Third Sunday of Easter (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, April 13, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, Vigil
April 13, 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 be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us as we look forward to the Third Sunday of Easter.
• If ever there were a day for a party, it was the day Jesus rose from the dead! It was the happiest day in all of human history, made more jubilant by ending the terrible despair and dejection of the disciples over the previous two days. And once the immense shock of seeing Jesus risen from the dead walk through the closed doors of the Upper Room to greet them had worn off, St. Luke tells us that the disciples were “incredulous for joy and amazed.” But they didn’t run out for gallons of wine or ask Jesus to convert water into champagne. Jesus didn’t call for cakes and fruit and other Middle Eastern celebratory fare. Instead, in the midst of the joy of his resurrection, Jesus turned the Upper Room into a vocational training school and began to finish the training of the disciples and apostles to fulfill his saving mission. There was a certain urgency involved in this that Jesus didn’t want to put off until later: the fields were white and ready for the harvest (Jn 4:35) and Jesus wanted the apostles, and the disciples with them, to get ready to go out to take in that harvest. He wants his conversation with us in this Sunday’s Gospel to be as formative and consequential.
• There were three steps to his finalizing their and our preparation so that they and we might become his witnesses to all nations.
• First, he allowed himself to be seen, encountered, and embraced. The apostles were troubled and Jesus came to give them his peace. Jesus wants to have a similar encounter with us in prayer so that he may give us his peace. Jesus showed them his body and invited them to touch him. This was to communicate that he wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t imaginary. He was real. This points to the need for us to recognize that Jesus’ presence with us isn’t phantasmic either, but real. He’s not a ghost but he’s got real flesh and blood. We can see him. We can touch him and not just on the “outside” but on the inside. This obviously points to the importance of the Eucharist, which is meant to amaze us and make us, like the first apostles, “incredulous for sheer joy.” This truth that seems too good to be true actually is true: God is with us in his risen body and blood, and he comes to give himself to us. Any apostle needs to live a Eucharistic life, to be amazed at God’s gift of himself to such a degree that that joy overflows to others. The Eucharist, I repeat, isn’t a ghost, isn’t an imaginary presence, isn’t a thing at all, but the same Jesus who appeared to his first followers in the Upper Room; he just looks different under sacramental form. This is something that the ongoing Eucharistic Revival in the United States is meant to help us grasp, and to respond with faith, gratitude, amazement and love.
• The second stage in the finalizing of their vocational training is that Jesus “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” Just like he had done a couple of hours with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, whose hearts he had made burn as he interpreted to them the things about himself in the scriptures, so Jesus filled his apostles with a similar fire, showing them, too, how everything foretold had been accomplished. He was the fulfillment of the innocent Abel, killed by his brother Cain; of Isaac, who carried the wood of the sacrifice on his shoulders to be sacrificed on Mount Moriah (which later became Jerusalem); of Joseph’s being betrayed by his brothers; of the Passover Lamb, who needed to be slain and eaten for the Jews to be set free; of the Suffering Servant, whom Isaiah prophesied would be “wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities”; of the “just man beset” by the envy of others in the Book of Wisdom; of all of the prophecies of the traits and sufferings of the Messiah in the Psalms and more. As St. Luke’s Gospel summarizes, Jesus helped them to see how “everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms, must be fulfilled,” especially that the “Messiah was to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.”  Likewise for us, we need to allow Jesus to open our minds to understand the Scriptures, to see how every part of Scripture relates to him. We have to show up for the Master’s master class in the liturgy of the word at Mass, in prayerful meditation and lectio divina on Sacred Scripture, in Bible Studies at our parishes or, for example, with Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year podcast, which has helped so many. St. Jerome said that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ, and the corollary of that means that the better we know Sacred Scripture, the better we will be able to know Jesus Christ and the better we will know not only how to understand his sufferings but our own in him.
• The final step in their post-resurrection vocational finishing school was to be commissioned by Jesus as his witnesses. Jesus told them, “You are witnesses of these things,” witnesses of all that happened to Jesus, his life, death and resurrection; witnesses to repentance and forgiveness of sins, because they themselves had been reconciled through the mercy they were commissioned to proclaim. Likewise, Jesus calls each of us to be witnesses of his life, of the metamorphosis his life has had in ours, of the reality that he is alive and, as Pope Francis loves to say, “living at [our] side every day to enlighten, to strengthen and free [us]” (EG 164).
• So the three-step path begins with encountering Jesus, something that can’t 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 about Jesus rather than really know him personally. They “say their prayers” rather than enter into a true prayerful dialogue with the risen Lord. They go to confession and forensically audit their soul, but they 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 a commemoration or sacred ceremony, rather than truly meeting Jesus Christ — the same Jesus who was wrapped in swaddling clothes, who walked the dusty streets of Palestine and hurdled the waves of the Galilean Sea, who was hammered to the Tree on Calvary, rose from the dead, and entered the Upper Room. As a university chaplain, I interact with many young people who perhaps live by the good Catholic values and habits they’ve inherited from their parents, grandparents and godparents, but who haven’t yet made those values personal. Many of them, despite years of the practice of the faith, drift away because, despite all the prayer, Masses, confessions, service opportunities and more, the lightbulb never went off that in all these activities they were really meeting the real Jesus. We need a real encounter.
• But to become a witness, we need to do more than simply encounter Jesus. There were many people in Jesus’ time who met him, who heard his words, who even could repeat them, but who chose not to follow him or to help bring others to encounter and follow him as well. We are called to be Jesus’ witnesses, not — as Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston likes to say — members of a witness protection program. Jesus meets us not only to change our lives forever but to make us his instruments to change others’ lives in the same radical way. Once Andrew had met Jesus, he went and brought his brother Simon to meet him, and Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter and promised to build his Church on him. Once the Samaritan woman met Jesus, she ran to her townspeople and encouraged all of them to come to meet Jesus, too, and discover 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 to others, even when he asked them to tell no one. They couldn’t help from sharing what Jesus had done for them. If we’ve really encountered Jesus, we can’t help but share him. Everyone we meet should be able to spot in us someone who has seen Jesus, who remembers him and his words, who has had his life totally changed by Jesus, and who recognizes that the greatest gift he could ever give someone else is the gift of the Lord. As Christians we give witness to what we believe, whether we want to or not. The disciple is meant to be a compelling witness to the Risen Christ and to his unbelievable gift of salvation, his teaching, his love, his presence, and his Church. This Easter Season Jesus wants to raise us all from the dead with him, 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,” but so that we will be “incredulous for joy” and “amazed.”
• So 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 a banquet. God is indeed planning such a celebration, a feast that will know no end, in heaven, where he hopes we and others will fully share in the triumph of his resurrection. He is sending us out into the world with the invitation. And to strengthen us for that Mission, and prepare all of us for that banquet, he comes to meet us this Sunday in the Upper Room, where Jesus weekly — even daily — encounters us, gives us his peace, opens our minds to understand the Scriptures, feeds us with his own Body and Blood, and sends us out changed, to help him change the world. We are indeed witnesses of all of these things. God bless you!

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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