Third Sunday after Easter (A) 4 May 2014

Third Sunday after Easter (A) 4 May 2014

Luke 24: 13-35

José Antonio Pagola

Welcome  and use the power of the gospel

Two disciples of Jesus are leaving Jerusalem far behind them. They  are sad and desolate travelers. In their hearts the  hope they had placed in Jesus died when they saw him die on the cross. However, they continue to think of him. They cannot forget him. Was it all an illusion?

   While they were talking about and discussing all they had lived through, Jesus catches up and begins to travel along with them. However, the disciples do not  recognize him. The Jesus in whom they had placed so much trust and had  loved perhaps passionately, now seems to them a strange fellow traveler.

   Jesus joins their conversation. The travelers listen to him surprised, but slowly a new feeling grows in their hearts. They don’t know exactly what. Later on they will remark: “Were not our hearts on fire while he spoke to us on  the way?”

   The travelers felt attracted by the words of Jesus. A time comes when they need his company. They don’t want to let him go: “Stay with us”. During the supper their eyes will be opened, and they will recognize him. This is the  first message of the story: when we welcome Jesus as a fellow traveler, his words can awaken in us lost hope.

   In the course of these years, many people have lost their faith in Jesus. Slowly he has become a strange and incompatible person to them. All they know of him is what they can put together in bits and pieces starting with what they have heard of him from preachers and catechists.

   Undoubtedly, the Sunday homily plays an indispensable role, but it is clearly insufficient for people today to come into direct and living contact with the Gospel. The way it is done today, before a congregation that has to remain silent, without  spelling out their anxieties, questions and problems, it is difficult to regenerate the vacillating faith of so many people who seek, sometimes without knowing it, to meet Jesus.

   Has not the time arrived to launch a new and different forum, outside the context of the Sunday liturgy, to listen to the Gospel of Jesus? Why do we not, lay men and women, priests, convinced Christians and people who are interested in the faith, gather to listen, share, dialogue, and welcome the Gospel of Jesus?

We have to give the Gospel the opportunity to enter with all its transforming power into direct and immediate contact with the problems, crises, fears and hopes of the people of today. Soon it will be too late for us to recover among us the original freshness of the Gospel.