations that I knew were wrong and had been prepared to resist. With great kindness, Father Henchey replied, with words I paraphrase as, “Roger, we give thanks to God for the graces he has given you to make such a good confession. This whole experience of God’s loving mercy for you will help make you a good and merciful confessor. Let God make these sins happy faults that will help you help many others rejoice in so great a Redeemer.” That experience of the joy of being forgiven, of God’s wanting to bring good even out of the evil we commit, I’ve never forgotten, and I have always tried to hear others’ confessions as Father Henchey heard mine. Please join me in praying to God that the measure with which Father Henchey measured out God’s mercy will be measured back to him.
• Today the same Jesus who met the terrified disciples in the Upper Room meets us here to bring about that transformation. Just as he led them through a “liturgy of the word” to understand how all that the prophets and he had foretold had to transpire, so he has led us on a similar journey. Just as he told them to see and touch him, so he has us behold him as the Lamb of God and not just to touch him but to be touched by him on the inside and become one with him in Holy Communion. And just as he sent them out as witnesses of risen life and his teachings to the end of the world, beginning from Jerusalem, so he will say to us at the end of this Mass, “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord” to all nations, beginning from West 51st Street. We will suffer for doing so, but it’s here that Jesus not only opens our minds and mouths but strengthens us to remain faithful when we do, so that repentance for the forgiveness of sins — and the Divine Mercy that meets that repentance — will allow people to learn how to hear, know, love and proclaim Jesus’ holy, saving name, receive and live by his Divine Mercy, and come to share in this world and forever Jesus’ resurrection!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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