FROM THE PASTOR’S DESK
Dear St. Mary’s Parishioners:
Over the next eight days, we will celebrate the “Easter Octave”. The Church gives us this special time because the joy of the Resurrection is too big to be contained to one day. It’s as if the Church wants to give us more time to really savor God’s amazing gift of raising Jesus from the dead. (It is significant that the 50 days of the Easter season are longer than Lent’s 40 days.) Each day during the Easter Octave, we are treated to a different account of Our Lord’s followers meeting Him after He rose from the dead. One of my favorites is the encounter between Jesus and the two disciples of Emmaus in the Gospel of Luke. (cf Lk 24:13-35)
We remember that Our Lord first encountered the men as they were walking to Emmaus and away from Jerusalem. So, even though they are going the wrong way, Jesus sought them out and walked with them. This is what Jesus does. He meets us where we are and walks with us. Our Lord asked the disciples: “What are you discussing as you walk along?” Jesus must have known what the two men were talking about. After all, He is God. He must have known that they were upset, frustrated, maybe even angry. But Jesus gave the disciples a chance to get all their feelings out. He encouraged them to surrender their feelings of frustration, fear and sadness to Him.
Jesus does the same with us. When we pray, He wants us to share with him our frustrations, our disappointments, and, yes, our occasional anger. To be sure, He also wants us to share our joys and our gratefulness with him. The point is that Jesus meets us wherever we are, just as He met the disciples on the way to Emmaus. Jesus already knows about our loneliness, our fears, our insecurities, our frustrations and our joyful moments. But He wants us to tell him about them anyway. Because in the telling of them to the Lord, we get a better handle on them---with his help of course. So Jesus waits for us patiently to come to Him. He longs for us to take up his invitation to walk alongside him.
After Jesus explained the Scriptures to the men, they invited Jesus to have a meal with them. The Emmaus disciples wanted to remain in Jesus’ presence. And when Jesus took bread, said the blessing and broke it, the eyes of the disciples were opened. After Jesus vanished from their sight, they said to each other: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” It is at this point in the story that a light went on for the disciples. Before they had the information, but they didn’t quite grasp the meaning. Jesus had said to them: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” The disciples needed to see that love and suffering go together, and that the supreme expression of love and suffering can be found in the Cross, in Jerusalem. Jesus helped the men to see this by celebrating the Eucharist. After seeing this, the men returned to Jerusalem. In other words, they reversed their course and went the way they needed to go. They returned to Jerusalem where love and suffering go together and are fruitful.
A most blessed Easter season to you all!
In the Resurrected Lord,
Father Berg
