Homily on the Second Sunday of Easter
We read in Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, the following:
“We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist’s Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice
We heard in the first reading that this was how the early church was. They gathered for the teaching of the Apostles (the Gospel stories about Jesus), the prayers (offering praise and thanks to God), the communal life (being a community) and the breaking of the bread (the Eucharist). This is how we are to be community today. No one can be a Christian in a vacuum.
I often wonder where Thomas was on the first Easter night. My thought is that he isolated himself and wanted nothing to do with the community of the disciples. Many times, we all do that in our spiritual life or in life in general. There is nothing wrong with going off by oneself, but we cannot live a healthy life like that or live as a Christian. Thomas must have realized that he needed the other 10 and showed up. Christianity has never been a me and Jesus thing. We are baptized into His Body, we share His Body, and we walk together the Promised Land of heaven.
Dorothy Day in the quote I started with sums it up. Love is about knowing God and each other, not on the surface, but to share in each other’s joys and struggles, each other’s pain, to help someone else bear the cross of grief, to walk with those who live in poverty they do not choose or bear the cross of a chronic illness. To be a community of faith, we cannot be isolated as an individual or a parish. When we gather here in Christ’s name and to share the Eucharist, we are not alone. Here is about Jesus and only Jesus. He brings us together as he gathered them after he rose. There are too many divisions in our nation and world, and we cannot have them at the table of the Lord. In the breaking of the one bread, the Body of Christ, we are one. We are all the scarred Body of Christ. If one is hungry and cold, we all are. If one has been abused by someone in the Church or in domestic violence, we bear that pain with them. The Body of Christ cannot be divided and live.
We can be the crust of bread to feed the world by our working for peace, justice and speaking out for those who have been silenced. Like Thomas touched the wounded Body of the Risen One, we must see the wounds of others in our own hearts. I will never know the depth of the suffering of another, but I can cry with them, I can get angry with them. I can be their voice when no when is listening to their pain.
I can be a small crust of the Bread of Life for them. And so can you.
