Third Sunday of Easter – A – April 23, 2023
“The Master was walking with them along the way, and he himself was the way. . . . They were walking along, dead, with Christ alive, they were walking along, dead, with life” (Augustine, Sermon 235.2–3, translation by Edmund Hill, OP).
As music ministers, homilists, and liturgists, we rightly focus most of our attention on what happens at Mass around the tables of the Word and the Eucharist. Indeed, much depends on what happens there.
However, we might also ask ourselves today what we have missed along the way to the table of the Lord.
We are people of “the Way” as much as of Word and Sacrament, for only when we plead with the stranger, “Stay,” will we recognize Christ in the breaking of the bread. Click To TweetWhen we are not actively engaged in the Eucharist, who is standing right in front of us? Who is inserting themselves into our conversations and debates, sidling up to our closed circles looking for a way in, disrupting our calendars and finely tuned agendas and rehearsals, asking clueless questions to which we expect them to already have answers—“Are you the only visitor who does not know of these things?”
St. Augustine continues in his Easter octave sermon: “You too, then, if you want to have life, do what they did in order to recognize the Lord. They showed him hospitality” (Sermon 235.3). We are people of “the Way” as much as of Word and Sacrament, for only when we plead with the stranger, “Stay,” will we recognize Christ in the breaking of the bread.
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