----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Raymond . . .
To: ...Donald
Sent: Sunday, 22 April 2012, 12:05
Subject: Peace be with you
Sun 3 Easter 2012
When you read today’s Gospel and then read the other accounts of the Lord’s appearances after his resurrection it’s very hard to know in what sequence these appearances took place. Perhaps this is due to the fact that, on this first Easter morning, time and eternity were getting mixed up. The Risen Lord was stepping in and out of the one to the other: from time into eternity; from eternity back into time. This would surely make a time scale of the apparitions impossible. Any attempt to set a chronological order to these events would be doomed to failure. It isn’t surprising then to read, in today’s Gospel, about the bewilderment of the Apostles. They hear about Jesus appearing at the tomb to Mary Magdalen; then they hear about an appearance to Peter; then, while their minds are still reeling as they try to take all this in, Jesus appears to them all together there and then in the room while they were still listening to the two disciples who had just met Him on their way to Emmaeus. In spite of Jesus’ reassuring greeting: “Peace be with you!”, they are, as the Evangelist tells us, “alarmed and frightened”. “They thought they were seeing a ghost”.
We can well imagine too what other thoughts might have been in the background of their minds when it began to dawn on them that this really was the Master. After all hadn’t they all abandoned him to his fate that night in Gethsemani? Hadn’t they all fled for their own lives and left him to be captured by the soldiers; to be dragged away by the rabble. The events of that night must have been still very vividly in their minds. As for Peter, how did he feel? Peter who had denied him three times, Peter who had cursed and swore that he didn’t even know him. No wonder Jesus had to say to them “Why are you so agitated?”
But then came the great transition for them from bewilderment and fear to a joy that they could hardly believe. Jesus showed them the wounds in his hands and feet; he proved that he was no mere ghostly apparition: he asked them for something to eat and he ate it before their very eyes. But most of all their hearts were calmed as they realized that he was greeting them, not with words of disappointment; words of recrimination, he was greeting them with that word of “Peace”; that word that was so unexpected and so very healing, and so very typical of the Master they knew. Finally, before he leaves them again, Jesus sums up for them in a few words his whole mission on earth:
“You see how it is written that the Christ would suffer and, on the third day, rise from the dead, and that, in his name, repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. The disciples were now ready for the great Pentecost event that would banish their last vestiges of fear and send them out to the world.