Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. Make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Today we celebrate the third Sunday of Easter.

The opening Prayer May your people exalt forever, O God, in renewed youthfulness of spirit, so that rejoicing now, in the restored glory of our adoption, we may look forward in confident hope to the rejoicing of the Day of Resurrection through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. A reading from the Acts of the apostles, third chapter 13 and 17 Peter said to the people, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and denied in Pilate’s presence. When he had decided to release him, you denied the holy and righteous one and asked that a murderer be be released to you. The author of life you put to death, but God raised him from the dead. Of this we are witnesses.

Now I know, brothers, that you acted out of ignorance, just as your leaders did. But God has thus brought to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand through the mouth of all the prophets that His Christ would suffer. Repent therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away. The Word of the Lord this Bonso Psalm Lord, let yout face shine on us. A reading from the New Testament from first John, second chapter, first through the fifth verse. My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is expiation for our sins, not for our sins only, but for those of the whole world. The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments. Those who say, I know him, but I do not keep his commandments are liars, and the truth is not with them. But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in Him. The Word of the Lord.

Alleluia Verse Lord Jesus opened the Scriptures to us. Make our hearts Burn while you speak to us. The gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Luke 24:35, 48, verse. The two disciples recounted what had taken place on the way and how Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of bread. While they were still speaking about this, he stood in their midst and said to them, peace be with you.

But they were startled and terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost. Then he said to them, why are you troubled? And why do you question? And questions arise in your heart. Look at my hands and my feet, that is, I myself. Touch me and see.

Because a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you can see, I have. As he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed, he asked them, have you anything here to eat? He gave him a piece of baked fish. He took it and ate it in front of them. He said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.

Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and he said to them, thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached in his name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. The Gospel of the Lord. Sa Ram Sam. We continue to reflect upon the experience of the early church, the experience that must have been so incredulous, where this figure, this wisdom teacher that they spent time with, who surrendered himself to evil and was destroyed seemingly by that evil, his life taken away, comes back and is so full of life and full of. Of wisdom and longing to open people’s eyes to what they had not seen before.

And so we see these story after story in this time in the church year where we see this Christ coming back. And I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have a teacher that you saw seemingly destroyed by evil and you thought the whole thing was now over, and you were distraught and frightened and confused, and all of a sudden there he is looking at you, talking to you. And what is it that he’s there for? Why did Jesus rise from the dead? Well, multiple reasons, perhaps to prove that he was who he says he was. But the thing that’s more interesting to me is what happened to the people that were living at that time when they encountered a risen Christ, and what was his response to them?

You know, I mean, at least the disciples in particular, they had failed him and they were filled with fear and shame and confusion. And all he does is he comes back. And he said, look, I understand your condition. I understand that you made this decision, you were frightened and you fled. And I understand because you were caught in, in confusion and sin and ignorance. But I want you to know who I am.

I want you to believe in everything that has been said about me. And what’s so interesting to me about these post resurrection experiences as we have in the stories of today’s Liturgy of the Word, you know, it’s like he comes and he said, look, I know what you did, I know your weaknesses. And you acted out of ignorance when you weren’t there for me. And I want you to know me. And the thing about me is that if you could just understand that everything that happened to me, Jesus is saying to his disciples, it was all planned that way. There was nothing about this that was a mistake.

And he keeps going back to them as he did in the scriptures today. And he says, go look and listen again to everything that was spoken about me in the Old Testament Testament. It’s all there. You can see exactly that I was living out the way God intended me to live. It was intended that I be seemingly in the eyes of the world, cut short. My life would be cut short because of sin, because of evil.

Like evil destroyed me. No, no. Evil has no power over me. What I’m trying to do for you is expose evil for what it is. I want you to see how this world that God has created for you really works. And what Jesus is saying to people over and over again.

And the church continues to say it to us today. And every religious person, every spiritual person, hopefully, is saying something like this to us. The challenge of being a believer in God is to believe in the world that he created, the world as it is. And sin is that weakness. We all have to create a world of our own. The world that we want to be there, the world that we think is there, the world that we were taught is there.

