Our Risen Lord’s appearance had to have caused a bundle of mixed emotions in the hearts of the apostles: fear, astonishment, exuberant joy. But there was also guilt and shame. After all, they were keenly aware of their weakness, their lack of courage in abandoning the Lord to his enemies.
In today’s 1st reading, we hear from St. Peter. Here he is, the Lord’s “star-pupil” and the “rock,” foundation of the Church, who had denied the Lord in the courtyard of the high priest, now in the public square of Jerusalem, boldly professing his faith in Jesus. The guilt and shame of his sin could have left him immobilized. He could have remained a broken man, but the Easter appearance of Jesus allayed his fear and shame. Jesus does not scold but says rather, “Peace be with you.”
The apostles’ encounter with Our Lord “brimmed not with severity but with mercy…and made them new persons purified by a forgiveness that is utterly unmerited.” (Francis: Easter II, 2022) Peter will not forget his offence, for which he will weep all his life but at the same time he keeps in his heart the sweetness of the Lord’s forgiveness which gives him the strength to invite others to conversion. I am sure Peter must have told them over and over again, “If the Lord forgave me, he will surely forgive you!”
In the second reading, we hear from St. John, who stood at the foot of the cross. There he heard Jesus implore his Father to forgive those who crucified him. There he also heard Jesus promise Paradise to the thief who had first blasphemed and cursed him but then threw himself upon Divine Mercy. St. John reminds us that in Jesus we have an advocate before the Father should we sin.
Peter and John, and the other apostles, would be “wounded healers” who could speak of God’s mercy with conviction because they had the personal experience of mercy, the experience of shame giving way to joy, the experience of guilt giving way to peace.
In the Gospel, Jesus assures the apostles that he is not a ghost but that he has a real body that can be touched, wounds that are visible and that he eats and drinks. We hear then his commission to his “wounded healers” that repentance for the forgiveness of sins is to be preached to all the nations, a commission that becomes a fundamental ministry of the Lord’s Church in the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation.
Our Easter joy is heightened by this consoling truth: that we, like Peter and John, can have a new beginning no matter what shame or guilt we carry in life. And how consoling it is that the ministers of the sacrament of new beginnings are themselves, “wounded healers.”
Pope Francis reminds us: “There are no situations we cannot get out of, we are not condemned to sink into quicksand, in which the more we move, the deeper we sink, Jesus is there, his hand extended, ready to reach out to us and pull us out of the mud, out of sin, out of the abyss of evil, into which we have fallen. The more we acknowledge our need…the sooner we will feel his embrace of grace.”
Today, the holy apostles call out to us: God’s love and mercy are more real than our sins and our cowardice.
