St Francis Xavier Parish, Armadale

14/06/2026

Homily for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

We heard our Lord say in the Gospel: “The harvest is rich but the labourers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to his harvest”. This line is often cited in the context of encouraging vocations to the priesthood – and this is indeed a vital and necessary part of the Church’s mission.

And yet it’s worth recalling what the Lord said to the Israelites in our first reading after having led them out from slavery in Egypt: “I will count you a kingdom of priests, a consecrated nation.” In other words, the whole people is to be marked by a priestly character.

For us Catholics, we recognise the unique and essential role of the ministerial priesthood. This begins, of course, with Christ the High Priest, who offered the perfect self-sacrifice on the Cross for our salvation. His mission then continued with the Apostles, whom Christ appointed, first and foremost, as witnesses to the Good News of the Resurrection. Their task is carried on to this day by the bishops, who are the successors of the Apostles, and aided by their primary helpers the priests. And yet, we all have a share in the priesthood of Christ through our baptism. This is sometimes spoken of as the universal priesthood of believers.

In a recent letter to the world’s cardinals, Pope Leo XIV reiterated the pressing need for us as a Church to share this Good News with the world, and he emphasised that the aim of this mission is not simply to ensure our own survival as a Church, but first and foremost the communication of that love with which God loves the world. He said that, “on a personal level, it calls every baptized person to renew their encounter with Christ, moving from a faith merely received to a faith truly lived and experienced.”

Pope Leo went on to say that the Church’s evangelising mission is “born of an encounter with Christ that is capable of transforming lives and spreading through attraction rather than conquest.”

To this end, I would like to take a few moments to reflect today on one of the greatest examples of the attractiveness of a life lived in love of the Lord – a man who wasn’t a priest, and yet who lived a life of such humble trust in the Lord that he continues to be one of the most loved saints in our Church’s history. I’m talking about the poor man of Assisi, St Francis.

This year marks the 800th anniversary of the passing of St Francis, who died on the 4th of October, 1226. As such, Pope Leo has declared this year to be a special Jubilee Year in honour of St Francis of Assisi.

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Part of what draws people to Francis’ life is the childlike innocence with which sought to follow the Lord. And indeed, Jesus once said that, unless we become like little children, we will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Now, my own previous employment allowed me to work with young children for several years, which is long enough to have learned what you parents here already know, namely, that they aren’t angels! Children are perfectly capable of lying, and cheating, and generally being as self-centred as any of us. But for the most part they do have one major advantage over most grown-ups, which is perhaps the point that Jesus was getting at. What advantage do they have? Their conspicuous lack of cynicism.

Most young children have not yet had their ability for spontaneous enthusiasm beaten out of them by life’s sufferings or peer-pressure. They can go from shedding tears to shrieking with delight in a matter of seconds, and they aren’t yet so self-conscious as to worry that shrieking with delight might be considered uncool.

Of course, there is much about life that demands our serious attention. The world of adults presents us with many important responsibilities that require our diligent care. But if in the process we lose our capacity for spontaneous enthusiasm, delight, and wonder, then there is a good chance that we will struggle to recognise the mysteries of the Kingdom.

If we were to look at the state of both the Church and society in Saint Francis of Assisi’s time, we would see that he had many reasons to be cynical. And yet, despite the extreme poverty that he embraced and the severe hardships he faced, he never lost his capacity for wonder and delight. Indeed, I suspect that this is a large part of why St Francis would become so popular among the faithful.

How did he manage this? So much is said of his external simplicity and poverty, yet Saint Francis also embraced what might be called a “philosophical simplicity”. By this I mean that he engaged with persons and things not primarily from a pre-existing ideological framework, but simply as they are – which is to say how they are in God.

This is perhaps easiest to see in Saint Francis’s praise of God’s creation, such as his famous Canticle to Brother Sun. G.K. Chesterton once wrote of him that, as opposed to people who cannot see the wood for the trees, “St Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees.” While aware of the magnitude of God’s creation, he never lost the ability to delight in this particular tree—this leaf, this little bug—and to give praise to the Lord for it all, no matter how small.

It is not hard to see ways in which this can relate to our everyday lives. How often, for instance, do we allow the concerns of home and work, or parish and diocese, to blind us from seeing, for example, the person right in front of us – a person who is an icon of the Lord and precious in his eyes.