And if it’s not the world that is, then we’re somehow at an enormous disadvantage. And so I want you to just imagine with me that a spiritual person, a person who believes in God, who is open therefore to the truth, is open primarily to the way the world works. A spiritual human being is the most realistic person in the room. They’re the ones that embrace the world as it is and surrender to it. And the thing that’s so fascinating about the world as it is. Is the ingredient called sin.

Evil. Why is it there? I don’t know if you’re like me, but you sometimes pick up the paper and now you listen to the news, and it seems like one thing after another. You’re hearing story after story about people who are either abusing each other, murdering each other, institutions that are found over and over again completely filled with corruption. And we constantly see evil and sin and destruction all around us. And I don’t know if you get the feeling sometimes you’re saying, well, you know, things are just getting worse.

Things are getting worse. What if this is the way the world is? What if a world of sin and goodness is the world God created? And what if we stop trying to destroy evil? Because the one thing you can say about evil is it has an intention. Its intention is primarily to separate things, things, to isolate things, to break them up into parts, and to call some good and to cause some evil and to set up this binary world and to somehow convince us that there’s a way to deal with everything in the world, that we don’t want to be there.

And that is to do exactly what evil does, to try to destroy it. Evil seeks destruction. Grace seeks healing. And so the unconscious thing that we get caught up in is that we end up trying to destroy evil by using evil. And that’s the great illusion, that’s the great lie that we get caught up in. And religion sometimes has a way of increasing that by giving us this false notion that the world that God wants us to have, the world that he created for us, is a world of union, communion, perfection.

If you look at the world at times and say, this is just so frustrating, it’s still so corrupt. Well, that’s the nature of the world. It will always be corrupt. And why would God allow corruption unless it had a purpose, a reason for being here? I know this might sound strange, but what I’m trying to say to you is evil is a part of the way the world is. And unless you embrace it and understand it and refuse to get caught up in its ways, you can’t really live and grow in this world as God intended you to grow and live.

We’re here not to stop sinning so much as to stop being caught in lies and illusions. We’re here to grow, to evolve into full, conscious human beings, aware of reality, the way God created the world to be. And the world that God created will always have. While we’re in this state of human beings living on this planet, there will always be evil and to Try to destroy it is to get caught up in the very thing that it wants us to get caught up in. Think about it. When you listen to a story, the story about somebody doing something wrong, what’s your reaction?

When you do something wrong, what’s your reaction? Forgiveness is what God teaches us to have. But what’s the opposite of that? Judgment, condemnation. A desire to punish, but even more deadly to destroy. Even if you’re looking at the world today and reading the paper and listening to the news and saying, I wish.

I want this all to stop. I want to destroy all these people that are destroying other people. Destroy all those elements out there that are negative. Let’s get rid of them. Think of the illusion that people get caught up in when they try to create a loving Christian community separate from the evil of the world. You end up with a cult.

Now, evil has got to be embraced for what it is. For it has a purpose. And what is that purpose? And the purpose is it’s part of the way in which God is inviting us to go through a process in this world where we are becoming more and more conscious of what is, what is true, what is real. Can you imagine growing in your wisdom as to what is right and wrong without making mistakes? Can you imagine what it’s like to simply be told what you’re supposed to do and then blindly say, okay, I’ll do it.

I’ll do exactly what you tell me to do? That’s not what God wants. He doesn’t want us to be people who are blindly obedient to a higher power. He doesn’t want us to follow him because he tells us to follow him. He wants us to discover why, what he’s calling us into the life that he wants us to live. He wants us to know why it is so important and why we should be motivated to do it.

It’s not because we’re told to. It’s because something inside of us knows. We know what it’s like to be the person that God created us to be. It’s called wholeness, holiness, consciousness. Can you become fully aware and conscious of what evil is and what your choices are unless you experience them? And could it be that the reason evil is in the world is because it’s there so that we can experience what it is that it really does, what it really does to us?

Our human nature, it flies in the face of everything that we are. I sometimes hate myself for being the person I am when I see myself not being who I think I should be. Now think about That I hate myself for being who I think I am. God knows who I am. He knows my goodness. He created it.

