April 26, 2020 - Third Sunday of Easter

Dear Friends in Christ:

A continued prayer for Easter blessings to you all! This weekend we hear the familiar story known as the Road to Emmaus. We have heard it repeated countless times in our lives, haven’t we? And yet each time we pick up something new to contemplate, we hear something we think we have never heard before, or our experiences permit us to reflect on it in a new way.

Certainly this time of pandemic has us all considering things differently, doesn’t it? As I have been thinking about this passage the last couple of days two things really hit me!

First, it is understandable how much the Eucharist meant to those disciples! Jesus first spoke to them, and then He broke the bread as He did during the Last Supper. They said that their hearts were on fire when He explained Scripture to them, but they recognized Him in the breaking of the bread.

The second thing to hit me was that Jesus really gave two gifts to these disciples on that path to Emmaus, the gift of understanding the new significance of the Word of God, and the gift of the Eucharist.

I want to consider briefly each of these gifts.

I am sure that all of your homes have bibles, and perhaps during this time of quarantine you have actually taken them off the shelf and contemplated the Word of God. Please check to make sure it is a Catholic Bible. This is important because the Catholic Bible includes books such as Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and Tobit which are not found in the non-Catholic bibles. Every home with little children should also have a children’s bible, or at least a book with bible stories for children.

We should actually read our bibles, study our bibles, but the most important thing we should do is pray with our bibles. Instead of being all bogged down with footnotes and various interpretations, we should read a passage and just ask ourselves, “What is this passage saying to me?” “God, what are You saying to me in these words?”

The Word of God is a living and effective Word, as Hebrews says, it is “sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit