"Were not our hearts burning. . .?"

Luke 24:13-35

After quite a bit of planning and some fanagaling, I have a Sunday off. Yesterday evening, after a long day of teaching, I was able to quietly attend a Vigil Mass at another parish. Today is my first day off since the week before Holy Week.

I was sorely tempted to just let it go today. But I felt impelled (not compelled, had that been the case, I would've resisted), to share a concentrated take on today's Gospel reading: The Road to Emmaus. I never really fully grasped the centrality of the Emmaus pericope until I read Louis-Marie Chauvet's The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body.

Saint Luke's pericope in which the inspired author conveys the story of what happened to Cleopas and companion (perhaps his wife?) as they made their way back home to their village after Jesus' passion and death is simply amazing. Cleopas and companion ("companion" is literally someone with whom you share bread) had even heard news of some women, fellow disciples of Jesus, seeing angels who they said told them that Jesus rose from the dead.

But all these two disappointed disciples saw after hearing these reports was an empty tomb. What does an empty tomb prove? Did those women really encounter angels?

Saint Luke's telling of what happened on the way to and then in Emmaus contains an inspired and comprehensive Eucharistic theology as well as a fairly well sketched out liturgical theology, which even includes a dismissal. The dismissal occurs when, having recognized the Risen Lord in the breaking of bread, which happened after a very extended liturgy of word (like the one at the Paschal Vigil), they rush the seven miles back to Jerusalem, despite it now being nightime, to tell the others what they had seen and heard and how their hearts were burning.

The story of the road to Emmaus tells the story of the Word becoming flesh and how the Word still becomes flesh. Through the Eucharist, the flesh the Word now takes is your flesh, my flesh. When we say the Church is the Body of Christ, we are not using an analogy. We are describing reality.

The mystery of life in Christ is that Christ can live in you (Colossians 1:27). Moreover, Christ desires not only to live in but through you and through me. You and I, along with everyone who else partakes of Christ's Body and Blood, are united in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit by partaking of the one bread and the one cup (okay, chalice). Given to us by the Lord Himself, the Church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist, in turn, makes the Church the Body of Christ.

Let's be honest, the only convincing evidence that the bread and wine are transformed (transubstantiated) into Christ's Body and Blood are the lives of those of us who eat and drink. Conversely, the best argument against this reality are the lives of those of us who partake. In the Eucharist, something really profound is happening, ex opere operato (i.e., whether you experience it or not).

While it is imporant and even necessary, don't remain content with minimalism, with hanging your hat on the peg of ex opere operato. Your participation, my participation, should be intentional. In the most important sense, this is what it means to actively participate.

For some reason, this Easter season, I feel impelled to emphasize that Jesus didn't just rise from the tomb. He is risen, denoting the on-going nature of His resurrection. Resurrection isn't merely something to be believed but something/Someone to be experienced in the way Cleopas and his companion did. Resurrection is not just a way of life, a manner of living, but a mode of being.

What should happen during the Eucharist should also resound beyond Mass and outside the walls of the Church. Quite simply, worship that doesn't lead to self-giving service isn't Christian worship. And so, "Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord. Alleluia." "Go in peace, glorfying the Lord by your life. Alleluia" (we won't use the double "Alleluia" again until the dismissal at Pentecost).

Year 2 Friday of the Second Week of Easter

Readings: Acts 5:34-42; Psalm 27:1.4.13-14; John 6:1-15

“And all day long, both at the temple and in their homes, they did not stop teaching and proclaiming the Christ, Jesus” (Acts 5:42). Indeed, Jesus is the Christ, the Christos, the Messiah, Meshiach. Jesus is the Anointed One, the Son of God, true God from true God. He didn’t just rise from the dead. He is is risen and alive!

That’s a lot of words! Isn’t that the risk we run, letting what passes for faith, which we often reduce to mere belief, become mostly or even exclusively words? Words found in Sacred Scripture are given to inspire us, to encourage, to challenge, and to provoke us. This is why faith is a verb, not a noun. Faith is action, not description.

While we should appreciate Gamaliel's balanced approach, it should also be noted that he seemed to raise no objection to the flogging of the apostles. Maybe he thought that would dampen their zeal in proclaiming the itinerant from Nazareth as some kind of savior or as the Messiah. Rather than cool apostolic fervor, the trial, rebuke, and flogging only inflamed the twelve more. But, according to Gamaliel’s criterion, their message must have come from God.

