April 26, 2020 - 3rd Sunday of Easter
(Acts: 2:14, 22-33; 1 Pt 1:17-21; Lk 24:13-35)
Peter’s main theme in addressing his fellow Jews is that Jesus is the promised Messiah, as demonstrated by the signs he worked and his Resurrection Messianic expectations of the Son of David included mastery over nature. The messianic heir of Solomon was expected to perform signs of the kind preserved in the legends of Solomon. Peter proposes that Jesus had passed this test and his miracles were, in fact, his “credentials” from God. The Resurrection, the “kerygma”, that is the foundation of Christian faith, is presented by Peter as the fulfillment of Psalm 16, which promises that the faithful one won’t undergo the corruption of the grave. Peter used a well-established and accepted Jewish method of interpretation called “midrash” that creatively develops the original meaning of a text to make relevant and useful to a later generation. Psalm 16 affirms that “my body, too, abides in confidence; because you will not abandon my soul to the netherworld, nor will you suffer your faithful one to undergo corruption. In our second reading this letter is believed to have been written thirty years or more after the first proclamation of the Gospel in Acts. The mercy we receive through his Precious Blood doesn’t exempt us from his justice; rather, it demands that we act reverently and with mercy. Reverence elicits obedience, humility and fidelity. It glows from the realization of what God as already done through the sacrificial blood of Christ. Even more than the blood of the Passover lamb that saved the enslaved Hebrews, the blood of Christ has ransomed believers from the futile way of life and patterns of behavior of the past. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus in today’s Gospel reading came to know the Lord in the “breaking of the bread” – the Eucharist. We can see that their encounter with Jesus that day parallels the way Jesus comes to meet us in every Mass. The first half of the Mass, like the first half of the journey to Emmaus, focuses on the Word of God, the Liturgy of the Word. The second half of the Mass, like the second half of the Emmaus story, centers on meeting and recognizing Jesus, in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Like the disciples who run back to Jerusalem to share the Good News, we too, at the end of every Mass, are commissioned to be ambassadors of Christ who revealed himself in the Word and in the Eucharist.