“…He opened their minds to understand the scriptures”

Meditation Of H.B. Card. Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch Of Jerusalem: Third Sunday Of East

The Gospel passage of the Third Sunday of Easter (Lk 24:35-48) can be reread in filigree with the Gospel of last Sunday (Jn 20:19-31): while the disciples are gathered in the house, the risen Lord makes himself present, gives his peace, shows his wounds, invites us not to fear, stirs great joy.

The Church makes us pause in the Upper Room because she knows how important it is for our faith life to learn to recognize the Lord, to welcome the signs of his Paschal presence.

First, I would like to emphasize what Jesus, risen from death, does not say.

The Risen One does not reassure his disciples that everything will be all right, that they will have no problems; he does not say that the time of suffering is over and that from now on, finally, everything will be easy.

The Lord does not mislead, just as He had never misled anyone during the years of His earthly life: to His disciples, He had proposed a demanding path, which also passed for them, as for Him, through the cross of a life given. The Lord does not deceive, because His resurrection does not impose a new era, a new way of life, on the world, but simply offers it, and proposes it.

And he offers it to those who believe that Easter is really a way of life, to those who believe that only what dies in self-giving and remains alive in love and relationship is true and eternal.

This is why we mentioned last Sunday that peace and joy are Easter gifts: they are born only from Easter and can be received only by those who walk after the Lord and pass through death with him to enter new life.

Today’s passage also emphasizes three aspects of this journey of faith and conversion.

The first we see the Lord eat and drink what they offer Him (Lk 24:42-43) to “convince” His own that He is not a ghost.

And this is to say that the Risen One is not an image, an idea, a thought: he is a presence, he is someone who shares life with us, always.

To his Church, Jesus promises his faithful presence, within history: a history that will be no less dramatic than His own, but where His own will be able to count on Him and His Easter gifts, and on the Spirit that He will give them in fullness on the day of Pentecost.

The second, according to the evangelist Luke, is found in these words, “…He opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (Lk 24:45).

After eating, Jesus stops with them and reflects on the history of salvation as told in the scriptures. And he does this transaction, which is fitting of the crucified and risen Lord: he opens.

Jesus died while opening: At his death the veil of the temple was torn open, the centurion opened to the faith, the tombs opened…

And the risen Jesus continues to open: He opens the tomb; he opens their minds to understand the Scriptures. Just as the good shepherd does, as we will see next Sunday, he opens the fence where the flock is locked up with no hope of getting out.

The Risen One opens minds, that is, he makes them see what life truly is, a continuous Easter. And he makes them see that this has always been written because it has always been inscribed in the depth of God’s life and history with Man.

The third passage is, with the fence now open, the Church is called to depart. Depart from where and to where?

To depart from the experience of the encounter with the Risen One, to go everywhere with an open mind of the Scriptures, and to be witnesses to God’s logic, which always follows the Paschal logic, which has always been present in the Scriptures and has been now fulfilled, fully revealed in Jesus. The Church cannot proclaim anything but this, for this alone it has witnessed.

It has witnessed, in a special way, that God forgives, and that the Risen One can be found right there, where we open ourselves to his healing and saving mercy.

The moment the Church proclaims anything else, in which she adopts other logics, she would cease to be the Church of the crucified and risen Lord, she would no longer be faithful to Him, or even to herself.

That is why the Easter season invites us to remain in the Upper Room, so that our minds too, can open to the Scriptures. And we can learn to be the Church that makes room for the Risen One, which walks with Him, and faithfully witnesses to Him, starting from Jerusalem.

+ Pierbattista