While it’s true that prudence governs all the virtues, prudence should never be used as an excuse not to proclaim Christ. Saint Francis of Assisi, the deacon and great evangelist, who certainly preached Christ in both word and deed, never said, “Preach the Gospel and if necessary, use words.” Francis was ordained as a deacon to gain faculties to preach. Preach he did, as well as engage in selfless works of charity.

Rabban Gamaliel, Medieval Miniature, courtesy of Wikipedia

The other day, driving down Orchard, I was behind a car that had on its back bumper a sticker that read: “If Jesus had owned a gun, he’d still be alive today.” Talk about an exercise not only in missing the point but in missing the most important point. Jesus, armed with power that made and sustains all there is, love, agape, is not dead but is alive!

There is a huge difference between thinking of Jesus as alive rather than someone who lived and died a long time ago, as merely a historical figure. It makes an even bigger difference to have a life-changing encounter with the Risen Lord. This is possible because He ascended and sent the Holy Spirit, who is the mode of Christ’s resurrection presence. It is the Holy Spirit who effects the sacraments.

By gathering, listening to the scriptures, and receiving Holy Communion, you encounter the Risen Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. In each Mass, as the scriptures are proclaimed and Holy Communion is received, the Word becomes flesh in and through us. We are sent forth to constantly proclaim the Christ, Jesus, to be His presence, His hands, eyes, ears, feet, heart.

Make no mistake, Christ is king, but not one in the mold of King David, as the crowd and even His disciples imagined. He is king of a kingdom that, while it is not of this world, is both in and for the world. It is manifested in the world now as a mustard seed, as yeast, as a sign of contradiction to worldly powers, which often chafe at when it is presented.

The power of Christ is the power of self-giving love. There is no better sign, no better symbol, no more meaningful demonstration of this than the sacramentum caritatis, the mysterion agape, the sacrament of self-giving love, that is, the Eucharist.

Divine Mercy Chaplet w/ Exposition

By the mercy of God, we come before our Risen Lord, present in the Eucharist. His Eucharistic presence is a present, a gift flowing from Divine Mercy. In a few moments, praying the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, given mystically to Saint Faustina Kowalska, we implore the Father for the sake of His Son’s sorrowful passion, to have mercy on us and on the whole world.

By praying the Chaplet of Divine Mercy together, we intercede for the world before the Father, through the Son, in the power of their Holy Spirit. We ask God to have mercy on the world and on us. Yesterday, Pope Leo held a Rosary Vigil for peace Saint Peter’s Basilica. At same time locally, there was a Rosary procession in Salt Lake City, which began and ended at our cathedral. This gathering is an extension of the Holy Father’s vigil.

In a memorandum issued last Thursday, Bishop Solis directed that in all prayerful gatherings of the faithful in our diocese this Divine Mercy Sunday, we pray for peace throughout the world and for respect for the human dignity of migrants and for their safety. In obedience to our bishop, this Chaplet of Divine Mercy is offered for those two intentions. Of course, it is right and fitting to add your own intentions to these communal intentions, just as at Mass.

Evil is real. I am not sure I agree with the assertion that evil is merely a lack. Evil seems to me, at least at times, to have some substance. In a world full of chaos and uncertainty, where, as Pope Leo noted in his new year’s address to the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, war, with all its concomitant suffering, seems to once again be in vogue. This causes many to wonder if evil has any limit.

Toward the end of his life, Pope Saint John Paul II, who was instrumental in Saint Faustina’s canonization and who established the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday, wrote about the limit God imposes on evil.

John Paul II insisted you can’t “think of the limit placed by God himself upon the various forms of evil without reference to the mystery of Redemption.” He then asked, “Could the mystery of Redemption be the response to that historical evil which, in different forms, continually recurs in human affairs?” Before jumping too quickly to give a facile answer to a complex question, he annunciated some of the evils. All too easily, he insisted, we can come to see

the evil of concentration camps, of gas chambers, of police cruelty, of total war, and of oppressive regimes - evil which, among other things, systematically contradicts the message of the Cross - it can seem...that such evil is more powerful than any good

He then urged us to pay close attention to history. Doing so, “we discover that this is precisely where the victorious presence of Christ's Cross is most clearly revealed.” Against a dark background the light shines forth more brightly. For “those subjected to systematic evil, there remains only Christ and his Cross as a source of spiritual self-defense, as a promise of victory.”

According to John Paul II, it is the Cross of Christ that “marks the divine limit placed upon evil, it is for this reason only: because thereby evil is radically overcome by good, hate by love, death by resurrection.”¹

It is only by bearing your cross daily and giving your life in loving service to others that you can experience resurrection, that is, in the words of Saint Augustine to the wealthy Roman widow Proba, life that is truly life!

