The Delegation of Rome and Vatican City of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, with the aim of providing continuous formation to its Knights, Dames and Postulants, began publishing podcasts on its YouTube channel on Palm Sunday 2024 with reflections on the festive readings.  These are edited by the formation director, Prof. Enzo Cantarano, Knight of Merit with Silver Star. On 14 April 2024, the meditation on the readings of the Third Sunday of Easter was published: the risen Jesus is always at work in His Church.

Podcast 14 April 2024 – Third Sunday of Easter: “Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead on the third day; conversion and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all people.”  Alleluia (Luke 24,46-47)

The first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, tells us that Peter, after healing the disabled man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, addresses his first speech after Pentecost to the Israelites present. He insistently reproaches them for their responsibility for the death of the crucified Jesus, but at the same time he reminds us of the greatness of God’s mercy. His is not a condemnation, but a message of hope, because there is no sin so serious as to hinder the grace that God gives us in the resurrection of His son. Peter closes with the invitation to reread the Scriptures from this new perspective and to convert. These dynamics also involve us today and Peter’s invitation is still relevant because even in our time, if Jesus returned to our Earth we would probably go back to kill him. In this sense, the famous “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is emblematic. What killed Jesus was precisely this opposition to the action and presence of God in history, this fear of what God can change in our lives: fear of His demands, fear above all of His novelty, of the way in which He presents Himself to us, which does not correspond to the idea we have of God. But the paradox is that such a total rejection was necessary precisely to show how far God’s omnipotence reached. The killing of the Son, the total rejection of His intervention in history and in our lives was the opportunity for God to demonstrate in the most extraordinary way possible His love and above all His determination, beyond and against all human resistance, to save man. The Resurrection of Christ means precisely this: more powerful grace, greater than our sin.

This is what John confirms in the second reading.  His letter reminds us that if God is light, the Christian has one more reason not to live in darkness, but in the joy of a communion full of light with him. If we still find ourselves lacking, because we are limited in our human condition, we must not be afraid. We have a Paraclete. This mysterious character is mentioned several times in the Gospel of John. In the legal language of the time he was the lawyer, the one who was called alongside those in prison awaiting trial and brought the reasons for their innocence. Jesus can do this because He was the atoning victim for our sins. He is the Lamb who was sacrificed once and for all to save not only His people, but the whole world, prisoner of evil and death, and exhorts us not to sin and to observe His commandments in order to be able to affirm, without being denied, to know Him. Listening to His Word and doing His will allow the love of God to give us the capacity for authentic testimony.

The passage from the Gospel of Luke begins with the final verse of the episode of the disciples of Emmaus. It is a short summary that reminds us of what had happened. The important thing about this story is that Jesus made Himself recognized by the two disciples in the breaking of the bread. They rushed back to Jerusalem to announce to the Apostles that they had met Jesus in person. While they do this, He is suddenly there, right among them as Luke states and as John, an eyewitness, had reiterated twice (see John 20, 19 – 26), with all His flesh, with all His weight, His presence, the shekhinàh – in Hebrew – the glory of the “divine presence.” To express the presence of Jesus, Luke does not use verbs of movement, such as “come” or “enter,” but the verb “stare” which does not imply any change of place. The risen one does not “come,” but is already there among his disciples. He just has to make Himself visible. He greets them with the Jewish shalom, the sum of all the messianic goods announced by the prophets. For this reason He does not slip away like a ghost, but enters gently and firmly into our existence. With the manner that has always characterized Him, and which we can now recognize as the unmistakable manner of God. In our “hit and run” culture, those who choose to stay go against the current. Jesus makes it a definitive manner. He, in fact, has risen and will never die again. His stay among His people is forever. Such a presence, true and real, also leaves us dumbfounded today, who believed without having seen, but it must have shocked His disciples in disbelief and amazed them with joy. A whirlwind of feelings, a commotion of emotions, an internal battle. His parents, despite having shared His dreams and expectations, disappointments and failures, despite having seen the drama of crucified love, knew Him only through hearsay, like Job!  Faced with the Risen One, the disciples seem frightened exactly like the women faced with the vision of the angels (Luke 24.4). Fright and fear are two notes from the Evangelist himself. Tarasso: the disturbance and agitation are a reproach that Jesus addresses directly to the disciples: “Why are you troubled?” Jesus means a profound disturbance (the verb tarasso means the soul is agitated, upside down, almost like a stormy sea) and here we are not talking about a temporary disturbance, but a firm one (the verb is in fact in the perfect tense), not a superficial but a profound agitation. In addition to agitation and disturbance, Jesus’ reproach also speaks of doubt and perplexity: dialogismos. This verb expresses very well the attitude of bewilderment of those who unexpectedly find themselves faced with a fact or a word that arouses perplexity and doubt and causes a problem: a perplexity that invades the whole person (your heart) and which not only occurs but rises like something that invades and increases more and more.

And they mistake Him for a ghost… or perhaps, unconsciously, they would have preferred Him to be one… It seems like a paradox, but do we also hope not to be disturbed by changes in our calm personal status quo? In short, Jesus causes a bit of healthy annoyance, there among His people, even today. We must necessarily deal with Him, and with the false images that we continually fill ourselves with and fill our heads with. Faced with life that has defeated death, we can no longer live as before. The selfish closures, the comfortable complaints, the accusations against the world that it is a threat and from which we prefer to defend ourselves, no longer have value or justification in the logic of He who is, who was and who is to come (Rev 1,8). Life, the world, humanity acquire a new depth. It is no longer permissible to spend our days like ghosts, imprisoned in clichés and repetitive patterns, which pigeonhole us like puppets and separate us from each other’s truth. Then Jesus shows His hands and feet, invites us to touch Him and asks for something to eat; then He opens their minds to the understanding of the Scriptures. It is the same dynamic as the meeting on the road with the two disciples, but in reverse, first the shared food and then the explanation of the scriptures. For the disciples, and many times for us today, the Law and the Prophets remained sacred words, detached from everyday reality, but Jesus tells them, and us, that in it we must grasp the messages of salvation that clarify the mystery of the gift of Christ on the cross, of His death and resurrection. The resurrection is a difficult mystery.  We see it in the reactions of the apostles, who despite their great joy, were full of doubts and still did not believe. Whoever reduces faith to intellectual notions naturally excludes doubt. In reality, faith does not only involve intelligence, but is an entrusting of our entire being to a reality greater than us. It is not easy to accept this perspective which calls everything into question. For this reason, Jesus, with patience and understanding, somehow legitimizes the doubts of the apostles and meets their hesitations. The exhortation to “touch” and “look at his hands and feet” means to the disciples that the Risen One is still the Jesus of Nazareth that they knew, even if His presence in their company is now of another type. This is the path that Jesus shows to His disciples: “He opened their minds and hearts to understand the Scriptures”. He invites them to read their entire experience guided not by their emotions, but by the light of that Word. At this point the Risen One states:  “Thus it is written: Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and in His name conversion and forgiveness of sins will be preached to all peoples, starting from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of this.” This could be our joyful experience of faith: we will understand where God wants to lead us through all events, even the most unexpected. We will also understand that the Lord continues to be present in the history of men and that He walks on their same paths. If in our daily life we ​​know how to be present where we are needed, if we share the suffering, the joys, the problems of everyday life with our brothers, then the risen Christ will always be with us: Christ does not want to be on the altars, but He wants to be close to every man for whom He has achieved salvation with His death and resurrection. He wants all men to be able to return redeemed to the Father.