The Third Sunday of Easter

I wonder of you can recall the last significant journey that you undertook. Often when we were children we used to sit at the back and shout out “Are we there yet?” which got the response as always: “15 munities even if it is 3 hours away” Our Faith journey can feel like the same as this. It can feel that we will never get there and when we have sorted one thing out we get confused about something else. We are always learning something new about ourselves and about God’s love for us. But with all this we can feel lost.  The disciples in our Gospel today must have felt the same.  They were lost and everything that they had hoped for had turned wrong. They hoped that he was the one to set Israel free. They were in one sense ex disciples ready to go back to what they had been doing.  

In a sense they had lost their faith and their way this is shown in the Gospel symbolically by turning their back on Jerusalem.

When things go wrong in our lives we can often turn our back on our faith blaming God or others for our lack of faith. I know that when something went wrong in my life I did exactly this. I turned my back on God and stopped praying and failed to go to Mass. I was lost and could not find a way out.  Our eyes are blind to the works and love of God.

Here at every Sunday we experience this Gospel in a very intimate way. We experience the breaking open of the word. To be both comforted and also challenged by the radical nature of the Gospel. Maybe one of the ways we have been challenged this week is in the message of reconciliation and not glorying in the death of another even if that person like Bin Laden is the head of an organization that promotes terror. It challenges us to think again about our own lives and attitudes. In this Gospel we see that Jesus himself tells the two disciples of “Fools so hard to see.” The disciples ultimately recognized him and their eyes were opened in the breaking of Bread. We too recognize Christ every Sunday or every time we go to Mass in the Blessed Sacrament. The Blessed Sacrament and respect for it is very important. That is why we genuflect or make an act of reverence when we come into the Church we recognize that in this space is Christ truly present.  This is also why when we come into the Church we should have a bit of silence for those who would like to pray and be with Christ. The Church is a different place from any other building that we might enter.

I had a man who wanted to become a catholic and I asked him why he wanted to become a Catholic. He said when he entered a Catholic Church there was something quite different. He felt more than anywhere else he felt something different.

And then the last thing that we recognize in the Gospel today is that the disciples when they had experienced all this their hearts were burning within them. And so they wanted to tell others about Christ and what they have witnessed.

The Gospel this weekend presents many challenges and allows us to meditate on what the Mass means for us and what it means to be Catholic in today’s modern world and why it is important to come and be in his presence on Sundays and when we can.