This capacity for wonder that St Francis so embodied has echoed through the best of our beguiling Catholic tradition over the centuries. Indeed, the deeply carnal nature of Catholic liturgy and art and culture gives the lie to the common caricature of the Church as something purely rigid and puritanical. Ours is an enchanted religion, drenched in a timeless landscape of saints and angels; pilgrimages and processions; fasts and feasts; sweeping cathedrals and hauntingly beautiful worship. Our humble lives, when touched by grace, become what Cardinal Dolan has called “an adventure in fidelity” – wherein we lowly things of clay and earth—against all expectations—are invited into an intimate encounter with the Lord and God of all creation.

Moreover, within our faith, even the trials and tribulations of our human existence become part of a spiritual drama of cosmic significance. St Francis again embraced this mystery with remarkable spiritual innocence. He saw in the life Christ that there was no joy without suffering—no Resurrection without the Cross—and simply figured that if this was good enough for Christ, it was good enough for him.

And so, St Francis desired to unite himself with Christ’s suffering and death, so that he could rise with him into eternal life as well. Indeed, he trusted this most counter-cultural of paths so completely that towards the end of his life he was granted the supreme privilege of bearing Christ’s wounds upon his own person, in the great mystery of the stigmata. As St Paul said in his letter to the Galatians, “the marks on my body are those of Christ.”

Such radical discipleship is not only to be celebrated, but also to be desired for ourselves, as scary as that may sound! Christ’s yoke is easy and his burden light, not because it is undemanding, but because it is real, and it is what we most want. For ultimately, it is all about Christ, who is our supreme wonder and delight.

So as we enter into this morning’s Eucharist, and once more have the privilege of offering the Lord the worship that is his due, may we be innocent enough to wonder and delight in the presence or our crucified and risen Lord. And may this delight stir our souls, transform our lives, and lead us into joyful service.

29/05/2026

24/05/2026

Homily for Pentecost, 2026

My father was notoriously difficult to buy gifts for. He didn’t like to be spoiled, and he led a fairly simple life in his latter years, with little need of extra material things. He did like to read books though, and one year my brother and I found a book we thought he would like – the autobiography of Neil Armstrong, who of course was the first man to step foot on the moon. Imagine our embarrassment, then, when we realised—after Dad had opened it—that we had given him that very same book as a gift a few years earlier… and he hadn’t even read it the first time!

Doubling up on a gift like that is probably a rarity (hopefully!), but it is more common for folks to receive gifts and for them to end up in a drawer or on a shelf—still unused—many years later. Think of how many items of clothing or books or DVDs or anything else that you’ve been given over the years and which, for one reason or another, you have never used. So it is one thing for us to be given a gift, and another thing all together for us to use that gift and to use it well.

Today’s feast of Pentecost is a celebration of gifts – indeed, the greatest gift of all, God himself. We commemorate the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the newly-formed Church, gathered together around Our Lady and the Apostles. We remember this gift, and in so doing we ourselves are drawn into this powerful movement of the Holy Spirit.

This extraordinary event was, for the broader Church, the deeper fulfilment of a promise which, for the Apostles, had already been fulfilled at the Resurrection – when Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”. Today, with the whole Church throughout the world, we pray the ancient prayer of the Church, asking that this gift will be renewed in our own time and in our own lives: “Come Holy Spirit, fill our hearts, and set us on fire with your love.”

In Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he gives some advice as to how we can recognise the presence of the Holy Spirit within us and among us. He explains that the Holy Spirit’s coming into our lives will be manifested in the gifts of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal 22-23). It goes without saying that these are all gifts worth having, and it is worth reflecting on just how much our lives would be changed if we allowed ourselves to receive these gifts more fully.

I’m sure many of us desire to be more patient, more gentle with those we love, and more in control of our lives. Many of us wish that there was a little more joy in our lives; that the goodness within us might come to the surface more often, that our love could be more generous and sincere. The gifts which the Holy Spirit brings are the very gifts which could make our lives richer and more loving and more deeply human.

And so, yes, it does make sense for us to pray, “Come Holy Spirit.” Indeed, this is what the Church invites us to do in a special way on today’s feast. But it is worth noting that this prayer has, in a very real sense, already been granted.

