Third Sunday of Easter, C - April 25, 2004

            Now that Easter Sunday is over, what are we to do?  Do we turn away from these events of crucifixion and resurrection, and like Peter in today’s gospel announce that, well, we’ll just go fishing?   Back to the daily grind, the weekend thrill (so quickly come and gone and almost never as good as we had hoped); back to the ordinary life of work, occasional breaks from routine, a short vacation in the summer, back to school in the autumn, the long wait of winter and yet again the spring?  Meanwhile, we notice in the mirror the advance of age.  Everything seems to be coming and going in cycles, over and over again, the seasons of the year and the liturgical life of the Church:  spring, summer, autumn and winter; Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter.  Around and around it goes -- except for our own life, which moves, ultimately, in ONE direction, from birth, childhood, young adult, adult, old age and death.

            What is one to do?  The passage of time is relentless, unstoppable.  Like a boat on a fast moving river, without sail or motor, we are carried along.  How shall we respond now to Easter as it passes us on our way through time?   We hardly have time to stop and smell the Easter lilies.  Indeed they are already beginning to wither here before the altar.

            Shall we -- after the sorrow and penance of Lent and the joy of Easter -- just go back to the ordinary, back to the job, the house, back to fishing as if nothing happened?  Can we even? 

            As I have shared with you before, I as a young boy stood at the grave of my father and too young perhaps to be very deeply touched by death, nevertheless I wondered to myself if this is the end, if it all settles down to internment under the sod of some dreary cemetery, is it worth it?  How can life have any meaning whatsoever if it simply ends here?  How can I return to school, to the dinner table with its empty spot there, back to fishing -- my father’s and my favorite pastime -- when this has happened? 

            We can’t of course.  And if we would take just a few moments out of our busy -- way too busy lives -- and reflect on our existence, our existence especially as believing Christians, believing Catholics, we would know that in the light of Calvary and Easter, nothing stays the same.  There is now no living on this earth as if nothing had happened.  To try to go back to the ordinary life, back to the routine as if nothing happened, is to avoid the reality of our situation.  For in the midst of all that ordinary activity, which we must engage in, there come those times when we look up from our fishing nets and see Him on the shore.  “It is the Lord,” John the Apostle informed Peter.  It is the Lord. 

            It is the Lord, because the story did not end at the Cross.  It is the Lord there, alive and beckoning -- “Come and eat your meal,” He says to us -- because Easter really did happen.  And the world has never been the same since.  How in heaven’s name do we think that our lives could be, should be?  He arose from the dead, and His followers who knew Him before and after these tremendous events of the Easter season spread throughout the empire and turned the whole world upside down, that old, tired pagan world, a world our modern, so-called neo-pagans seem to forget; and they forget too how refreshing was the Christian message when began to make its way across that dying time of history.  We moderns forget how joyfully much of the known world became Christians when they heard this message – that nothing now, in the light of the Resurrection of Christ, is to stay the same, but everything now begins to take on the marvelous hue of eternal life.

            No, nothing is the same.  Oh yes, the years come and go, the Easter lilies flourish for such a short while and then are gone.  Spring rains and winter cold and more wrinkles around the eyes.  But it is all changed, transformed even.  On that dark day of the first good Friday the cycle of the meaningless revolution of the seasons was broken.  Death died when the author of life commended His spirit into the hands of the Father.  And the death of death was made evident to the whole world when Christ arose from its grasp.

            And so even death is changed.  Even the grave is transformed.  Like a furrow of newly plowed ground, which looks so barren, so is the grave that place where new life will spring forth on the last day.  Don’t you see?  It’s all changed forever, and our gathering here is another sign of that great transformation:  here where mere bread and wine brought forward from the ordinary work of human hands are so remarkably changed that words have never been adequate to describe the miracle.  But here He is.  “It is the Lord,” is what we say as bread-now-His-Body is lifted up something like when He was lifted up on the Cross that He might bear away our sins and bring us new life.  And here in this place, now, right now, He comes to us to feed us with that which prepares us for that new world which is coming.

            “I’m going out to fish,” Peter announced to the other disciples when they were all at a loss as to what they should do now that Jesus had died.  “I’m going out to fish,” Peter said.  I am just going to carry on, I suppose, like normal, like before this Jesus ever broke into our lives and filled us with such hope.  What else can I do?

            Then the voice from the shore:  “Come and eat your meal.”  “It is the Lord.”  It is the Mass, the Eucharist, to remind us that all is now new.  Yes, it is the Lord, Christ come back from the dead never to die again.  And nothing, nothing was ever the same for Peter the fisherman and the other disciples ever again.  And nothing, nothing, my dear brothers and sisters, is the same for us.  Time moves on.   We grow old with the cycle of the seasons.  We return to our work, our homes, our families, back to school, as we must, but with something drastically different because of His death and resurrection -- our own destiny which we know now reaches beyond the mere passing of seasons, of growing old, even beyond the cold grave, beyond time itself.  Because He really did rise from the dead, and thank God, nothing will ever be the same again.  Because it has all been made eternally new.