This coming Sunday is the 3rd Sunday of Easter. Our Lectionary does well to include a verse that it is more properly part of the Emmaus road story: “Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (v.35). As Catholics we are often prone to focus only on the “breaking of the bread” and its Eucharistic implications. We should also consider “what had taken place on the way.” As Joel Green [853] remarks, “this” refers to “evidences of the risen Lord, but more profoundly with the coherence between the pattern provided by Moses and all the prophets, the prophetic witness of the Scriptures to the Messiah who suffers and enters into his glory, the ministry of Jesus as this has been focused on table fellowship, and the experience of the resurrected Jesus.” Continue reading →
This coming Sunday is the 3rd Sunday of Easter. The return of the two disciples from Emmaus returns the focus to Jerusalem which is the “center” of the Luke-Acts narrative. In the gospel all roads lead to Jerusalem. In Acts all roads lead from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. Upon their return they find “the eleven and those with them. The travelers are greeted with the news abuzz in the room: The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!”Continue reading →
This coming Sunday is the 3rd Sunday of Easter In Lectionary Cycle B, in which Mark in the primary gospel. The reading for the 2nd Sunday of Easter was taken from the Gospel of John and recounts the Upper Room scenes of Jesus’ appearances and the story of Thomas. On this the 3rd Sunday of Easter, the lectionary again looks to another gospel account to tell the story of the appearance in the Upper Room. This pericope is taken from the Gospel of Luke.
In the Lucan recounting of the events of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus, our story occurs on the evening of Easter Sunday. The women have found the tomb empty, there have been encounters with the Resurrected Jesus, and the news is spreading among the small group of faithful. But not all have heard – not the two disciples on the “Road to Emmaus” (24:17)
The first verse of our reading more traditionally belongs to the Emmaus road story when two disciples encounter the Risen Jesus(Lk 24:13-35). That reading is from the 2nd Sunday of Easter in Lectionary Cycle C. Let us pick up the ending of that story:
30 And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. 31 With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight. 32 Then they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning (within us) while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?” 33 So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem where they found gathered together the eleven and those with them 34 who were saying, “The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!” 35 Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Brian Stoffregen provides good reason to review the “Road to Emmaus” account as he points out the parallels between the back-to-back Lucan accounts. Each in its own way is a story of the growth in faith as the disciples experience:
Now the two have made the long trek back to Jerusalem, found the community gathered in the upper room, and shared their encounter. While they were still speaking about this, [Jesus] stood in their midst.”
One of the emphases of the “Road to Emmaus” account was to emphasize the reality of Jesus’ spiritual presence in the church in the Word proclaimed and in the “breaking of the bread.” Now Luke moves the emphasis to the physical reality of Jesus’ resurrection body. Jerome Kodell [Luke, 979] notes: “From the earliest times in the church, there was a danger of docetism, the heretical belief that Jesus was God behind a thin veneer of humanity: thus his suffering was only playacting, and his resurrection was simply a return to a completely spiritual existence with no bodily effect. The Letters of John combated this error (1 John 4:2–3; 2 John 7).” And so Luke stresses that Jesus’ resurrection body is real and not simply a resuscitated corpse. The disciples touch him; the marks of the passion are visible in his hands and feet; he eats with the disciples – far more than simply appearing among them.
It is good to remember that Luke’s primary audience are people raised in Hellenistic thought. The evangelist is offering a whole new category of thought, beyond any previous perspective.
Image credit: Maesta altar piece, Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308, Museo dell’Opera Metropolitana del Duomo, Siena | Public Domain
This coming weekend we celebrate the 2nd Sunday of Easter in Lectionary Cycle B. In response, Jesus told Thomas, Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. Thomas came to believe because he saw the risen Lord, but Jesus did not praise Thomas’ pathway to faith; rather, he pronounced a blessing upon those who have not seen the risen Jesus yet have believed in him nevertheless. These are those who hear or read the witness to Jesus borne by the disciples and confirmed by the Spirit (15:26–27). This is the second pronunciation of blessing by Jesus in the form of a beatitude in the Fourth Gospel (cf. 13:17: “If you understand this, blessed are you if you do it.”). There are people who refer to this as the 9th beatitude. Continue reading →
This coming weekend we celebrate the 2nd Sunday of Easter in Lectionary Cycle B. Although many translations include “doubt” in v. 27 — and thus lead to the phrase “Doubting Thomas,” but there is no Greek word for “doubt” in the verse. The phrase do not be unbelieving, but believe contrasts apistos and pistos — the only occurrence of both these words in John. Simply put, the word does not mean “doubt” and Greek does not lack the equivalent words: diakrinomai, dialogismos, distazō, dipsychos, aporeō, and aporia. Continue reading →
This coming weekend we celebrate the 2nd Sunday of Easter in Lectionary Cycle B. The sacred writer had already introduced the giving of the Holy Spirit in John 7 in a scene during the Feast of Tabernacles in which the Spirit is promised at a future time when Jesus was glorified. In the Fourth Gospel it is at the crucifixion that Jesus is glorified in that his willing obedience manifests the nature of God, which is love. It is there on the cross that Jesus delivers the Spirit into the world (19:30), symbolized immediately afterward by the flow of the sacramental symbols of blood and water. Continue reading →
This coming weekend we celebrate the 2nd Sunday of Easter in Lectionary Cycle B. Consider this one verse: When Jesus prayed for his disciples he said to the Father, “As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world” (17:18).
Jesus and the disciples were not born into a time of theological vacuum. Jewish theology was robust and with a history of succeeding and competing rabbinic schools. The followers of Jesus and the people of his time were Jews who were raised and lived this theology. It provided the framework for their daily lives and shaped their expectations about the Messiah, the Anointed One, who was to come. Among the gospels, John’s is the writings whose work expresses the fulfillment of those expectations and provides the theology for those that would follow Jesus. The basis of the theology is evident from the opening:
John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and Word was God…”
This coming weekend we celebrate the 2nd Sunday of Easter in Lectionary Cycle B. The disciples, still reeling from the events of the last three days, gather in the upper room. In Matthew 28:8, Mary Magdalene’s reaction to the encounter with Jesus was “fearful but overjoyed.” Perhaps this too is the experience of the disciples. All John tells us is that they were gathered together, hiding as it were, for fear of the Jews (v.19) Continue reading →
This coming weekend we celebrate the 2nd Sunday of Easter in Lectionary Cycle B. In the Johannine narrative our gospel occurs on what has been a full day: “On the evening of that first day of the week.” It was only that morning that Mary Magdalene had visited the tomb and confessed, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him” (20:2) – ironically echoing one the decisive misunderstanding of Jesus’ ministry: from where did Jesus come and where is he going (e.g. 7:33-36, 8:21-23). Mary became the first disciple of the good news of the empty tomb conveying the word to Peter and “the one whom Jesus loved.” Slowly the implications of the empty tomb and the burial linens come to the disciples and they begin to understand – each in differing ways and to varying degrees. The disciple whom Jesus loved “saw and believed” (20:8), however “they did not yet understand the scripture that he had to rise from the dead” (v.9). Continue reading →
Up until now, I had never written a commentary on the gospel for Easter Sunday. Perhaps it was left undone by all the activities leading up to Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, Holy Week, and Easter itself. But now it is done. This Easter Sunday the gospel reading is taken from John and describes the scene at the empty tomb:
1 On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. 2 So she ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.” 3 So, Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb. 4 They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; 5 he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in. 6 When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, 7 and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place. 8 Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed. 9 For they did not yet understand the scripture that he had to rise from the dead. (John 20:1-9) Continue reading →
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