Weekly HOMILY for April 19, 2009: Bearers of Peace to One Another

2nd Sunday of Easter, Cycle B
Our Lady of Grace
April 19, 2009

Bearers of Peace to One Another
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato


In Your Face

Did it ever strike you that Jesus should have gone into the chambers of the high priests? “Look at me, you poor, misguided people, and repent of your ways,” he could have said. “I am right. You are wrong. I am the Son of God. Now do you get it?”

Or why not go to the judgment seat where Pilate Saturday? “‘What is truth?’ you say. Here it is. ‘Behold the man,’ you said. Behold indeed. Don’t just sit there with your mouth open. I’ve come back from the dead. Take a picture and send it back to your emperor.”

No, Jesus does nothing of the kind. The resurrection is not about himself or for his own persona prestige or vindication. Instead of focusing on trying to prove anything, he comes through locked doors to greet and to challenge his shuddering, fearful and defensive disciples.

Jesus breaks into te company of bewildered and anxious people tooffer them a new sense of meaning and purpose.

These are the people who, in such a touching way, he called friends on the night before he died, and to a man they let him down.

At this point they have lost any dimension of their sense of mission that they might have had or any sense of their being a living community with a clear sense of purpose and direction.

All that binds them together is fear.


The Huddle

They’re not huddled in that room as athletes sometimes huddle to make plans for the next play or the nect offensive, but simply to be huddled. Their huddling is for the sake of huddling.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus says to them, and suddenly a new spirit enters into that locked, shaded room; a new sense of energy and purpose enters into their closed and frightened presence

the appearance of Jesus on that evening of the first day of the week is less about the past than about the future that will arise out of the light and power and peace of his Easter presence.

it is less about evening and more about morning.

The resurrection is about the future of those fearful disciples and about the future of the world they will begin to build in the power of his spirit.

It is the intrusion of the risen Jesus into their frightened little circle that breaks them out of their inward-looking huddle and turns them around.

Jesus turns their circle inside out. His presence and greeting of peace is a call to conversion – a real spiritual turnaround.

More than merely brining peace to his frightened followers, he charges them to move nto the future as heralds and bearers of that same peace.

They themselves will take on his peace-making mission and bring it forward. His appearance do more than simply vindicate his personal integrity or prove the validity of his life and ministry; they evokes and provoke transformation among his disciples.

In his appearances the risen Jesus confronts them with their own possibilities.


The Confrontation

Jesus says to them again, “Peace be with your. As the Father has sent me so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

(1) The peace is offered. (2) The commission is given. (3) The energy of the Spirit’s breath is poured out from the very soul of the risen Christ, but the “If’s” loom large, very large.

(4) A choice remains here – a big choice. They will have to make a decision that will give shape and direction to their whole future.

The choice is about being locked up in a huddle or being feed to become messengers of liberation and reconciliation. The choice is about staying in the upper room in self-righteous isolation, or moving to the ground floor and out the door.

Take your pick.


The Choice Is Yours

You can look backwards and point fingers at the chief priests and Pilates in your own life who have hurt you, even at the Peters and the Thomases with their betrayals and doubts, OR you can choose to move into God’s future and go out to these same persons with a message of peace and healing

In the peace of Christ and in the power of his spirit you can believe in the possibilities of forgiveness and reconciliation OR, with one eye looking backward, you can proceed with your own carefully controlled steps and plans and projects, guided by nothing more than your own limited vision and carefully contrived pragmatism.

This is the fundamental choice Jesus offers as he breathes on his first disciples and messengers of good news.

And on this “first day of the week” again with us his disciples huddled together he breathes on us today!

Take your pick!