Homily for Thursday, Octave of Easter

Homily for Thursday, Octave of Easter

April 5, 2018

Acts 3: 11-26
Luke 24: 35-48
Nativity, Washington, D.C.

On Monday we began reading the Acts of the Apostles, which we’ll work our way thru during the 7 weeks of the Easter season.  We’ll follow the apostolic preaching from Jerusalem to the rest of the Holy Land to the Greek-speaking lands of the Eastern Mediterranean and finally to Rome.

What the apostles preach—Peter and John in these early chapters of Acts, the deacons Stephen and Philip, then Peter alone, and finally Paul and his co-workers—is that Jesus of Nazareth has been raised from the dead, and he is the Christ—the Messiah—sent by God as the suffering servant to redeem all who will believe in him, Jew and Gentile alike, for God created all people, loves all people, and forgives the sins of all who repent.

We heard most of those themes in today’s 1st reading, Peter’s sermon following the cure of a crippled man.  That healing is itself a sign of God’s wish to heal us all thru the power of Christ’s name—heal us of far worse afflictions than physical injury or disease.

In the gospel reading Luke emphasized the physical reality of Christ’s resurrection.  The apostles were not imagining that Jesus was alive, were not having daydreams or nightmares, were not hallucinating.  The Lucan scene is similar to the one in John’s Gospel when Thomas insists on probing Jesus’ physical wounds.  Here, Jesus shows his wounds and has them touch his flesh and bones.  It really is the one whom the Romans crucified.  And he eats some of the physical food they have at hand.  It really is he, alive, in the flesh, but wondrously transformed too—into the same reality of eternal life that he offers to all believers, as the apostles will go on to preach courageously in the face of all kinds of opposition, harassment, hatred, and persecution—because this Jesus was not in their imaginations but was totally real, and totally self-giving so that we might have a share in his eternal life.