Take courage, by His death and resurrection, Christ conquered evil and death. By His passion, death, and resurrection, Christ not only responds to all the evil in world, He vanquishes it. Christus resurrexit, quia Deus caritas est - Christ is resurrected because God is love.

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1 All citations from John Paul II. Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of the Millennium, 19-20. Random House: 2005.^↩

Year A Second Sunday of Easter

Readings: Acts 2:42-47; Ps 118:2-4.13-15.22-24; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

During this Easter season, both in the Sunday lectionary and for the Office of Readings (one of the offices that comprise the Liturgy of the Hours) the Church provides us with readings from 1 Peter. This inspired text focuses on the suffering endured by many early Christians.

Because we are in Year A of the three-year cycle of Sunday readings, we read from 1 Peter for six consecutive Sundays. While some readings feature it more explicitly, five out of the six broach the subject of suffering.

As the Buddha observed: to live is to suffer. As Christ painstakingly showed: to love is to suffer. But to love is also what it means to be truly alive. Theologian Herbert McCabe observed: “if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.”¹ While it is abundantly clear that suffering, in its various forms, is an inherent part of life, it’s important to note that God does not cause human suffering. On the contrary, humanity caused Christ’s suffering and death.

Both in His suffering and descent into hell, Christ retrieved human suffering from the void of meaninglessness. As Msgr Luigi Giussani insisted: “He mounted the Cross to free us from the fascination with nothingness, to free us from the fascination with appearances, with the ephemeral.” It is because the Lord “was tested through what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.”² Experience makes abstractions real.

In and through Christ, “the alchemy of grace can turn the lead of suffering into the gold of glory.”³ Being a Christian means steadfastly refusing to let suffering have the last word. Christians are incorrigible about this because we believe in the resurrection. This is what our epistle reading tells us: we rejoice in the “resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” the source of our “living hope.”⁴

When accepted rather than refused or denied (both of which are futile responses) and united with Christ’s suffering, your suffering can be the means by which your faith is strengthened, your hope enlivened, and your charity increased.

Living this way, which cannot and does not attenuate the seriousness of suffering or dull its pain, will result in “praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”⁵ When you think about it, not letting your suffering diminish your living hope is the very revelation of Jesus Christ, just as the crucifixion is the deepest revelation of God’s very self.

Today’s Gospel has two distinct parts. In the first part, we hear what is held to be Christ’s institution of the Sacrament of Penance (i.e., confession). In part two, we hear Thomas’ merciful encounter with Christ. So, we might say that within one and the same Gospel reading the Church puts before us faith and doubt.

What ties faith and doubt together inextricably is the reality of suffering. Nothing produces doubt about God’s goodness, God’s power, or even God’s very existence more than suffering. But rather than denying suffering or seeing it as God’s punishment for wayward humanity, or an individual who has misbehaved, or inflicting divine wrath upon yourself, the doubt caused by suffering is vital and perhaps even necessary for faith.

According to our epistle reading, doubt caused by suffering is what makes your faith “more precious” and more enduring “than gold that is… tested by fire.”⁶ Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Certainty is the opposite of faith. In the context of suffering, it is people who can always produce a reason for suffering, usually by invoking pious platitudes,which grate. As Rich Mullins sang: “I know it would not hurt any less/Even if it could be explained.”⁷ Suffering is a mystery because there is no explanation that eases our pain.

It is very important to point out something our Gospel for Divine Mercy Sunday makes very clear: the Risen Lord still bears the wounds of his crucifixion. This is perhaps the best explanation of suffering available to us. It is God telling us he has suffered with us and continues to suffer with and even through us.

Thomas, who sadly remains stuck by the descriptor “Doubting,” isn’t faithless. Anyone who has attentively read the fourth Gospel knows that he is faithful start to finish. His experience of the Lord’s suffering and death certainly caused his hope to wane. Most likely, Thomas was heartbroken, despondent, grieving.

Maybe what he was told by the others simply seemed to be good to be true, something he wanted so badly to believe but couldn’t face the risk of disappointment if turned out not to be. Too often, we reduce Jesus’ closest disciples to caricatures, to two-dimensional figures, rather than complex human beings like us.

