May 8, 2011

''THE LORD KNOWS WHEN
TO COME TO US . .. AND
WHEN TO LEAVE!"


May 8 - Third Sunday of Easter


Ask the average Catholic today which is the greatest Church Feast and he or she is just as likely to say " Christmas" as "Easter." And yet Easter was the bedrock of the early Church experiences and preaching and the introduction of a new celebration in the Roman Church in 354 (the birth of Our Lord surely did not appear to threaten the established order... but it did - in a good sense, of course. Peter in the First Reading gives an amazing performance. Note that here we have an uninstructed Galilean, ex-fisherman,ex-denier of Christ who know raises his voice to expound truths he certainly never learned in any of the Rabbinical schools. In every age the Risen Lord is always with his Church - even in our faithless twenty-first century. It a bit difficult to read of Eater joy this year and then head home to another jobless week,one in a long and painful series. Lose faith? No. Anyone can "give up" trying and nobody was more tempted than Christ, not only in Gethsemane but much earlier when he became aware that he was destined to be the Great Failure at the human level - and, after all, he was perfect God but also perfect human being.


The reiterated phrase: " Show us, Lord, the path of life," adds a note of practicality to this Sunday's Responsorial Psalm. The Risen Lord is the same one who, at the Last Supper, described himself as "the Way, the Truth and the Life," — the perfect Guide on our journey on the way to our true home. Peter is the main player in this Sunday's liturgy but in the Second Reading we no longer have the confident preacher but an older and wiser man who has been on the missions field, and experienced success and failure, but most of all has learned a lot about the difficulty of convincing others of what he confidently proclaimed on the first Easter Sunday. We can surely relate to him and to his situation when we come up time after time against one more refusal to heed the Easter message of the Institute: "Rise, dear brother or sister! You don't know what you're missing!" The Alleluia has an interesting phrase: "Explain the Scripture to us." We are not talking of some scholar droning on about the different interpretations of the sacred writings but of our forever- young Lord ever at our side to blow away the clouds of doubt.


Perhaps the most interesting moment of the Gospel comes when the three travelers sit down in the inn (presumably, the text says "village,") and the Third Man breaks bread and opens the eyes of the other two. Why did he disappear? Did they not have much more to ask him? Indeed they had, including rushing to embrace him in the joy of their discovery, but . . . suppose he had remained. Would the initial excitement not have gradually died down? Would they have run out of questions? Would they have watched him eat and - insensibly - felt that really they now understood everything. Would they - God forbid! - have stifled polite yawns and thanked him, saying they had to go? What an anti-climax that would have been! The Lord always knows when to come into our lives and - especially - when to take his leave!