Homily for Thursday, Week 7 of Easter

Homily for Thursday
7th Week of Easter

May 16, 2024
Acts 22:30, 23: 6-11
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

“Wishing to determine the truth about why Paul was being accused by the Jews…” (Acts 22: 30).

Our reading from Acts is drastically abbreviated in these final weeks of Easter.  Paul concluded his 3d missionary journey with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the Jewish leaders noticed him and tried to do away with him.  He was rescued and jailed by the Roman forces in the city.  As we’ll see tomorrow and Saturday, or if we read the rest of Acts on our own this is prelude to Paul’s last recorded journey, which will take him to Rome, as if to the culmination of giving witness to Jesus “in Jerusalem, thruout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8)—not that Rome is the ends of the earth, then or now, but in religious terms was at the other end of the spectrum from Jerusalem, “true pole of the earth, the Great King’s city” (Ps 48:2, Grail).  There, in the center of imperial power, Paul will continue to teach the truth of the Great King, that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

The heart of the Gospel shows in our reading today, “the truth about why Paul was being accused”:  “I am on trial for hope in the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 23:6).  As we heard at the beginning of Acts (and as recently as Tuesday[1]) when a replacement for Judas had to be chosen (1:21-22), the central point of the Gospel, the central truth of history, is the resurrection of Jesus.  He is risen, and he offers to Jew and Gentile a revived relationship with God and a shared brotherhood based on that relationship, a relationship leading to eternal life for all who follow Jesus—“that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one” (John 17:22-23).  That’s why Paul was accused by the Jewish leaders in one town after another, and why Christians are still accused by the powers of the earth.  Nevertheless, we maintain our hope in the living Christ.  As Pope Francis has been saying recently in connection with the Jubilee Year, “Hope does not disappoint.”

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[1] Feast of St. Matthias.