In my homily last Sunday, Feast of the Divine Mercy, at our center, where I celebrate a regular 10 a.m. Sunday Mass, I told the community that for the next Sundays of Easter I will reflect on the different aspects of mission all the way to the Feast of the Ascension, where we see the Risen Lord commissioning his community to continue his mission on earth.
Then in the Pentecost, the Sunday after, we see this community being given the primary tool to live out and bring the mission to completion, the gift of the Holy Spirit.
This Sunday we look at two aspects of mission: the encounter with the source of mission, the Risen Lord, and the inherent “logical response” to the encounter, witnessing.
This Sunday’s Gospel is sandwiched between these two aspects of mission. We start the passage with the closing lines of the narrative of the encounter of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus who “recounted what had taken place on the way and how Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of bread.”
Here we get the synthesis of one of the most powerful and heartwarming encounters of the Risen Lord with his early community. The elements are all there: the encounter with the Risen Lord as he reenters the journey of his friends; the reinspiration of the mission, “hearts burning within”; and the special moment of recognition.
In this special moment, the transition comes into play. “It is the Lord!” as John cries out in the John 21 Resurrection appearance. Then the renewed inspiration bursts forth.
In John, Peter jumps into the water and swims to the Risen Lord. With the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, they get up from the table, run back to Jerusalem and proclaim, “It is true, the Lord has been raised!”
Falling short
The witness to mission is where we, myself included, often fall short.
We have said several times that this living out of mission is always a sharing in the mission of Christ.
As suggested framework for assessing your own pattern of living out mission, please consider the crisis, antithesis and synthesis process of the Greeks.
Crisis, the breakdown in the status quo, confronts us with a choice—to accept the breakdown or to hold on to the old order that no longer works. As Einstein said, we cannot solve a problem or an anomaly with the same paradigm or order that created it.
This is another way of describing the need to accept the breakdown and thus open us to the antithesis, a new perspective, a new way of doing things.
The crisis comes to a head in the Agony in the Garden, where he seems to make a last-ditch effort to hold on to the status quo—“If it is possible, let this cup pass away from me”—but opens up to acceptance: “Father, not my will, but your will be done.”
In this moment of choice, the antithesis unfolds: the cross and the resurrection. This radically sets a new way of doing things: “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
The cross shows us how suffering is transformed into sacrifice and made life-giving by love. No one wants to suffer. The default mode does not make suffering the first option, which makes the suffering meaningful as we freely choose to suffer out of love for God and others.
In the resurrection, we have the mother of all game changers. Everything in our life is potentially meaningful because of the resurrection, because life does not end in death. Everything in our life can be integrated into meaning and mission.
Now the synthesis is possible. The living out of the mission is the synthesis.
In simple and quiet ways or in dramatic moments, the genuine encounter with the Risen Lord is in experiencing the grace of the cross and resurrection—of crisis, antithesis and synthesis.
The response to this encounter is to go forth in mission, to be a witness to the cross and the resurrection, living our day-to-day life with a sense of mission, meaning and purpose.
Let me share a couple of short stories on encounter.
The first is about a young man who saw me for spiritual accompaniment. For years he knew he had wanted to serve God, to live a life that was mission-inspired. Two indelible moments in our journey portray genuine encounter.
Palm of God’s hand
The first was when, after months of spiritual conversations, I told him that maybe his mission was to let people believe in goodness. When I told him this, his face lit up and he went into a fetal position, perhaps feeling the security and safety of a child in the womb, or the palm of God’s hand.
Months later, I mentioned the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Again, he lit up and got visibly excited, like a child opening presents on Christmas morning. It was the same passage that inspired him to follow Christ as a high school student.
The second story is about a friend who went through life-changing crises for the past 15 years. He had another the past weeks, and asked if we could talk.
He shared his anxieties, and how he had to begin to understand the patterns of what he had gone through the past 15 years, as he faced his crises.
Eventually, two themes emerged: his desire to go to Mass more often, and his encounter with the Pope on his recent visit here.
In his early crisis, he had gone to Mass every day and felt it was his only refuge. Then when he faced other crises, he could not get himself to do the daily Mass again because he felt it was a sign of defeat. Yet every time he went to Mass on Sundays, he was often moved to tears, especially at the Our Father.
On the Pope’s recent visit, he was glued to the TV set watching every event. He would be moved to tears—tears of joy, but he still did not understand what they meant.
I told him that these tears of joy are what Ignatius called experiences of consolation without previous cause. The only cause for this is a deep experience of God’s presence, a genuine encounter with God that need not be mediated by an action or event.
It is this encounter that made the two disciples on the road to Emmaus say, “Were not our hearts burning within us?” And it was their response to the encounter that led to mission.
The encounters in our life are gifts; like all graces, they are freely given by God, not earned by us.
But grace is also personal. It is not generic. Grace is given for us to be able to live our personal mission that is forged and nurtured by our personal relationship with God. But we must embrace this grace, open our life to it, and let it transform us.
Grace is always God’s love, and this love has been defined once and for all in the cross and resurrection.