Homily for Monday, Week 4 of Easter

Homily for Monday
4th Week of Easter

May 4, 2020

Collect

Thru mixed signals of some kind, I wasn’t able to be deliver this homily this a.m.

In the Collect we noted that “we celebrate the paschal mysteries on earth” by reason of a gift of God the Father.  Then we pray that we may come “to rejoice in the full measure of [his] grace.”  The Father’s gift to us is yet to be realized in full.  We’ve not yet achieved the paschal mysteries in full.  That will come only when we’re raised with our Lord Jesus on the Last Day.

Peter baptizes Cornelius

God’s grace is illustrated for us in the story of the conversion of Cornelius and his household (Acts 10).  The sequence of readings skips that story, which in fact takes up all of ch. 10; today we hear its aftermath when Peter’s returned to Jerusalem (Acts 11:1-18).  Thru Peter God has revealed his gift of “life-giving repentance to the Gentiles too” (Acts 11:18).  Until that moment—when the Holy Spirit came down on those Romans in Caesarea.  God’s favor had been restricted to his chosen people, the flesh-and-blood descendants of Abraham.  Now God’s grace expands the divine choice—“amazing grace that saved a wretch like me,” all the wretches of the pagan world, and of course the wretches of the Jewish world as well, as many as repented and called upon the name of the Lord Jesus (cf. Acts 2:38).  The Gentiles are the “other sheep that do not belong to this fold” (John 10:16), the fold of Abraham’s offspring.

But the paschal mysteries that we celebrate, in their full measure, “the full measure of God’s grace,” are for everyone—even for us so far away in time, culture, language, and geography from Jesus of Nazareth.  Amazing grace!  We need only hear the voice of the Good Shepherd (John 10:16), run to join is flock, and follow him.