Homily for Sunday, 19 April 2015– Third Sunday of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; Psalm 4:2, 4, 7-8, 9; 1 John 2:1-5a; Luke 24:35-48

This homily was given at Anglin House, the residence for elderly and infirm Basilians in Toronto, ON, Canada.

“You are witnesses of these things,” we hear today from Luke’s Gospel. Later, Peter echoes these words to the people he addresses in Acts, taking the identity of witness upon himself and the other disciples of Jesus: “To this we are witnesses.” To what are we witnesses? What is the central message that we have been invited to proclaim “to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem”; beginning from when the risen Christ stood among his first disciples in the upper room at Emmaus?

“Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day,” Jesus reminds his disciples, “and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name.” Repentance and forgiveness of sins: To this we are witnesses. Repentance and forgiveness of sins: This is at the core of the message of the risen Christ; the message that our Lord invites us to continue to proclaim and, more importantly, to live out day to day.

How are we to be witnesses to repentance and forgiveness of sins? We cannot go back to stand among the first witnesses to the risen Christ in the upper room, who first heard Jesus’ greeting, “Peace be with you.” We cannot stand with those first disciples who “in their joy” at seeing the risen Christ were “disbelieving and still wondering.” We cannot witness directly to Peter’s address to “the people” of Israel. These events are finished; in the past.

I like to imagine Peter’s speech in our first reading, from Acts, as the opening arguments at a courtroom trial. Only these opening arguments are not from the prosecution or the defense, but from the defendant. In Acts, Peter lays out the charge against the people: Rejection; denial of “the Holy and Righteous One”; asking “to have a murderer given to” them in the place of Jesus, the Christ; killing Jesus, “the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead.” “To this we are witnesses,” Peter says. But Peter speaks not as one who has any right to accuse the people of anything but as the guilty party. Peter stands for us. Peter and we are all guilty of this crime of having denied Christ; having handed Christ over to death for our sins.

And then something remarkable happens at this trial: We are clearly guilty beyond reasonable doubt, but we are not condemned. Instead, we are pardoned. We are forgiven. This was God’s will for us all along, “that his Messiah should suffer.” By Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection, we are forgiven and, even more remarkably, given the chance to be witnesses to our own forgiveness by our own lives. We, the defendants at this trial, represented by Peter, become this trial’s star witnesses. So how do we go about being witnesses?

We cannot go back in time to re-live these events of our Scriptures: Peter’s address to the people of Israel in Acts; Jesus’ appearance in the upper room to his disciples in Emmaus. Yet in his reflection for today’s readings in America Magazine, John Martens points out that we witness in two ways to the resurrected Christ and what Christ’s resurrection means for us as Christians. First, we witness to “the authenticity and trustworthiness of the” first “witnesses”; to Jesus’ first disciples and Apostles who first encountered our risen Lord physically present among them. We trust the truth revealed to us in Scripture and by the tradition of the Church, handed on to us from the first Apostles; from these first direct witnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Second, even more importantly, we bear witness to the risen Christ by “the authenticity and trustworthiness of our lives.” How can we live our lives in a way that is most authentic and trustworthy? I ask this: How many of us have ever been forgiven of some wrongdoing? How many of us have been forgiven, especially when we did not expect to be forgiven by the person we had wronged, at least not as immediately or as generously as this person forgave us? I can think of a few instances in my own life in which I have been forgiven. I have even gone, filled with guilt on a few occasions, to people I have wronged, only to hear, “I forgive you; do not worry. No longer dwell on what you did wrong. Let it go.” How freeing! Has anyone ever approached us, having wronged us, thinking she or he would surely be scolded or condemned (maybe when we have heard confessions, those of us who are priests), and we have instead responded with great tenderness and forgiveness? This generous forgiveness is an image of God’s forgiveness for us, shown most fully by Christ’s death and resurrection for us. “To this we are witnesses.”

And being witnesses means extending the same forgiveness to others that we have received. Who is in most need of our forgiveness? I ask all of us, the next time we have a chance to pray silently for a few minutes, to think of one person who is most in need of our forgiveness. Maybe this person is a member of our family; a friend; an acquaintance; maybe even a member of our religious community; a Basilian confrère… This is the person to whom God is inviting you; inviting me today to reach out in forgiveness; to witness to the forgiveness we have all been granted because Christ died and is risen for us! This is how God invites all of us to ever greater “authenticity and trustworthiness” of our lives as Christians.

This is how God invites all of us today to witness to the “repentance and forgiveness of sins” that is central to Peter’s message to the people of Israel after Jesus had risen from the dead. This is how God invites all of us today to witness to the “repentance and forgiveness of sins” that is the central message of Jesus’ appearance to his disciples in the upper room at Emmaus.

This is the message that we as Church, beginning with the first disciples; “beginning from Jerusalem,” have been entrusted with proclaiming “in [Jesus’] name to all nations.” Proclaim by all means and, even more importantly, live by “repentance and forgiveness of sins.” Reach out with the same forgiveness we have been given by God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Reach out with the same forgiveness we have, at one time or another, received from another person. Reach out with forgiveness. “To this,” to God’s gift of forgiveness that impels us both to forgive and to repent from sin, “we are witnesses.”