From Emmaus to Indiana

User's Guide to Sunday, April 19

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Sunday, April 19, is the Third Sunday of Easter (Year B).

 

Emmaus Hikes

It’s April, and it’s Easter, so it’s time to get outdoors. This Sunday is traditionally “Emmaus Sunday” because it often includes the Gospel reading of the disciples on the road to Emmaus (today’s Mass includes the reading immediately following that one). So this Sunday the Hoopes family begins “Emmaus hikes” — followed by a Catholic movie (it’s Sound of Music this week). It is a good way to make Sunday special and to grow closer as a family.

 

Mass Readings

Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; Psalm 4:2, 4, 7-9; 1 John 2:1-5; Luke 24:35-48

 

Our Take

It’s a discouraging time for Catholics and other Christians.

Look overseas, and you see Christians martyred for the faith in horrifying ways. In China, the government is destroying churches; in India, anti-Christian activists destroy Christians’ property.

At home, things are not nearly that bad, but they are discouraging still: In Indiana, for instance, a firestorm was started over a commonsense religious-freedom law.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act allowed Christian businesses to decline to be involved in ceremonies they don’t believe in. But because activists who want to redefine marriage complained, the state’s reasonable law was made to look bigoted and evil. Major corporations announced plans to boycott Indiana — ironically exercising the very right that they want to see stripped from Christian citizens.

Shouldn’t a country founded in large part by Christians have more sense than this?

Perhaps it should, but as the first reading reminds us, we shouldn’t be surprised when we see setbacks and suffering.

Peter tells the Jews that the Lord “had announced beforehand, through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer.”

It is not just Christianity’s adversaries who forget that, though. In the Gospel, we hear about the apostles’ reaction to Jesus after the Resurrection.

“They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost,” says the Gospel.

Clearly, the disciples were not listening carefully when Jesus taught them. He never taught them that they would be conquerors. He never promised to be a Messiah who won political victories that made the world a comfortable place for his followers.

He told them quite the opposite.

Jesus reminds them what he had told them already: “It is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

The early apostles were in a much worse position than American Christians — they really were in the position of the Christians suffering martyrdom in our day.

Yet Jesus reminded them that Easter is a time for joy and a time to advance, not retreat.

Persecution is part of the life story for any follower of the One who was crucified and died for us. We are entering a dark time in America, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it. The same Jesus Christ who rose from the dead and accompanied the earliest Christians is with us even now.

He brings grace and joy, because he is the central figure in the world’s history and the One who matters most to its future.

We can be confident that, whatever the future brings, it is safe with him.

 

Tom and April Hoopes write from Atchison, Kansas,

where Tom is writer in residence at Benedictine College.