All of us who have been baptised are already bearers of the Spirit of God. When the water was poured over our heads, or when we were immersed, so too was the Spirit of God poured out upon us. When, at our Confirmation, the bishop (or the priest designated by him) made the sign of the cross on our foreheads with the sacred oil of Chrism, we were filled with the fullness of the Holy Spirit’s gifts, and were strengthened and renewed and commissioned to be signs and bearers of God’s love. And all of us who have ever received Holy Communion, as many of us will in this Mass, receive the true presence of the Lord into the deepest reality of our lives, which transforms us slowly but surely into living images of his own loving presence to the world.

All of this has already happened and continues to be a part of us. All of it is renewed and deepened each time we receive Holy Communion at Mass. All of these gifts of the Holy Spirit—peace and courage and understanding and love—these have already been given to us.

But we, like all those who are offered gifts, have a choice – namely, whether we decide to make use of them or not. The gifts of God’s Spirit have already been offered to us and they reside within us. But we still have the choice of ignoring them, or pushing them to one side, or failing to make the most of them. Indeed, it may be that we have done this for many years. But, like gifts that lies unused on a shelf or hidden away in a drawer, the presence and power of God’s Spirit continues to lie within us just waiting for us to remember him, to turn to him, and to allow him to be for us all that he wants to be.

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It is not coincidental that this feast of the Holy Spirit also marks the beginning of the Church, because the power of the gifts that the Holy Spirit brings is, quite frankly, too much for us to handle on our own. So our Lord calls us into a community of disciples – a communion of fellow believers who share our love of the Lord, who can support us when our own flame of faith becomes weak, and who can challenge us to allow the Holy Spirit’s gifts to bear real fruit in our lives.

As you look around this church this morning, you’ll probably see a group of people who, if you’re honest, you might not have chosen to gather together with on a Sunday morning if it were simply up to you. I remember being stuck by that fact when I was first returning to Mass in my early twenties after several years away. Here I was, kneeling alongside a very diverse group of people – people of differing ages, ethnic backgrounds, socio-economic backgrounds, political persuasions, tastes in music, etc.

And yet, even then, I could see that there was something very healthy about this. This union with people who, on the surface, were quite different from me, forced me to stretch beyond my own comfortable little bubble. If I was in union with the Lord, and they were in union with the Lord, I had to take them seriously, and they had to take me seriously.

Because, at its core, the Church’s communion is not a superficial “let’s all hold hands and just get along”. Such shallow attempts at community based on little more than shared geography are inevitably bound to fail.

No, the Church’s communion is based on something far deeper – namely, a “common union” with the Lord. It is based on a mutual love of the one who loves us more than we can imagine – a shared ingrafting into the life of Him who made all things out of nothing, and who sustains all things in every single moment.

And this shared union with the Lord is far more significant than any passing surface differences. Again, as St Paul said to the Galatians, in the Church “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28)

So we are not here this morning simply for our own sake, or to seek our own salvation alone. We are stewards of each other, called to support and compliment each other, as parts of a human body support and compliment each other. We are called to help the gifts of the Holy Spirit to manifest in the lives of each one of us.

And we as a Church are not here on earth simply for our own sake either. To quote from Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI:

“(The Church) cannot be like an association that, in difficult circumstances, is simply trying to keep its head above water. She has a task to perform for the world, for mankind… We are not fighting for our own survival; we know that we have been entrusted with a mission that lays upon us a responsibility for everyone. That is why the Church has to measure herself, and be measured by others, by the extent to which the presence of God, the knowledge of him, and the acceptance of his will are alive within her.” (Joseph Ratzinger, “Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith”)

So as we commemorate today the great sending of the Holy Spirit, and the beginnings of our Church, let us call again on Christ to send down his Spirit, so as to fill us anew with his grace, and to renew once more the face of the earth.

“Come Holy Spirit, fill our hearts, and set us on fire with your love.”

17/05/2026

Homily for the Ascension of the Lord, Year A

There is a powerful connection between today’s feast of the Ascension of our Lord into heaven, and the feast of the Annunciation – that world-changing moment when the Archangel Gabriel visited the Virgin Mary, and she said “yes” to the Father’s plan for her to be the mother of his divine Son. The moment our Lady said “yes”, the human and the divine became united in the person of the child Jesus in her womb.

Think about that! The human and the divine—God and man—are joined together for all eternity in the person of Jesus. The theological term for this concept is the Hypostatic Union, which describes how—from the Annunciation onwards—Christ Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, and these two natures are perfectly joined in him, never to be separated.

