Vigils Reading – Easter Wednesday

THE TREMENDOUS DESTINY

OF LOVE

By Caryl Houselander

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Quite different from His appearance to Magdalene or the apostles is

Christ’s approach to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. These are scholars,

they must come to the point of communion with him through the travail of the

mind. Step by step he takes them back through the scriptures, leading them to

know him by thinking their own thoughts, by linking up the academic

knowledge they have acquired in the past with the events of the day, and

thrashing out the problem that is so baffling to intellectuals in all ages, the

problem of suffering.

Through a totally different approach to the same problem he convinces

Thomas…the poor man who has no philosophy to be armor against the wounds

of the world, no thoughts to help him through the loneliness of his own

anguish… It was when Thomas actually put his own hands into these wounds

and felt, as it were, his own sins and sorrows redeemed in the glorious Body of

Christ, that the cry came out of his heart: “You are my Lord and my God!”.

Last there is Peter. Who but Christ would have known that the one thing

that could lift up that broken heart was not a formal act of contrition, but a

spontaneous, almost an exasperated cry of love? —Who but he would have

thought of provoking the same impulsive temperament, which had made a

coward of Peter with such cruel results, to give it the courage to break out into

those acts of love? And, as it was with the others, Peter is given something to do

for Christ, something that is exactly suited to his inmost need, as it has been in

the case of each of the others. He is to become the shepherd. Christ shows him

that he knows what the sorrow for his sin has done to him, how it has taken away

his cowardice, so that he can give him even this charge, the charge of the

shepherd who is to protect the frailest of his flock, his lambs…to feed them, and

if need be to give his life for them. Could he give greater proof of his trust in the

reality of Peter’s love, in the truth of Peter’s word: “Lord, you know all things;

you can tell that I love You”.

Why we, who are members of Christ’s body on earth, his Church, are so, is

a great mystery. But the fact remains that God has chosen us for the tremendous

destiny of love, and if the wonder and the joy of it is ours, so too is the

responsibility of it. That responsibility is to prove to those who are still unaware

of it that Christ has risen from the dead and that he is in the world now. We

cannot do this without a very close imitation of Christ’s way with other people.

Christ “knew what was in them”: that is the secret of his method; he knew and

loved every one, objectively and individually, as a separate person, a unique

person; he respected their otherness, their independence, even their slowness,

their limitations, which were all part of the experience which was to bring them

to the realization of his love. Christ wishes to approach people through us today

in just the same way, through just the same means, as he did in his Risen Life.