Thomas’ response should be our response whenever the consecrated host and the chalice are raised: “My Lord and my God!”⁸ Lest, anyone break his arm patting himself on the back for his superior faith, you are not among those who have not seen! Here today, the Risen Lord says, Eat my flesh and drink my blood, "and do not be unbelieving, but believe."⁹

On this Divine Mercy Sunday, let’s worship the God who is Mercy and dismiss the omnipotent moral monster of so many imaginations. Taking a cue from the closing prayer for the Chaplet of Divine Mercy: in difficult moments, like one we are presently living, may we not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to God’s holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself.

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1 From Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” London Review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 20, 19 October 2006.^↩
2 Hebrews 2:18.^↩
3 Ken Boa, from the podcast “In the Studio with Michael Card.”^↩
4 1 Peter 1:3.^↩
5 1 Peter 1:7.^↩
6 1 Peter 1:7.^↩
7 Rich Mullins lyrics to “Hard to Get.”^↩
8 John 20:28.^↩
9 John 20:27.^>↩

Friday in the Octave of Easter

Readings: Acts 4:1-12; Psalm 118:1-2.4.22-24.25-27a; John 21:1-14

Again, Happy Easter! Christus resurrexit! Christos anesti! Despite everything that might weigh us down or cause despair, we hope because Jesus rose from the dead. Because He lives, we can live because, by the power of the Spirit, He can live in us!

Just as Jesus discovered the price of love was death- though, by His resurrection, He proved love is stronger than death- it wasn’t too long before Peter and John discovered the cost of following Christ. Apart from healing in the name of Jesus, these two were arrested and charged with proclaiming the Lord’s resurrection.

When arraigned before the Jewish authorities, Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, boldly proclaimed the same Jesus they had condemned to death as the resurrected savior of the world. It was by His power he healed the handicapped man.

When charged with being a Christian, Peter didn’t make a case to the contrary and then anxiously wait to see if he was convicted. Rather, he pled guilty, loudly proclaiming His guilt. By what power or name did I heal the crippled man? The name of Jesus. You know, the guy you had killed!

Apparition du Christ sur les bords du lac de Tibériade, James Tissot, 1886-1894

Proclaiming Christ risen and reigning is the mission entrusted to all 266 of Saint Peter’s successors. You don’t need a doctorate in Church history to know that some of these did a lousy job carrying out this mission. Some even served as counter-witnesses. Thankfully, it’s been centuries since such an unworthy man has walked in the shoes of the Galilean fisherman.

Even during his short pontificate, Leo XIV has boldly proclaimed the Gospel during a time chaos and upheaval. I am quite certain he’s quickly learned, as Peter and John did, the good news is not always well received. Like Peter, this requires proclaiming it more boldly! This the Holy Father has done with persistence, serenity, and gentleness.

In Evangelii Nuntiandi, Pope Saint Paul VI plainly declared:

Evangelizing is. . . the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize, that is to say, in order to preach and teach, to be the channel of the gift of grace, to reconcile sinners with God, and to perpetuate Christ's sacrifice in the Mass, which is the memorial of His death and glorious resurrection (sec. 14)

In our Gospel today, we can see Peter’s jumping into the water as a kind of baptism and the meal the disciples ate with the Risen Lord as a Eucharist. Indeed, baptism should set someone running from the font to the Lord’s table, eager to partake of the saving sacrifice, the medicine of immortality.

Never forget that you are called to share what you receive here. You receive Christ. You are to share Christ. Because you are a member of Christ’s Body, your mission, your deepest identity, your reason for existing is to proclaim Christ.

Monday in the Octave of Easter

Readings: Acts 2:14.22-33; Psalm 16:1-2.5.7-11; Matthew 28:8-15

Today is not the Monday after Easter. Nor is it Monday of the First of Week of Easter. Today is Monday in the Octave of Easter. Today is Easter!

The Church observes the entire first week of Easter as one day. For those of us who pray the Liturgy of the Hours, the hymn, antiphons, and psalmody could easily become numbingly repetitive. Yet, somehow, they don’t, given the enormity of what we celebrate.

What do we celebrate? Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The Lord’s rising from the tomb is so mind-bending that over nearly two millennia there have been no shortage of theories about what this might mean.

When it comes to Christ’s resurrection, I tend to take it fairly literally. Apart from there being difficulty in some account of recognizing Jesus risen from the dead, there is nothing in Sacred Scripture that indicates the Lord’s resurrection is to be taken in any way other than how it is described by those who claim to be eyewitnesses.

In our Gospel this evening, the two Marys have no difficulty recognizing Jesus, whom they encounter while running to tell the other disciples about the empty tomb. Seeing Him, they worship. Unlike when disciples fell at His feet during His earthly ministry, when He raised them up, He lets these two disciples worship Him in awe.

