Third Sunday of Easter (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, April 17, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter (B), Vigil
April 17, 2021

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.
• 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 the morrow: 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.
• In the Gospel, we see how he finishes his preparations so that they might become his witnesses to all nations. He did it in three steps.
• First, he allowed himself to be seen, to be encountered, to be embraced — They were troubled and he came to give them his peace. This, we can say, points to the need for prayer, to come into the presence of the Lord, so that he may likewise give us his peace. He showed them his body and invited them to touch him. He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t imaginary. He was real. St. Luke tells us that they were amazed and incredulous for sheer joy. This points to the need for us to recognize that Jesus’ presence with us isn’t phantasmic, 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. All of this points to the importance of the Eucharist, which is meant to amaze us and make us “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 and bring that joy out to others.
• Second, “he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” — Just like he had done hours before with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, whose hearts he had made burn as he interpreted to 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 Joseph’s being betrayed by his brothers; 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 the Suffering Servant, whom Isaiah prophesied would be “wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities”; of the Passover Lamb, who needed to be slain and eaten for the Jews to be set free; of all of the prophecies of the traits of the Messiah 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.
• Third he commissioned them as witnesses. He 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 — that they themselves have been reconciled through the mercy they were commissioned to proclaim. Likewise we are called to be witnesses of Jesus’ whole life, of the life-changing aspect of his work in our life, of the reality that he is alive.
• 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 only know about Jesus rather than really know him personally. They “say their prayers” rather than enter into a genuine 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 if they were attending just a commemoration or sacred ceremony, rather than really 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. Many young people live by the good Catholic values they’ve inherited from their parents, grandparents and godparents, but haven’t yet made those values personal. They’re comfortable answering the question, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?,” but not, “Who do you say that I am?,” because they really haven’t had that personal encounter with Jesus that is supposed to be the source and summit of every day in the life of a Christian who prays and lives by faith.
• In order to become a witness, however, we need to do more than simply encounter Jesus. We know that there were many people in Jesus’ time who met him, who heard his words, who even could repeat them, but they chose not to follow him and not to help bring others to encounter and follow him as well. Nicodemus, for example, came to meet Jesus by night, because he was too afraid to encounter him in the daylight and potentially put at risk his position with the Sanhedrin. 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. Once the Samaritan woman met Jesus, she ran to her townspeople and encouraged all of them to come to meet Jesus, too. 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 themselves from sharing what Jesus had done for them. If we’ve really encountered Jesus, we can’t help but share him.
• But there’s a third aspect of witness that we need to confront. The witness we’re called to give is one truly of Jesus, of his way of being, acting, interacting, and of the way he changes us for the better. The 19th-century German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase “God is dead” and whose thoughts on the will to power provided one of the main philosophical foundations for the Nazist ideology, once said, “I may have been able to believe in a Redeemer, if I had ever met someone redeemed.” He had never met someone, he was claiming, who really lived the Christian faith, who reminded him of Jesus, who seemed to enflesh the Christian promise that we carry within the real presence of the risen Jesus Christ whom we receive in Holy Communion, whom we supposedly meet in prayer, and whose example we seek to make the real pattern of our life. The reality is that everyone who encounters us as Christians is meant to encounter someone redeemed. 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. This means, obviously, that we seek to live like Jesus.
• As Christians we give witness to what we believe, whether we want to or not. The question for us is whether we give witness to the Risen Christ and his unbelievable gift of salvation, his teaching, his love, his presence, his Church, or whether we give witness that we don’t really deep down believe what we profess we believe, or if we really do believe it conceptually, that we don’t love the Lord and the gift of our faith.
• No matter how we’ve lived in the past, this Easter Season Jesus wants to raise us all from the dead with him. 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,” but so that we will be “incredulous for joy” and “amazed.”
• 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, and he is sending us out into the world with the invitation. And to strengthen us for that Mission, he comes to meet us this Sunday in the Upper Room, where Jesus weekly — even daily —meets us, gives us his peace, opens our minds to understand the Scriptures and sends us out changed, to help him change the world.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download