Sunday Sermon: the resurrection makes Christianity an experience of fire within the heart of individual Christians

The liturgy of the second Sunday of Easter is based on the following readings: Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 118; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31. The main theme of this liturgy is the impact of the Risen Christ’s presence on the fearful disciples. St John summarizes it as Jesus’ greeting, his breathing on the disciples and his imparting of the Holy Spirit with the power to forgive and to retain sins. Christ’s impact after his resurrection goes beyond those who saw him then to all those who will not have seen Jesus but will believe in his presence and his teaching. And that is the rest of us. This was highlighted in Jesus’ later appearance to Thomas. The doctrinal message of our liturgy is mainly the experience of Jesus Christ and the emotional impact it had on the disciples: “the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” (v. 20). And this is the same emotional impact that we should get today as well. We too experience our faith in the experience of the personal presence of Jesus Christ in our lives. Our experience of Jesus is different. We do not see Him but we experience his presence in our lives here and today. This impact was greatly felt by the very first Christians as we read in the Acts of the Apostles in what is described as the characteristic of the Christian life: They lived as one community. All they possessed individually was divided among the members of their community according to what one needed. Together they prayed, and arranged their work in such a way that some gave and others received instructions on their faith. It is due to the same impact above that the faith of the first Christians was rock-solid! St. Peter warns them that they need that kind of faith because they “may have to suffer through various trials” (v.6). Hence theirs was the kind of faith that rejoices in suffering because it is tried by fire. This was the experience of the first Christian martyrs who suffered death by torture but were sustained by their faith in Christ to the last moment. From the pastoral point of view, our experience today in our modern time is far different from the experience of the first Christians. We are fond of reducing faith to some words of comfort and consolation when there is nothing else to say or to do. It has become a theoretical doctrine, an abstract explanation of ideas. This is wrong, because the center of any Christian life at any given epoch should be always the experience of Jesus Christ. This should be experienced as a real, personal and overwhelming contact which is above all spiritual. Like in case of the first Christians, such a contact gives us, ordinary people, the courage and conviction that our faith is worth more than anything we have. It also gives us a real joy that nothing can undermine. We need, as Christians, to have greater expectations; there is a treasure to be found. Christianity is not a present-day painkiller for the woes of life, mere opium for the people; it is the experience of fire within, an unbreakable all-conquering spirit. It is a kind of love that always gives more. Because of our life style today as Christians, it becomes hard for us to understand the description of Christianity in the Acts of the Apostles. We may take it as an impossible, impractical ideal of naïve simplicity but it has the gist of Christianity. And that is the strong sense of a community called Christian united around Christ. This should inspire Christianity as a style of life today. That desire to form a community; to live together as Christian brothers and sisters, sharing a common experience of Jesus Christ. It is obviously true that our lives are certainly more complicated than the scattered Christian communities of the first century after Christ, but nothing should impede our desire to live and to build an authentically Christian life in community. In our community as Christians we have the obligation to build and live in communion with others. But our history has shown us that it is not simple at times to build a Christian unity embracing all our diversity. That is why this liturgy is pointing a finger at us in a particular way: We need to re-examine the state of our community. When can we call ourselves a Christian communion? It is when we have strengthened the intimate bonds within our society, when none of our members feels discriminated and when we all gather around the person of Christ as brothers and sisters. Ends