It is the sense of awe they express that causes the Risen Lord to reassure them by telling them not to be afraid. Due to its spontaneity and sincerity, the worship the two women offer is nearly perfect. It has both immanent and transcendent dimensions. Jesus is concretely “there,” they hug His feet, but He is resurrected and glorified.

While the two disciples went on their way to tell the others, not just that they found Jesus’ tomb empty but that they had seen Him risen, the quandary of the empty tomb had to be dealt with by the chief priests and elders. This leads to the first and even now persistent explanation: Jesus’ disciples took His body from the tomb, placed it somewhere else, and told everyone He rose from the dead. On this account, Christianity is built on a great fraud.

What does it mean to say Jesus rose from the dead? Well, in epistemological terms, it is a justifiable belief as is any belief that is not an outright impossibility, not a logical contradiction. On the contrary, insisting that it is utterly impossible for someone who is dead to come back to life is a bit of a fallacy. But when examined in this way, even a believer is forced to admit that the probability is low.

It is important, therefore, for belief to be bolstered by experience. To experience the Risen Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit, who is the mode of Christ’s resurrection presence, is a sine qua non of being Christian.

While it needs to be deeply personal, one does not have to be a mystic, like, say, Saint Teresa of Avila, to have an encounter with the Risen Christ. In the Eucharist, the Lord’s presence, by the power of the Holy Spirit, who is the agent of transubstantiation, is mediated to us under the appearance of ordinary bread and wine.

It is this mediation that makes the Eucharist real, tangible, empirical, edible and drinkable. All the sacraments are mediate (i.e., “real”) experiences of the Risen Lord.

Sometimes there is a desire to argue so fervently about the reality of what transubstantiation effects that the only way the bread and wine can make Christ really and truly present is dismissed. Here’s the truth, if sacraments are not both signs and symbols, they are nothing. This isn't to assert anything other than the bread and wine (elements chosen by Christ Himself) are the media used by the Holy Spirit to make Christ truly present.

In the other sacraments, the Spirit uses different media- water and oil, etc.- to effect the Lord's true presence.

Typically, a sign is something that stands in for something else. But the sacraments are “efficacious” signs, meaning they are what they signify. What they signify is really a who, Jesus Christ. This why we can say something like, “The Eucharist is not merely a sign.”

Sacraments are also symbols. “Symbol” comes from the Greek word symbolon. In Greek, symbolon refers to a token that is broken in half and used for the sake of recognition. In ancient times, a symbolon gave someone the right to be accepted by the party that owned the other half.

In the Eucharist, the Holy Spirit transforsm, transsubstantiates, the ordinary elements into Christ and our receiving these connects us to Christ, transforming us into His Body. In many ways, as theologian Henri de Lubac noted, it makes more sense to call the Eucharist Christ’s mystical Body and the Church His true body. After all, it is the Church, His Body, that serves as His hands, His eyes, His heart, His feet in the world. The Church is the sacrament of salvation in and for the world.

Like the two Marys, our worship of the Risen Christ should be spontaneous and heartfelt as we recognize His immanence in breaking of the bread, while at the same time being in awe of this great mystery in which we participate by grace. The Eucharist is the primary place to encounter the Risen Lord until He returns.

Urbi et orbi- Easter 2026

URBI ET ORBI MESSAGE
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
LEO XIV

Dear brothers and sisters,
Christ is risen! Happy Easter!

For centuries, the Church has joyfully sung of the event that is the origin and foundation of her faith: “Yes, Christ my hope is arisen / Christ indeed from death is risen / Have mercy, victor King, ever reigning” (Easter Sequence).

Easter is the victory of life over death, of light over darkness, of love over hatred. It is a victory that came at a very high price: Christ, the Son of the living God (cf. Mt 16:16), had to die — and die on a cross — after suffering an unjust condemnation, being mocked and tortured, and shedding all his blood. As the true immolated Lamb, he took upon himself the sin of the world (cf. Jn 1:29; 1 Pet 1:18–19) and thus freed us all — and with us, all creation — from the dominion of evil.

But how was Jesus able to be victorious? What is the strength with which he defeated once and for all the ancient adversary, the prince of this world (cf. Jn 12:31)? What is the power with which he rose from the dead, not returning to his former life, but entering into eternal life and thus opening in his own flesh the passage from this world to the Father?

This strength, this power, is God himself for he is Love who creates and generates, Love who is faithful to the end and Love who forgives and redeems.

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