Friday of Easter Week

James Jacques Tissot. ‘Christ Appears on the Shore of the Sea of Tiberias.’ Between 1884-1896. Watercolor over graphite on paper. Brooklyn Museum, New York. 

There are several very curious elements to today’s Gospel reading (John 21: 1-14) in which the Risen Lord appears to some of his principal disciples who are fishing at the Sea of Tiberias. Why have they gone fishing immediately after the crucifixion and Resurrection? Why do they not recognize Jesus when he appears? Why do they catch nothing, but then bring in a massive haul of fish at the Lord’s direction? Why does the naked Simon Peter gird himself and leap into the sea when he realizes that Jesus is there? Why does the Lord offer them bread and roasted fish on shore? The careful reader will note even more intriguing things in the passage than these, but here we have a start.

The terrified and distraught disciples may simply have wanted to withdraw from Jerusalem and the by turns horrific (crucifixion) and joyous (Resurrection) scenes they had just witnessed. To use a perhaps poor analogy from our own lives, we often enjoy returning to ordinary domestic activities to settle our minds after returning from participation in some especially tragic or even extremely happy event. In the early Church, the disciples’ failure to recognize Jesus was often ascribed to their hardness of heart, dullness of mind and lack of faith, and I believe that patristic reading could well be applied here. St. Peter Chrysologus, a 5th century bishop of Ravenna, believed that it was the ‘beloved disciple’ John who was the first to recognize the Lord because ‘Love brings a sharper focus to bear on everything and the one who loves always feels with more intensity.’ St. Peter Chrysologus also wrote that Peter girded himself before leaping into the sea because ‘The guilty always cover themselves to conceal themselves. Thus, like Adam, Peter wanted to hide his nakedness today after his wrongdoing; both of them, before sinning, were clothed only by a holy nakedness. He hoped that the sea would wash the dirty clothes representing his betrayal. He jumped into the sea because he wanted to be the first to return, he to whom the greatest responsibilities had been entrusted. He girded his tunic around him because he was to gird himself for a martyr’s combat, according to the Lord’s words: “Another will gird you and lead you where you would rather not go.”‘ (John 21: 18)

The eating of roasted fish and bread on shore is of course reminiscent of the multiplication miracles found elsewhere in the Gospels, symbols of God’s power and providence. But the early Christians saw a special significance in the roasted fish, which they thought symbolized Christ himself, who had suffered and offered himself as a victim reminiscent of the ‘burnt offerings’ of the Old Testament. They even had a Latin saying: ‘Piscis assus, Christus passus” (‘The fish burnt, the Christ suffered’). The failure of the disciples to catch anything before the arrival of the Risen Lord may symbolize their powerlessness to proclaim the Gospel or convert people to Christ without faith and without Christ himself. St. Peter Chrysologous indeed saw the great catch of fish obtained at the Lord’s direction to contain a lesson about the conversion of souls to the life of the Church: ‘With great difficulty they bring back with them the Church cast to the winds of the world. This is what these men bring along to the light of heaven in the net of the Gospel and snatch from the deep to lead to the Lord.’ [I have taken these quotations from Sermon 78 by St. Peter Chrysologus, which you can find in various English translations online or in print.]

Thursday of Easter Week

Mary Magdalen Announcing the Resurrection to the Apostles. Illumination on parchment, c. 1123. St. Albans Psalter, St. Godehard’s Church, Hildesheim, Germany.

Our Gospel passage today is Luke 24: 35-48, and finds the disciples gathered in the locked upper room, discussing how two of them had come to recognize Jesus in the breaking of the 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.’ Now the different Gospel accounts are so varied when it comes to the Resurrection appearances, that we might fail to realize that this is the night of the Resurrection itself and that Jesus has now been seen five times: by Mary Magdalene alone in the garden, by the women on their way to tell the other disciples, by Peter alone, by the two disciples en route to Emmaus, and now at night by the eleven. Why does Jesus say ‘Peace be with you’? Because the door is locked and they are afraid in the aftermath of the crucifixion. Because Jesus has suddenly appeared to them, as if out of the ground itself, without making so much as a noise or any other sign to warn them. Because ‘Peace be with you’ was a traditional Jewish greeting denoting a wish for peace and prosperity. And because, beyond all these more temporal concerns, he knows that their faith is weak, that they are imperfect human beings, and that they have need of the profound peace of soul which only God can give. 

Now we probably all have ways of reminding ourselves of the peace bestowed by Christ, especially when we are troubled by some vexing problem, when we find ourselves overcome by anger, or even perhaps find ourselves the objects of the verbal abuse or hostile or vengeful actions of others. Here are two ways that help me. The first is to repeat some line of scripture, or a prayer, which moves me to stop focusing on destructive thoughts or feelings and concentrate on what is good and positive. This is one of my favorites, taken from the conclusion of the First Hour at the end of morning prayers each day: ‘Dies et actus nostros in sua pace disponat Dominus omnipotens.’ (‘May the almighty Lord arrange our day and actions in his peace.’) And the other is this: whenever I repeat the doxology, at the end of a psalm or at the conclusion of a decade of the Rosary, for example, I try to concentrate on each Person of the Holy Trinity and the role each plays in bringing me and my loved ones, including those departed, into existence: the Father as our ultimate origin and Creator; the Son as the one through whom we are created and redeemed; the Holy Spirit as the one who is breathed forth into us, giving us life, will sustain us in life even in death, and who will be breathed forth again into our resurrected bodies on the last day. All these meditations help me to keep some things in perspective. If you’re anything like me, chances are you’ll need all the divine help you can get. 

