My name is Don, and I’ve been a Catholic priest now for over 50 years. And during that time, I keep going back to the same readings over and over again, only to discover that they contain something I never understood was there before. It gives me new enthusiasm and excitement for the message that keeps revealing itself. And I pray that the message that I’m sending you will be valuable. And if you find it so, please share these podcasts with your friends. Thank you.

Good morning. I pray that you all had a wonderful Easter celebration. And to those of you who may not have been able to experience the richness of so many of the ceremonies we have, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church, we have Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil. But I just want you to realize that those celebrations, it’s always wonderful to participate in them, but at the same time, they are so powerful in filling us with the awareness that we’re supposed to have at this time of year, which is the incredible gift of God’s forgiveness. So I pray you’re feeling very forgiven on this first Sunday after Easter. And today we’re going to do something I haven’t done in a while, but I want to dedicate this program.

It was a request by Fichuda Kitty, and she wanted us all to remember her mother, Leilani Chantilot, and she died on this very day. This is the anniversary of her death when she entered into the kingdom, freed and loved by God. So we have her in mind as we do this program. And we are celebrating the second Sunday of Easter. And here’s the opening prayer. God of everlasting mercy, who in the very recurrence of the Paschal feast, kindle the faith of the people.

You have made your own increase. We pray the grace you have bestowed that all may grasp and rightly understand in what font they have been washed, in whose spirit they have been reborn, in whose blood they have been redeemed. To our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, Holy One, God, forever and ever. Amen. A reading from the Acts of the apostles, fifth chapter 12 to the 16th verse. Many signs and wonders were done among the people at the hands of the apostles.

They were all together in Solomon’s portico. None of the others dared to join them, but the people esteemed them yet more than ever believers in the Lord. Great numbers of men and women were added to them thus. They even carried the sick out into the streets and laid them on cots and mats, so that when Peter came by, at least his shadow might fall on one or another of them. A large number of people from the towns in the vicinity of Jerusalem also gathered, bringing the sick and those disturbed by unclean spirits, and they were all cured. The Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good his love is everlasting.

Let the house of Aaron say, his mercy endures forever. Let those who fear the Lord say, his mercy endures forever. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his love is everlasting. I was hard pressed and was falling, but the Lord helped me. My strength and my courage is the Lord, and he has been my Savior. The joyful shout of victory in the tents of the just Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his love is everlasting.

The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, but the Lord has been done. It’s wonderful in our eyes. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his love is everlasting. A reading from the book of Revelations 1st chapter, 9th through the 11th verse 12, 13th verse and the 17th to the 19th verse I John, your brother, who share with you the distress, the kingdom, and the endurance we have in Jesus found myself on the island of Patmos because I proclaimed God’s word and gave testimony to Jesus.

I was caught up in the spirit of the Lord’s day and heard behind me a voice as loud as a trumpet which said, write on a scroll what you see. Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and when I turned I saw seven gold lampstands. In the midst of the lampstands, one like a son of man, wearing an ankle length robe with a gold sash around his chest. When I caught sight of him I fell down at his feet as though dead. He touched me with his right hand and said, do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the one who lives.

Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld. Write down therefore what you have seen and what is happening and what will happen afterwards. The Word of the Lord. Hallelujah verse. You believe in me, Thomas, because you have seen me, says the Lord.

Blessed are those who have not seen me but still believe the Gospel. For this Sunday is taken from St John 2019 31st verse on the evening of the first day of the week, when the doors were locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, peace be with you. When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven. Them whose sins you retain are retained. Thomas Chaldidymus, one of the 12, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, we have seen the Lord. But he said to them, unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.

Now, a week later, his disciples were again inside, and Thomas was with him. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, peace be with you. Then he said to Thomas, put your finger here and see my hands and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe. Thomas answered and said to him, my Lord and my God. Jesus said to him, have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.

Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this belief, you may have life in his name, the Gospel of the Lord. Sa if somebody would stop you on the street today and ask you, oh, you all believe in this thing called Easter. What was it that Easter, or what does it say to you? What is it? What is there for?

What’s its purpose? And a lot of people might say, well, it’s a story about the fact that this man Jesus, was more than just a man. And it was proven because he was raised from the dead. And like the biggest important teaching of Easter is, Jesus did not die a human death, but rose. But that’s not the major teaching. I don’t think of this very, very important, important season and important time called Easter.

Listen to the opening prayer. We address God always in the opening prayer. And it’s God. You are the God of mercy, mercy, forgiveness. Please help us to remember and don’t let us ever forget that we have been washed, we have been reborn, we have been redeemed. All right, that’s all about us, something happening to us.