So when I hate that which he creates, I’m caught in what evil. I’m doing the very thing that evil longs to do. It longs to enter into us and to make us into people that are like evil. And again, evil separates, isolates, wants to destroy. You can’t destroy evil using the tactics of evil. You can only destroy evil by taking away its power.

And what is its power, its desire to destroy, to punish. That’s why from the beginning, it’s so clear what Jesus came into the world to do is to radically change our response to evil. So he does it in a way that seems absolutely incredulous to everyone watching it. There he is. He gives in and allows evil to do all of its negative stuff to him, to isolate him, to separate him, to make him into something evil, to incite people to want to destroy goodness. And then when he’s in the middle of all that, he just drops this explosive bomb, which is forgiveness.

He said, look, I’m not going to be what you are to me in this moment, this destructive force. I will not turn around and seek to destroy you. I will allow you to be who you are. Because I believe that if you are a human being and you can experience the impact, if you can experience consciously what sin actually is, what it feels, feels like to want to destroy, to want to kill, to want to remove, isolate someone, if you experience that and you feel it in your gut that it’s somehow wrong, then you’ve grown up, then you’ve become more conscious. It’s essential that you taste evil in order to get past it, because the taste is bitter. It’s awful.

But somehow we live in a mild form of it. You know, my prejudice, my way of denying people rights. And all the stuff we do that is negative toward ourselves and others is somehow participating in evil. Yet we do it with a sense that this is what God calls us to. We need to hate sinners and get rid of them. Hate sin and get rid of it.

I guess we can say, well, Jesus said, don’t hate the sinner, but he does say, hate the sin. And you’ve got to be careful of that. Because do you hate the fact that we’re given a world in which our experiences are the best teachers? And are we supposed to hate the fact that the world is imperfect? Or are we supposed to deal with it as an imperfect world that is trying to awaken us to something that’s so wonderfully freeing and mysterious, surrendering to evil, not buying into it, not becoming it, but becoming something radically different. Evil’s role is always to be hidden and to pose as something else.

But to taste it, to know it, to experience it through sin is sometimes the best teacher. Because to be told what to do is one thing. To know in your heart what is the only real thing you really want to do. That’s transformation, that’s holiness. That’s the goal of spirituality. Closing prayer Father, you tell us that we need to know you in Jesus.

We need to pay attention to all that he is and all that he longs to open our minds to and give us the the freedom to let go of misconceptions, lies, illusions, and enter into the world of truth. The truth is that you’ve come in the world to save us all from the kind of world that we tend to create, that is never going to fulfill our longings and our desires. Make us open to your wisdom, your truth, your life. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. Hello, my name is Will Richie and I work for Pastoral Reflections Institute. Monsignor Fisher has asked me to share a personal reflection on today’s homily.

It really got my attention when he brought up this thing about things are getting worse. Even his voice inflection, as we hear in every generation, it’s definitely right here in the 2000 and twenties. People are saying, man, things are getting worse. That’s happening, this is happening, that’s happening. Yet what Monsignor says is that the world was always intended to have evil. Sin is a teacher towards learning what to do and what not to do.

He talks about evil, really sets up a binary world. He shows through Jesus example that Jesus was not out to defeat evil, he was crucified. Yes, he died on a cross, but he did not lose to evil because there was no competition there. When I think of a binary world, I think of my own experience and something else Monsignor mentioned about the illusion people get caught up in when they try to create a loving Christian community separate from evil, separate from pop culture, separate from all the things that they have decided are binary themselves and how they often end up with a cult. I don’t want to get too personal here, but I remember moving at one point in my childhood, and I remember decisions that were made by my parents as they became followers of a different sect of Catholicism and how we no longer had TV in the home and radio in the home and pop culture in the home. We even went from celebrating Halloween one year and the next year celebrating All Saints Day.

I remember the houses we would go in of the families that also did not participate in pop culture. I remember how isolating it felt. I remember how achievement was magnified. Thinking back on it now, I remember how we couldn’t do anything sinful, but how there was so much sin in the world. I’m grateful for Monsignor’s message today because it teaches me, having come out of that time period in our life, that everything is meant to be good and evil and it is embracing the two that we are in union with Christ and we truly live our call through God. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show.

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Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher, produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2024 Foreign.