Pope Paul VI, in a general audience given on 09.04.75, offered some helpful thoughts on the meaning of peace in our lives, as a commentary on today’s Gospel. ‘Thus the risen Jesus announces and establishes peace in the disorientated souls of his disciples…It is the Lord’s peace, heard in all its original significance, personal, interior, both moral and psychological, and which is inseparable from happiness–that which St. Paul counts among the fruits of the Spirit after charity and joy, consolidated to a certain extent together with them (Gal. 5, 22)…The union of these three fruits is not far from our common, spiritual experience. It is the best answer to our query concerning the state of our conscience, when we can say: my conscience is at peace. What is more precious for the thoughtful man of honor?…Peace of conscience is the most authentic form of happiness. It helps us to be strong in adversity; it upholds the nobility and freedom of the person, even in the direst situations; it remains our lifeline, that is to say our hope…when despair would have the upper hand…This matchless gift of interior peace is the Risen One’s first gift.’ 

Wednesday of Easter Week

Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, c. 1907. Church of St. Peter in Chains, 12 Womersley Road, London, England.

In today’s Gospel (Luke 24: 13-35) we find the Risen Lord Jesus meeting two of his disciples traveling along the road to Emmaus. And they do not recognize him until after they reach their destination, when they finally see him present, after he has explained the scriptures to them, in the breaking of the bread. Here is how St. Augustine, a 5th century North African bishop, understood the passage in one of his sermons: ‘The Teacher goes with them along the way and is himself the way, but they are not yet on the true way. When Jesus meets up with them they have lost this way. When he was still with them before his Passion he had foretold everything to them: his sufferings, death, resurrection on the third day…But his death had made them lose their memory.’ 

I am interested in why the disciples did not recognize the Lord. Had he altered his appearance? Or was it simply, as seems to be the case, that their eyes were blinded through lack of comprehension of his message, their hearts were hardened through lack of faith, and they had never really understood the Lord Jesus in the first place anyway. ‘We had hoped,’ they say, ‘that he (Jesus of Nazareth) would redeem Israel.’ St. Augustine’s commentary on these words is this: ‘Really, disciples? You had hoped and now hope no longer? Yet Christ is alive and hope in you is dead? Yes, Christ is alive but the living Christ found the hearts of his disciples dead…He walks alongside them and seems to be following them, yet it is he who is guiding them…They walk as dead men with the living, as dead men with Life itself. Life walks by their side. Yet in their hearts life has not yet been made new.’

When, toward the end of the passage, Jesus interprets for them what referred to him in the scriptures, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, then breaks bread with them, we see an early and striking reference to the celebration of the Eucharist. ‘Why,’ people sometimes ask, ‘does Jesus not simply appear to us bodily, so that we may believe?’ The answer is: he does. For, having risen from the dead, as the disciples on the road to Emmaus eventually realized, and particularly since his glorious Ascension into heaven, the Risen Lord has passed mysteriously over into the Church itself, and into the consecrated elements of bread and wine which we offer and receive in the Eucharist as his sacred body and blood. It is no accident that Jesus vanished the instant the disciples recognized him in the breaking of the bread, for he was still vividly with them in the sacred action they were in the midst of experiencing. And they were soon to carry that sacred mystery out into all the world through their preaching and in the liturgical practice of the early Church. And there is one more thing, as St. Augustine reminds us: ‘If you will have life, then do what they [the disciples] did which led to them recognizing the Lord: they received him as their guest. He appeared as someone continuing on his journey, yet they held him fast, begging him to remain…If you want to recognize the Lord,’ St. Augustine teaches us, ‘then hold fast your guest.’ 

Tuesday of Easter Week

Mary Magdalen with Daffodils. Silver-gilt, polychrome and enamel cloisonné and filigree. Russian, c. 1890. 

Just today I came across an anonymous 13th century monastic homily on today’s Gospel (John 20: 11-18) in which Mary Magdalen stands weeping at Jesus’ open tomb, distraught because his body is not there. Meanwhile, he seems to have radically changed in appearance, so that she does not at first recognize him. Here is how the 13th century homilist describes it: ‘A touching scene, filled with goodness, in which he who is desired and sought reveals himself while hiding himself. He hides himself so as to be sought even more ardently, found with even more joy, held even more carefully until he is brought, so as to remain there, into the dwelling place of love (cf Sg 3,4). This is how Wisdom, who “finds her delight in the sons of men, plays on the surface of the earth” (Pr 8,31).’