And Jesus, what he was doing on the cross was not only dying when we died on the cross. He was not just going to die there so he could prove that he was more than just a mortal man, that he was also God, and that he would rise in the next day, in two days or three days or whatever. But the point being, no, the most important thing to remember is when he died, he died for our sins so that we would not be held accountable for our sins. It’s an amazing thing because I’ve been taught that my whole life, but still as a Roman Catholic, I grew up in Chicago and I was taught about sin. And sin was this horrible thing that I did. And every time I did it, I was inflicting some kind of pain.

Still today, I would inflict pain on Jesus, which was confusing for me as a child. But nevertheless, it went on to say that, you know, you have to do something to make up for your sins. You have to go to confession. You have to. And going to confession meant that you had to make a firm purpose of amendment you were not going to sin again. So you had to go.

And by your decision, I will never sin again. You might receive forgiveness. Well, you were assured of forgiveness when it came through the priest. Okay, what that left me with. And maybe I’m just unusual on this. So if this homily is all about me, I apologize.

But it’s been really hard for me to believe that I am always forgiven, completely forgiven by God. I’ve been to confession, I go to confession. But still I can feel, I’m not sure that the sin that I committed is not going to be somehow something that damaged or will continue to damage my relationship with God. And, you know, that probably comes from my own upbringing. I don’t know if you. How you grew up, but, you know, one of the things I realized that I had a.

A family, and it’s not unusual to have this. They were human beings, so I didn’t expect them to be as merciful or as kind or as generous as God. But. But if I, if I did something wrong, I, I was, I was not just punished. That was. I don’t remember being like punished in any really physical way.

Maybe grounded or taken privileges away out. But there was something more subtle that was going on when I sinned. And that was some kind of understanding that I got from my parents and the people around me and the teachers I had that when you sin, you damage the relationship. And somehow the person that has told you not to sin or the person you’ve sinned against, they don’t have the same affection or attention for you. That somehow sin damages the relationship, and you’re hoping that it can be repaired and maybe you try to do something, make up for the sin, you know. But this is not in any way, shape or form, in any way that you can ever really have this way of thinking about the way God relates to sin.

And so I want to go back to the Scriptures for a minute and look at the first reading. The first reading is a beautiful description of what happened to the people that really understood who Jesus was. And they realized, I would say, in the moment that happened, that their sins were forgiven. They knew that they were forgiven. And somehow when they were forgiven, that idea of being forgiven meant that they were loved despite their sin. In other words, forgiveness is not so much God giving up his right to punish you and foregoing that and saying, I’m not going to do that.

But it’s more about him saying, when you sin, it never, ever damages my relationship with you. I’m always there for you. I reach out to you. In fact, the more you sin, the more my intensity, the stronger my intensity is to reach you and to so draw you out of a place where you feel there’s something wrong with you. And so when I look at these images in that opening prayer, when it says, you know you’ve been cleansed, washed cleansed of all your sin, you’re a new person. You’re not the person you were, you know, when you sinned and you’ve been redeemed, which means I paid for everything.

And that’s really difficult, I think, to believe, especially if you come from a world of conditional lovers, and most of us do. And so I want to look carefully then at the experience the disciples had when Jesus appeared to them again, because that’s always been the theme of this first Sunday after Easter. Now remember, every one of them, except for John, who happened to write this particular passage, every one of them had disappointed in their own minds, disappointed God greatly by denying him. Now think about that. They spent three years with him. He told them over and over again to be strong.

He told them, I will be the strength for you. I’ll do everything for you. All these kinds of promises. But remember, they hadn’t yet received the Holy Spirit. So the death of Jesus hadn’t fully been incorporated into their very being yet. And so they were still, in a way, without the grace of belief and faith.

And so they were filled with shame. They had to be filled with shame. Remember the first thing that God said to the human race when they had sinned in the Garden of Eden story. He didn’t say, what have you done? You’re disgusting. How could you do this to me?

My mom used to say that. No, it was more like, where are you? Why are you hiding from me? There’s something in human beings. When we disappoint someone that we look up to and we do not perform in the way that we think they demand or would like us to perform, we have a feeling that they are going to go away from us, they’re going to be separated from us. It’s in our DNA, I think.

And so there’s a wonderful way in which we need to look carefully at the disciples, who must have been filled with a tremendous amount of shame. And he must have sat around thinking he was who he said he was and we didn’t believe him. And what are we? We’re failures. And when Jesus first appears to those failures, what is his response? Is there one shred of anything in the presence of Jesus when he returns to his disciples that’s judgmental or critical or implies how much he was disappointed in them?