So at the Annunciation, humanity and divinity united in the person of Christ. And at the Ascension of our Lord into heaven, this divine human being—the person with the risen, glorified body of Jesus—became for all eternity a part of who the Triune God in heaven is. As we proclaim each week in the Creed, “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”

The Catechism explains that by “the Father’s right hand” we can understand the glory and honour of divinity, which the Son had before all ages, being one with the Father. But the Catechism also takes care to note that Christ is seated “bodily” at the Father’s right hand, having taken on human flesh at the Incarnation, and having had this flesh glorified in the Resurrection.

So it was not just the spirit of Jesus or the divine nature of Jesus that ascended to the Father. It was the risen Jesus, whole, alive, and entire, in his glorified body that ascended. This is the body which the disciples had touched, the body in which Jesus had eaten and drunk with them both before and after his Resurrection – a real, physical body, but now, risen from the dead, a gloriously restored body, bearing the marks of his passion. This is what/who ascended. This is what/who, now and forever, is a living, participating part of God.

What does this mean for us? Well for one, the Ascension, along with the Incarnation, tells us in unmistakable terms that it is a good thing to be a human being – indeed, it is a wonderful and important and holy thing to be a human being. It is such an important thing that God did it. Furthermore, the fullness of God now includes what it means to be a human being.

Again, think about that! The Triune God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—is perfectly one, and the Son is both fully human and fully divine. So our humanity—the very thing that we probably lament at times—is now and forever a definitive part of the Godhead – physically, as well as spiritually. God loves us so much, that—without loss of divinity—he let himself become human. We are forever a part of God’s DNA, so to speak. We have an “inside man” with God, quite literally, in the person of Christ.

And this, of course, was and is a pure gift. As Jesus said to Nicodemus in St John’s Gospel, “No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven” (John 3:13). In other words, left to our own devices, we would never have had access to the “Father's house”, to life and happiness with God. Only Christ could open such access for us, which indeed was the whole point of his coming among us. And now, we are exhorted to live with joyful confidence that we too shall follow where he, our Head and shepherd, has gone before us.

The ascended Christ is for us a source of tremendous strength and encouragement. St Paul speaks of Christ as “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), who reveals to us the deepest truth about what it is to be human. He was like us in all things but sin, and was not unfamiliar with the aches and pains and trials and heartbreak and suffering that are so often part of our human experience. And yet, he also revealed the supreme dignity of our humanity, in that he freely chose to take it on himself.

Furthermore, in his Ascension, he calls us to follow his humanity into eternal life with the divinity. The Orthodox, rather daringly, speak of this as our call to “divinization”, in which—through Christ—we ourselves are called to become more like God.

We are called into union with Him whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and whose reign shall have no end. We are made for glory with God in heaven, the same glory in which our humanity currently abides in the person of Christ.

Let us rejoice in this fact, and let all of its implications wash over us. May we live with the dignity befitting such eternal glory, and not allow ourselves to sink into the sin and selfishness that is beneath such dignity. And may we treat others with the dignity befitting the eternal glory for which they have made, recognising Christ in them, even when his presence is seemingly well-disguised.

In the Ascension, our humanity was raised—quite literally—to the heights. We give thanks for this gift in this Mass, and we pray that, in the fullness of time, we—and all those whom we love—may also go where our Lord and guide has gone before. Amen.

10/05/2026

Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter, Year A

There are many beautiful things about the ebb and flow of our liturgical year. The highlight, of course, is the intense immediacy of Holy Week and the Sacred Triduum, in which our Lord’s self-offering on our behalf is laid bare in all its heart-breaking power and majesty.

The season of Lent as a time of purification and preparation for this greatest of weeks probably makes sense to us as well, even if we sometimes struggle to be faithful to the assorted penances we set ourselves. And yet, the season of Eastertide—a bit like the season of Christmastide—probably gets a bit overlooked in the consciousness of many.

For starters, there is the idea of the Easter Octave as a single liturgical movement, emphasising that the power and significance of the Resurrection is so great that it cannot be constrained to a single day. And, just as Lent is a time of spiritual and physical fasting, Easter gives us firstly a full week—and then an entire season of fifty days—of compulsory feasting.

I would suggest that feasting and fasting are both things that many of us struggle with as ongoing physical disciplines. We’re hardwired into our daily routines, and it takes a lot of effort to force ourselves into a deliberately out-of-the-normal rhythm of life for any extended period.

But, as an internal disposition, I suspect that many of us find it easier to live in the headspace of Lent more than that of Easter, defaulting more to self-examination and reproach, rather than to gratitude and joy.

