Meditation Of His Beatitude Patriarch Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa : Third Sunday Of Easter
Below you can find the Meditation of His Beatitude Patriarch Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, for the Third Sunday Of Easter, on Sunday 14 April 2024.
Lk 24:35-48
The Gospel passage of the Third Sunday of Easter (Lk 24:35-48) can be reread in filigree with the Gospel of last Sunday (Jn 20:19-31): while the disciples are gathered in the house, the risen Lord makes himself present, gives his peace, shows his wounds, invites us not to fear, stirs great joy.
The Church makes us pause in the Upper Room because she knows how important it is for our faith life to learn to recognize the Lord, to welcome the signs of his Paschal presence.
First, I would like to emphasize what Jesus, risen from death, does not say.
The Risen One does not reassure his disciples that everything will be all right, that they will have no problems; he does not say that the time of suffering is over and that from now on, finally, everything will be easy.
The Lord does not mislead, just as He had never misled anyone during the years of His earthly life: to His disciples, He had proposed a demanding path, which also passed for them, as for Him, through the cross of a life given. The Lord does not deceive, because His resurrection does not impose a new era, a new way of life, on the world, but simply offers it, and proposes it.
And he offers it to those who believe that Easter is really a way of life, to those who believe that only what dies in self-giving and remains alive in love and relationship is true and eternal.
This is why we mentioned last Sunday that peace and joy are Easter gifts: they are born only from Easter and can be received only by those who walk after the Lord and pass through death with him to enter new life.
Today's passage also emphasizes three aspects of this journey of faith and conversion.
The first we see the Lord eat and drink what they offer Him (Lk 24:42-43) to "convince" His own that He is not a ghost.
And this is to say that the Risen One is not an image, an idea, a thought: he is a presence, he is someone who shares life with us, always.
To his Church, Jesus promises his faithful presence, within history: a history that will be no less dramatic than His own, but where His own will be able to count on Him and His Easter gifts, and on the Spirit that He will give them in fullness on the day of Pentecost.
The second, according to the evangelist Luke, is found in these words, "...He opened their minds to understand the scriptures" (Lk 24:45).
After eating, Jesus stops with them and reflects on the history of salvation as told in the scriptures. And he does this transaction, which is fitting of the crucified and risen Lord: he opens.