First Reading
Acts of the Apostles 3:13-15, 17-19
Peter said to the people: “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and denied in Pilate’s presence when he had decided to release him. You denied the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. The author of life you put to death, but God raised him from the dead; of this we are witnesses. Now I know, brothers, that you acted out of ignorance, just as your leaders did; but God has thus brought to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer. Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away.”
Second Reading
1 John 2:1-5a
My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one. He is expiation for our sins, and not for our sins only but for those of the whole world. The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments. Those who say, “I know him,” but do not keep his commandments are liars, and the truth is not in them. But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him.
Gospel Cycle Cycle B
Luke 24:35-48
The two disciples recounted what had taken place on the way, and how Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of bread. While they were still speaking about this, he stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” But they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. Then he said to them, “Why are you troubled? And why do questions arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have.” And as he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed, he asked them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of baked fish; he took it and ate it in front of them. He said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. And he said to them, “Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”
All three readings today speak about situations in which people did things and made comments and really did not know what was happening at the spiritual level, at the level where God and our world interact. You and I are like that in our daily lives as well. Often God is at work and we ignore it, or we do not see it, or we refuse to believe it. And then we just go on living but the depths of spiritual possibility have been ignored or missed.
The first reading is from the Acts of the Apostles and recounts how Saint Peter told the people of this time that they had caused the death of Jesus. Then Saint Peter softens it and says that all of this was done out of ignorance. So the challenge is to move from ignorance to knowledge of the Lord Jesus. We must learn to know how God is at work in our lives, even when we may not be aware of it. This is a strong lesson because so many of us today live as if there were no God, even when we may pay homage to God with our lips.
The second reading today is from the First Letter of Saint John and speak about people who proclaim with their mouths that Jesus is Lord but by their actions they make their words lies. That means, of course, that we can all say that Jesus is Lord but unless we live in a way that proclaims that Jesus is truly Lord of my life, then our words are just lied and untruths.
This is the same message for all of us: if you and I really believe in god, then our lives have to change and we have to live in such a way that our actions proclaim Christ rather than have words that are empty of meaning.
The Gospel of Luke, which is given to us today, is the same message again: Christ can appear right in front of our noses and we may still not believe in Him because what He does is so far outside of our normal experiences.
We can sense in today’s Gospel that the disciples want to believe, but to believe asks quite a bit of them because they had seen the Lord Jesus die. How many ways the Lord Jesus can die in our lives! We can let Jesus die in our lives by not praying, by living in a way that excludes Him, by treating others and even ourselves in bad ways, by ignoring the demands of God in our personal life, etc. Then once again Jesus may break through and show us that He is alive and risen—and we can still reject that or we can accept that and try to make sense of it. It is not easy to believe!
We are invited to believe in the Lord Jesus today: the believe that He is God, to believe that He rose from the dead, to believe that He loves me personally and to believe that I must also work to bring the Good News to all peoples. Christ is risen! Christ is truly risen. Alleluia.