Easter Week 3 Saturday

Readings: Acts 9.31-42; Psalm 116; John 6.60-69

The departure of Paul leaves the Church at peace. He is like the prophet Elijah, a troubler of Israel. He is restless and passionate, and he will return after some sabbatical time in his home city of Tarsus. He is a new element which is not so easily grafted into the community whose life has been underway since Pentecost and which looks back to the public ministry of Jesus as its model and inspiration.

Notice how everything the apostles do and say echoes all that Jesus said and did and which Luke records in h is first book, the Gospel of Luke. Most dramatically in today's reading, for Peter not only heals a paralysed man but raises a woman from the dead. He calls her by name, Tabitha, which is almost exactly the same Aramaic word Jesus used in raising the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5.41).

The apostles, and the entire Christian community, not only pass on the message about Jesus, they continue his work and mission. Stephen's passion and death parallel those of Jesus. The encounter between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch which we read again on Thursday last parallels Luke 24 and the experienfce of the two disciples who encountered a stranger on the road (see homily for 8 May 2025).

And so it continues to our own time. The Church is apostolic not just in its origin and its foundation but also in its mission. The disciples are called and sent, as Saul becomes Paul, to preach and to heal and to become more and more identified with Christ so it is no longer they and we who live but Christ who lives in them and in us. And Christ will do even greater things through us than he himself did in his public ministry (it is probably the most startling of his promises).

Christ assures us of his presence in the Word (words that are spirit and life, words of eternal life) and in the Sacraments. This is in the Eucharist above all, the source and summit of the Christian life, in a unique way in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. The Eucharist is our food and our medicine, our strength for the journey, and an experience already of the communion which is to come in the glory of his kingdom.