In our daily Gospel once again, we learn that, upon seeing him, “the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus.”1 Even after he asked them if they had anything to eat, calling them “children,” the disciples did not realize it was the Lord. According to John’s account, it seems that after the dramatic events of Jesus’s passion and death and even after their encounter with the risen Christ in Jerusalem, his closest followers didn’t know what else to do except go back home to Capernaum and resume their trade as fishermen.
At least in Saint John’s view, it wasn’t clear to Peter and Jesus’s other closest followers what his rising from the dead meant. We are faced with the same question, aren’t we? What implications does our encounter with the risen Lord have for our lives? In posing this question, which is as existential as it is theological, we come to the heart of the matter. Only the theological questions that have existential implications are worth asking. In other words, virtually nobody cares about the abstract, metaphysical questions that often masquerade as theology.
The heart of the matter is the matter of our hearts. As Cleopas and his companion asked after their startling encounter with the risen Christ as they made their way back to Emmaus discouraged and disappointed: “Were not our hearts burning [within us] while he spoke to us on the way…?”2 Just like in our Gospel for Wednesday, taken from Saint Luke, in today’s Gospel, after his disciples come ashore, having made their large haul, Jesus celebrates with them a sort of Eucharist. Once again, it is in this celebration that any doubts about his identity dissipate.
Time and again during the resurrection appearances in the Gospels, even Jesus’s closest disciples had to see him with new eyes after his resurrection, seeing him through the eyes of faith. Looking through "the eyes of faith" changes the way one sees everything and everyone. To use a familiar term, “seeing with the eyes of faith” refers to being converted.
In our reading today, taken once again from Acts 4, Peter, who draws attention to himself and John by healing the crippled man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, tells those who are inquiring, that Jesus Christ, by whose power he caused the crippled man to walk, “the stone rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone.”3
This, too, has implications for the lives of Jesus’s followers. In our advocacy and ready assistance to those in need, to society’s outcasts, to those who are often deemed dispensable, we must be ready to be rejected and despised. If you haven’t experienced this already, let me remind you that doing the right thing is often very difficult. You must be willing to pay the price when endeavoring to live as if God’s kingdom is already fully established.
It is not enough to vigorously and arrogantly assert that Jesus Christ is the only means of salvation. As those who claim his name, we must show this by our unfailing love, expressed as service. The Christian word for this is diakonia.
God’s kingdom, at least according to Jesus’s teaching, is something of a bizarro world, the world as we know it turned upside down. In his teaching during the crisis brought about by the rapid spread of the sars-cov-2 virus, Pope Francis has indicated, emerging from this, we have an opportunity to make some structural changes. The other day, for example, he proposed, not a universal basic income, but a universal basic wage.4
This proposal basically insists that everyone who works should make enough money on which to live and support his/her family. Just think of all those workers who are putting themselves at risk during this time to keep us supplied with life's necessities. Let’s not forget, when used medically, a crisis marks the turning point of a disease, a time when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death.
My dear friends, certain elements of the Mass that merit deep reflection and reiteration. In seeking to answer the question, “What implications does Jesus’s rising from the dead have for our lives?,” it bears noting that the word “Mass” is derived from the Latin word missa, which means more than merely being dismissed. It means something like to be sent. This is indicated by the fact that missa is closely related to the word missio, which is the origin of our English word “mission.”
If you were to ask virtually any Catholic what it means to say that the Church is “apostolic,” you’d likely receive a response seeking to articulate what we call apostolic succession. While this is not an incorrect reply, it is a woefully incomplete one. It merits repeating in this context that in Saint John’s Gospel there are no apostles, only disciples.
The Church, which remains the community of disciples of the risen Christ, is apostolic in that each and every member is sent, quite literally, at the end of each Eucharist. We are sent to make the One in whom we have recognized as Lord and God present wherever we are.
1 John 21:4.↩
2 Luke 24:32.↩
3 Acts 4:11.↩
4 See “Pope calls for consideration of ‘universal basic wage’ for unprotected workers.”↩
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