One of the things which interests me most about the Christian life is what it has the power to do deep within the hearts and minds and souls of individuals. What takes place over time, in other words, in terms of the rearrangement of what we might think of as our ‘interior furniture’, when we come to a life of faith? If we meditate upon the scriptures each day? If we examine our consciences and periodically confess our faults? If we pray the various liturgical hours of the day and consider the mysteries of salvation history with which they are generally associated? If we attend the Divine Liturgy, follow the prayers and sacred actions attentively, allow ourselves to be united to the Lord sacramentally in a way which defies our limited powers of understanding? What takes place deep within us as persons if we daily struggle to control our appetites rather than have them control us, practice patience and forgiveness, begin to see the world as a place which God has created and in which he is intensively at work, rather than as a meaningless random accident to be explained away by science and used ruthlessly for the gratification of our own childish desires? I am interested, for example, in exactly what took place within the souls of the people to whom St. Peter was preaching on the day of Pentecost in today’s first reading from Acts when, in response to the apostle’s calling them to account for their part in the crucifixion, we read that: ‘Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and they asked Peter and the other apostles, “What are we to do, my brothers?”‘ What exactly did this cutting ‘to the heart’ mean, and how did it change them irrevocably?

As for what was taking place within Mary Magdalen’s soul at the empty tomb, the soul of one whose ‘interior furniture’ had already been radically rearranged, to say the least, by the Lord during the years of his pre-Resurrection ministry on earth, let us return to our 13th century preacher as he imagines the Risen Lord speaking to this most ardent of his disciples: ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for? Do you have him you are looking for and not know him? The true, eternal joy and you weep? You have within you the one you are looking for without. In truth, you are standing outside in floods of tears beside a tomb. My tomb is your heart. I am not dead in it but resting, alive for eternity. Your soul is my garden and you are right to think I am the gardener. The new Adam, I tend and keep my paradise. Your tears, your love and your desire are my work. You possess me within you without knowing it and that is why you seek me without. So I am going to appear to you there, too, to make you return to yourself so as to find within what you are looking for without.’ 


Monday of Easter Week

James Jacques Tissot. ‘Christ Appears to Mary Magdalene’, 1884-1886. Watercolor over graphite on paper.  Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Perhaps, in trying to imagine the disciples’ joy on hearing that the Lord had risen from the dead, we might imagine how we ourselves would feel if we were to learn that someone we had loved deeply and lost in death had been raised from the grave. Because, for those who had come to know Jesus in his earthly life, he had become everything: he healed their hopeless infirmities; he forgave the darkest of their sins; he fed them when they had nothing to eat; he brought those who had become the dregs and outcasts of society back into the company of the loved and accepted. So that when he was taken away from them, their lives were utterly shattered, and when he returned, their joy was indescribably great, and they hastened to Galilee to see him again, with just the same kind of joy, though in even greater magnitude, that we might experience with the return from the dead of a departed loved one. Indeed, it is with just such joy that we expectantly await our reunion with our friends and loved ones in the Lord in heaven.

But there is of course more. St. Peter Chrysologus, 5th century Bishop of Ravenna in Italy, saw Mary Magdalen and the other Mary in today’s Gospel passage (Mt. 28: 8-15) as models and images of the Church being sent on its mission to proclaim the Resurrection and to greet the Risen Lord himself. ‘It was the Bride whom the angel was sending towards the Bridegroom,’ he says in his 76th sermon, one of the 176 sermons which have survived to our day. And, interestingly enough, St. Peter places just as much emphasis on the Risen Lord’s own joy on seeing the two Marys as on these two women’s joy on beholding their Divine Master once again. ‘How was it that he hastened to meet these women along the way and greeted them so joyfully? He didn’t wait to be recognized, didn’t seek to be identified, didn’t allow himself to be questioned, but hurried eagerly towards this encounter. This is what the strength of love does; it is stronger than all else, exceeds all else. In greeting the Church, Christ greets himself, for he has made it his own.’ Perhaps we have never stopped to try to imagine Jesus’ own indescribable joy to find himself on Easter morning, still lying in the sealed tomb but opening his eyes and rising to his feet, about to hurry forth to see his disciples and banish their sorrow forever.

When we read the accounts in the Acts of the Apostles of St. Paul and his companions traveling thousands of miles in order to preach the Gospel, we may find ourselves feeling exhausted at the very thought of the work which all that would have entailed. And indeed it brought these early evangelists much in terms of suffering and privation. Yet it is also clear that, in the preaching of the Word and the breaking of the bread in the celebration of the Eucharist, St. Paul and the others experienced such an intense and personal encounter with the Risen Lord himself that they were willing to give themselves joyfully to whatever the work of proclaiming him might require. It was all a far cry from the grim sense of obedience with which some had approached their desperate struggle to live up to the demands of the Old Testament Mosaic law. Rather ‘The commandment had become grace,’ as St. Melito, Bishop of Sardis in what is now western Turkey, put it in a 2nd century Easter homily, excerpts of which are read during the Office of Vigils during these Easter days. May that same grace bring us joy, as we too go forth to meet the Risen Lord and, much more importantly, he goes forth with even greater joy to meet us.