Homily for 3d Sunday of Easter

Homily for the
3rd Sunday of Easter

April 14, 1991

Luke 24: 35-48
Troop 40, Alpine, N.J.

This little nugget comes from well before I officially became Troop 40’s chaplain; with one T40 Scout in my freshman English class at Salesian HS, I got invited now and then to accompany the troop and offer Mass in the field for them.

Some of you may have followed the story, a couple weeks ago, of the woman who was exploring the deepest part of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico with a group of cavers.  When she broke her leg in an accident, it became a national story; people everywhere seemed to be concerned about the progress of the rescue team working its way down several miles from the surface over a period of two days (I believe), and seemed to admire the woman’s courage and strength down below with her partners.  Once the rescuers reached her with a stretcher and additional first aid, they had to haul her out, which took another several days of pulling her dead weight, protecting her from further injury, and keeping up her spirits.  Everyone involved strained very hard to save this woman from the brokenness she had experienced, and in fact her brokenness built something of a new spirit of teamwork and salvation—a spirit they all experienced despite their exhaustion when they had finished and whatever bruises they had gotten in the process.

Yesterday we all did some hiking, and a lot of it was in the rain.  When we finished we were pretty tired; we had strained a lot.  Maybe we got a bruise or two from a fall, or some blisters or some sore muscles.  We experienced a kind of brokenness through our hike.  But after all that, we felt a lot of satisfaction too.  We’d accomplished something, maybe something we weren’t sure we could do; and some of us earned a merit badge through our painful efforts.

The experience of the cave explorers and rescuers, and our experience, is a little like the experience that Jesus went through.  Jesus’ heart was crushed on Holy Thursday by betrayal and by the fear of torture and death.  On Good Friday his spirit was beaten by the injustice of his trial and condemnation, and his body was broken by torture and finally by death on the cross.

In the gospel we heard how Jesus appears to his disciples after he has risen from the dead, and how he reassures them that he isn’t a ghost but the real flesh-and-blood Jesus, the same Jesus who had been so broken by the cross.  This same Jesus is now alive.  He speaks with his friends and even asks them for some fish to eat.  The body and the spirit that had been pained, tortured, and broken has been raised up.  The payoff isn’t national TV coverage, teamwork, or a merit badge, but “the remission of sins for all the nations” (Luke 24:47).

The gospel reading began with a reference to a pair of disciples who “had come to know Jesus in the breaking of bread” (Luke 24:35).  “The breaking of bread” became a New Testament term for the Eucharist.  The body of Jesus is still being broken for us, for the forgiveness of sins, at every Mass.  When the priest breaks the Bread before Communion, he reminds us of how Jesus’ body was broken by death for us; the Mass, you know, is the very same sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, made present to us here and now because we could not be physically present at Calvary.  The Eucharistic bread is one, but it is broken into several pieces to symbolize that all of us are made one in Christ; Christ died for all the nations.  Indeed, we have that symbolized right here by Scouts from Mount Vernon and from Queens celebrating the Eucharist in New Jersey, and we come from a bunch of different national backgrounds.

Being broken is not just for Jesus and for special occasions like dramatic rescues and merit badges.  We who break the bread of Jesus, with Jesus, must be broken every day.  We must be broken by keeping his commandments, by keeping the values of the Scout oath, by doing our duty, by keeping ourselves clean and honorable in body and heart.  It breaks us sometimes to be honest, to be pure, to be loyal, to do our schoolwork, to obey, to help someone, to think of others before ourselves, not to put someone else down.  Every Eucharist in which we break bread with Jesus is a call to live the Eucharist, to break the sinfulness in us.  But the payoff in being broken like that is to be like Jesus, and eventually to share in his glorious resurrection.