The grace of remembering
April 14—Third Sunday of Easter
Readings: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; Psalm 4, R. Lord, let your face shine on us.; 1 Jn 2:1-5a; Gospel—Luke 24:35-48
In the short ending of the Gospel of Mark, the Risen Lord scolds the disciples for not believing in Mary and the two disciples who encountered Him on the road to Emmaus. Our Gospel for this Sunday opens with the same scene, minus the scolding. Last Sunday, we had the story of doubting Thomas.
In both narratives, as we also see it today, the Lord obliged the doubting of His closest friends. Then he always helped them regain perspective, especially through the grace of remembering.
This Sunday, I invite you to reflect on this natural human process we go through. First, our moments of doubt and our struggles when confronted with challenges or crises. Second, the moment of the “antithesis.” Third, the moment of synthesis.
The Cross and the Resurrection were such a severe moment of crisis for the Risen Lord’s disciples. First, all their hopes and dreams of the Messiah were shattered by the death of Jesus on the Cross.
In the words of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, “… and we were hoping He was the one.” Such was the devastating effect of the Cross.
Amid the crisis of the Cross, the Risen Lord presented the antithesis, his Resurrection. But the disciples were too immersed in their grief, holding on to their preconceptions.
Such is the nature of crisis; it throws us off and we struggle to resolve it with what we are familiar with, which is what the crisis has broken down and what prevents us from recognizing the antithesis.
As Albert Einstein put it, insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, or it is solving a problem with the very same thing that caused it.
Out of our comfort zone
To put it simply, crisis invites us to get out of our comfort zone and have the courage to believe and hope anew.
The Resurrection was part of the crisis, as it was an unheard-of phenomenon.
The Cross and Resurrection, the Paschal Mystery, triggered the crisis. This is the grace of Christian paradox— “… in dying we are born into eternal life.”
The second moment, the antithesis is—for lack of a better term—pure grace. It is a privileged moment of encounter with the Risen Lord.
The moment of recognition comes with things familiar—the breaking of bread, calling us by name, the moment when we first encountered the Lord—in our relationship with the Lord, our most intimate moment with Him but viewed from the eyes of the Risen Lord.
The Risen Lord gives us the grace to overcome our inability to shift our perspective, our inability to leave our comfort zone. He makes us remember. He calls us by name. He breaks bread with us. He retells the story—the story about Him and our journey with Him.
This is the path to the synthesis, remembering, most especially remembering the journey of Jesus and our journey with him.
The third moment is the moment of synthesis. It is the moment when all doubts are overcome. It is the moment when we pray at the Mass, in the words of Doubting Thomas, “My Lord and my God.”
It is the moment when we rejoice because then we acknowledge Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior, our Risen Lord. —CONTRIBUTED INQ