No peace. Please be at peace. You’re human. It’s normal. That was a lot to ask of you, to believe in who I was. When you saw all this stuff happening around you, don’t be so hard on yourself.

I love that image. And then I wonder about this figure, Thomas the doubter. Why was he the one who just couldn’t let go of his doubts that this could really happen? And I’m wondering if the doubt was not so much that could a man actually rise from the dead? Yes, that was tough for anybody. But think about it.

Was it that that was so hard for him to believe, or was it the fact that he came back to his disciples and didn’t hold anything against them? And I just want you to imagine this for me. Maybe I hope this isn’t playing too much with scripture, but scripture is so rich and so beautiful. You can work with it all kinds of ways. But let’s just say imagine that that was his biggest problem, that he couldn’t believe that God would have come back and forgiven them that easily. And so he wants to be sure.

He wants to be sure he’s forgiven. He wants to have God look at him, Jesus look at him and say, I have forgiven you. You weren’t the worst of all of them, which is what I do sometimes, or you might do when you know we’re the worst of sinners. And so he was able to put his hands inside of the wounds that healed him. Those wounds are the Reason why we no longer have to fear any kind of punishment. Those are the wounds that he took upon himself.

That is the impact of every sin we’ve ever committed. And justice demands some kind of restitution. And he took it on himself. Wow. That’s a very, very different way of feeling the need for absolute, total belief and trust in who Jesus is. Now, I’ve been a priest for 55 years.

I go to confession a lot. Maybe not as much as I used to, because maybe I don’t need to as much at age 82. But nevertheless, I still. I know deep down inside of me have this anxiety that even when I sin, no matter what it is, I have somehow disappointed God. After all, I’m his priest. I’m.

I’m somebody that’s not supposed to have any kind of sinful inclinations. But that’s not true. But that’s what some people think. And that’s what I even maybe put on myself. I should not ever sin. And yet what he’s trying to say to you and to me, and he said it to Thomas.

No, look, listen to what I’m trying to say for you. And maybe if I explain it this way, you’ll understand it. So I’m going to tell you what God has said to me today as I prepared for this homily about what it means that you are forgiven. It means that God. God has made a decision in the person of Jesus to come and make it clear to all of us that he forfeits his right to punish you. He’s decided he doesn’t want to inflict pain on you because of your sins.

Does that seem absolutely impossible for a lover like who God really is? And yet I have a religion, I have a conscience, I have people around me. They all seem to imply something else. They seem to imply that there is this thing you have to fix. If you’ve done anything negative that God is going to see as negative, and he waits for you to do something to make up for your sin before he’s going to forgive you. And that doesn’t make any sense to me anymore either.

He forgives because he loves so intensely. And he knows that the only thing that is really going to convince you to not sin again is not the fear of the punishment, of the loss of a relationship with him or the punishment of hell, but it’s the fact that you’ve been loved, that you’ve been loved so intensely. And when he talks about forgiveness in the Gospel, it’s so beautifully. He said, you know, if you Forgive someone and they know they’re forgiven, the sin is gone. But if you don’t forgive someone, that sin, the separation of sin, the shame of sin stays. Now think about that.

Do you really believe that God loves you that much? That no matter what you do, no matter how horrific it is, it never diminishes his desire to tell you that there’s still something inside of you. Not the sin which will carry a certain punishment, but by the very fact that you did it. It’s not that you sin and nothing happens to you. No, there’s a lot of pain that’s caused by sin that doesn’t come from God. It comes from the nature of sin.

But the minute you don’t believe that God looks at you in your worst, when you’re at your worst, in the worst thing you’ve ever done, and looks at you and says, you know what? I love you so much. If you think for a second that I’m interested in punishing you for what you’ve done, you’re wrong. I will do everything I can to get you to see what you’ve done and the pain you’ve caused yourself and others. I’ll do that. But never will I ever pull away from you.

Peace be with you when you’re in that place of shame. Peace be with you when you’re in that sense of being separated from God because you’re human and you fail and you’re selfish at times. Amen. Sa A Closing Prayer Father, remove from us doubt an inability to believe in things that seem beyond our way of seeing the world. Help us to see the world as you have created it, especially to see you as you are. And we as we are.

We struggle. We sin. It’s part of our growth. It’s part of our changing and developing. And your response is never condemnation. Bless us with that peace.

And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. The music in this program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner. I’m excited for the opportunity to awaken your spiritual journey. If you enjoy this program, please subscribe and share it with a friend. This ministry also needs your support, so make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on on our website. Thank you so much for your listenership and your continued support.

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