It is not an insignificant thing for the Church to command us to extended feasting—both physically and spiritually—and to linger in the gift of grace. We all have different tendencies, I suppose. For some, there is perhaps a disordered sense of humility, or even unworthiness, which leads to a discomfort with looking the resurrected Christ in the face and saying, “He is risen for me.”

For others, especially in our economics-driven culture, there is likely a nagging voice that says, “get back to work,” lest some unspecified disaster befall us. Indeed, I can affirm in myself the challenge of simply stopping for a two-and-a-half week break without regularly worrying that my to-do list is going to grow inordinately in the meantime.

At the root of all of this, I suspect, is a very human discomfort with the superabundance of God’s gratuitous love – how can we possibly spend fifty days feasting? How could anyone justify that? After all, there are the stresses of our day-to-day lives to worry about – our jobs, our studies, our to-do lists, financial stresses, family difficulties, etc.

On a broader level, some might argue that feasting and leisure and joy are simply inappropriate in the face of the drama and suffering of our times. And indeed, the digital age has amplified the age-old temptation to get overly caught up in the headlines, which—it must be said—almost always tend to be depressing. But we should remember that today’s headlines are not uniquely depressing, despite what the prognosticators of doom would have us believe. War, disease and famine have been constants for almost all of human history. Fearing that the sky is falling is as much a spiritual problem as it is a problem grounded in reality.

Those with eyes to see can always find signs of immense beauty in our world. More to the point, those with eyes to see can always taste the joy and hope of our faith, and most especially in the Good News of the Easter proclamation.

Asking how anyone could justify fifty days of feasting raises a key word with spiritual significance – namely, justification. A common temptation for many of us is self-justification, which can lead us—among other things—to allow ourselves only as much joy and leisure as we think we have earned, or which our circumstances warrant.

Of course, we must remember that this season of feasting is not justified by us, but by our Lord. And to be reluctant to join in is, really, to decline our invitation to join Christ. How then can one refuse? And if we do, what is any of this for?

The Church, in her wisdom, knows that we struggle with feasting as much as fasting, and so she commands us to make an effort to keep on feasting throughout Eastertide, just as she commanded us to make an effort to fast during Lent.

And so, six weeks into this festival season, let me say once more, happy Easter! Whatever is going on in your life, I exhort you to please strive to make space for joy – not only because we all need it, but also because it is our Christian duty.

Feast, and find your joy and peace not in the depression-inducing vortex of news headlines or social media, but in the secure knowledge that He who created you in love also redeemed you out of love, and longs to be in union with you for all eternity.

Let me finish with a brief poem from the spiritual writings of St Teresa of Avila that a friend gave me recently, in which our Lord speaks beautifully of this union at the heart of the Good News, and which we are invited into in today’s Eucharist:

It was by love that you were made,
Lovely and beautiful to be.
So, though it’s true that you have strayed,
Upon my heart you are portrayed—
Soul, seek yourself in me.

In you, dear Soul, I am confined.
You are my dwelling and my home.
And, even if one day I find
Closed-fast the portals of your mind,
I’ll beg for entrance when I come.

O Search for me not far away
For, if you would attain to me,
You only need my name to say
And I am there without delay.
Soul, seek yourself in me.

04/05/2026

This Wednesday evening. 🙏

22/04/2026

19/04/2026

Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter, Year A

In our Gospel we’ve heard this very powerful account of two disciples who left Jerusalem for Emmaus just after the Resurrection, completely oblivious to what the Lord was doing around them. And as they walk, they’re talking about what had happened – it’s in the past tense. The text says that they were downcast. You could even argue that they might have already been slipping into nostalgia – talking about what once was, what might have been, etc.

So they’re walking away, talking about what had happened, not realising what they’re walking away from. They think the dream is dead – and they’re probably heading back to their home town to pick up the pieces of their old life. Little do they know, the dream is well and truly alive. The problem is, it is so different from what they expected that they can’t see it. Indeed, when Jesus pulls up alongside them, they don’t recognise him – they can’t see what’s right in front of them. They still don’t get what Jesus’ mission and ministry are all about.

Jesus asks them what they were discussing as they walked along, and they tell him the story of all that’s happened—including the rumours of Resurrection—but it’s clear they don’t know what to believe. Then Jesus says something very significant – he upbraids them for being so slow to believe the full message of the prophets. In the original Greek it says he calls them “slow of heart” – essentially, he accuses them of being half-hearted. It’s a heart problem. And he says to them, “Do you not realise that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and die?” It was necessary.

