Happy Easter everyone.  I hope you had a great week basking in the joy of Easter, and I hope that you were able to recognize that the joy we experience is the same joy of the first disciples, who received the Lord in His risen body. Through receiving Jesus in Word and Sacrament, we are experiencing the resurrected presence of Jesus Christ in a very real way here at Mass.  

 

Today’s Gospel passage says that the proof of Jesus’ resurrection was written down so that “you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this belief we may have [eternal] life in His name.”   

 

This week I led a guided scripture reflection at Wahlert High School for sophomores and juniors, and I told them that the Scriptures we proclaim are not merely words on a page, but are the living and active word of God, able to penetrate our minds and hearts with the truth about the resurrection of Christ and the promise of eternal life.  The words still speak to us today if we are open to them.  They can still be proof for us.

 

When Jesus appeared to the first disciples, He breathed on them and spoke to them in order to communicate the gift of the Holy Spirit. When we hear the Scriptures proclaimed, Jesus is also speaking to us with the breath of the Holy Spirit. 

 

Jesus was not content to merely have a written record of His life that we could appreciate in a historical critical sense. Jesus wants to speak to us personally and powerfully through the Scriptures. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can know His voice, just as Thomas and the other disciples came to know His voice.

 

We should also consider the resurrected presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Though we do not yet see Jesus in His human form, we truly see and receive His sacramental body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Eucharist. Through the celebration of Communion, Jesus  gives Himself to us in a way that unites us to the experience of the first disciples.  

 

Jesus was not content to merely show His resurrected body to the first disciples and have us wait for His second coming. Jesus wants to give His resurrected body to every disciple in the Eucharist.  

Because we receive Jesus’ body into our bodies, the celebration of the Eucharist creates a deeper union with Him every time we receive Him here at Mass. This relationship with God is a real relationship, and like every relationship, it grows deeper in love and trust as time goes on, if we keep talking and listening to each other.  Every time we come to Mass we should listen for at least one thing that God wants to say to us, and then we should really let that sink in as we receive His Body and Blood.

 

On this great Feast of Divine Mercy, we have an opportunity to really recognize God’s personal love for us.  God the Father is a loving Dad who just wants us to be safe, secure and loved in His house for eternity.  We heard in our second reading we have, “an inheritance, kept in heaven for you.” God gave us Divine Mercy to help us to his House.

 

I was at a family’s house recently and they have a few young grandchildren, and it was just awesome for me to sit back and watch them all just dote over these children. The adults would hold them in the air or play with them and kids would smile and giggle, and the room was filled with so much love and joy. The love for each was so apparent, tangible. I just thought, “this is the way that God looks at each one of us, His beautiful children.”

 

And this is why Jesus came to Earth was that we could be reconciled to the Father for the forgiveness of sin, so we could enter His house, pure as little children.  A key piece of today’s celebration of Divine Mercy is going to confession, which I talked about last week, but this week we have the key scripture, it was key for my recognition of the truth of this Sacrament: Jesus said “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

 

It hit me: “How can our sins be either forgiven or retained unless we tell them to someone?”* This was a proof text for me, which I received with joy, just as if God spoke it to me, because I finally realized this confession thing wasn’t a burden, it was a gift! 

Jesus gave me a way to hear with my own ears that I was forgiven, just like the gift of His true presence in the Eucharist showed He was still here. We should rejoice, then, with the same joy of the first disciples!  Jesus will come again today to give us His body. May the Holy Spirit deepen our faith in the bible, the Eucharist, and the priest in confession as the presence of Jesus among us. Jesus Christ is risen and present in our lives. As we receive the Eucharist, we can proclaim with Thomas: “My Lord and my God!”