Really? How could it be necessary? Why the cross? They couldn’t figure out the cross, just like us most of the time. It’s the thing we always leave out, because it’s so problematic. These poor disciples thought that Jesus’ suffering and death meant that is was all over – that he had lost. Little did they know that it was precisely through the cross that Jesus won his greatest triumph over sin and death.

So Jesus sets out to teach them – to help them see the significance of all that had just happened. And “starting with Moses and going through all the prophets, he explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures that were about himself.” Unfortunately we don’t have the seminar notes of what Jesus said to them on the way to Emmaus, but we do have the essence of it. And the essence of what Jesus said to them is this: “The Bible… is about me. The whole Bible—from beginning to end—is about me.”

Now, I had the privilege of studying Scripture in some depth for several years as part of my priestly formation, and I have to say that there can be a temptation to get so caught up in all the different ways of approaching the text that you can miss the wood for the trees. “Who wrote this section?” and “who was the audience for that passage?” and “what changes did the redactor make here?” and “how do you parse that verb?” and so on. Don’t get me wrong, all of that stuff is helpful, but it’s possible to get so caught up in it that we miss the most important thing—the very thing that Jesus points out to the disciples on the road—that at the end of the day it’s all about him, and that it leads to the cross.

Once you understand that it’s all about Jesus and that it leads to the cross, you can read it and get it. It’s like getting to the end of a mystery novel when everything is revealed, and then you can then go back and read it again and you notice that the clues were there all along. So Jesus essentially says to them, “the very thing that’s giving you so much trouble—the cross—is the key to the whole thing.” This is why the Church has always said that the whole Bible needs to be read in the light of Christ – because it’s all ultimately about him and the victory he would win on the cross. So Jesus walks the disciples through it all—through all of salvation history—and he helps them see how he is the key to understanding it all.

Then they get to Emmaus, the disciples invite him in, and at the breaking of the bread they recognise him. At the breaking of the bread it’s no longer past tense – it’s present tense. “I will be with you until the end of the age.” And guess how I will be with you until the end of the age? Not in some esoteric doctrine that can only be understood by people with PhDs… but in a little piece of bread. Jesus is with us—in the most remarkable way—in the Eucharist.

A friend of mine likes to imagine that one time when Jesus was off by himself praying to the Father, his prayer went something like this: “I’ve been on reconnaissance here, I’ve looked around, I’ve looked at what we have to work with, and the one thing I can tell you is that whatever we leave them to keep them going when I’m gone… it had better be idiot-proof!” It had better be idiot proof!

Well I’m happy to tell you that the Eucharist is idiot-proof. It’s the most amazing thing, and in order for us to get it, all we have to do is do it… and keep on doing it. I mean, theological reflection on the Eucharist certainly has its place, but it’s not our job to figure out the Eucharist. Jesus didn’t say, “Take this and figure it out.” He said, “Take this and eat it.” The Church has been carrying out this command of Jesus for two thousand years, and we get to do it again right here in a few minutes.

At the breaking of the bread a remarkable transformation happened in the two disciples. The text says that “their eyes were opened”, and they “set out that instant and returned to Jerusalem.” These two disciples who only shortly before were anxious to go inside because it was nearly evening, set out that instant to make the seven mile journey back to Jerusalem to share the Good News. Why? Because their hearts were “burning within them” upon their encounter with the risen Lord. Pray with all your heart for such a grace. Pray that you too might encounter the risen Lord in such a way that your heart burns within you, and that this fire propels you to set out into the “dark nights” of our world to share the Good News.

Because—it has to be said—so many people in our culture are like the disciples at the start of this passage. They’re drifting away—just as the disciples were walking away from Jerusalem—because it doesn’t make sense. And so if, like Jesus in this passage, we are able to explain to folks that it is the Person of Jesus Christ who definitively makes sense of human history—and indeed the entire human experience—if we are able to communicate something of that to people who are drifting away, and they are subsequently able to encounter him – I’ve seen it many times – they too can come hustling back to the Lord with hearts on fire.

So let us pray in this Mass that each of us—and our parish community as a whole—may be able to relive the experience of these disciples on the way to Emmaus, and in so doing to rediscover the grace of the transforming encounter with the Risen Lord.