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We share excerpts from Father Simeon's homily at his Mass of Thanksgiving:
Today, the glorious Son of Man touches us reassuringly with his wounded hand
and with immense tenderness he says to us: 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 underworld. These, my friends, are words from the mouth of
the risen Jesus himself, revealing the deepest meaning of his Resurrection,
words from the one who cannot lie. The
one who says, in the present tense of eternity: “I am the Living One forever and ever”, also says: “Once I was dead”. He thus refers to his own death in the past tense,
as a stage already suffered through and left behind definitively.
How radically and permanently our lives could be transformed if we made the
knowledge of this gift of indestructible life and peace our deepest conviction,
if we truly believed the words of power, reassurance and consolation spoken to
us by our Savior after his triumph over death. Christ, in fact, knows intimately our impulse toward decay, because once
he too truly drank the bitterness of his and our common mortality, drank it down
to the dregs, so that it is your and my
specific death that he triumphed over, and not merely some abstract idea of death. The wounds in his body swiftly banish all
such abstraction. The one thing that a follower
of Jesus can be sure of is that he or she will never be alone, because in the
act of following at least two are always involved. So, if we follow him into his death, he will
lead us out of it into his life.
Jesus penetrates to the center of the apostles’ fear despite the locked
doors. Jesus’ love
and desire to be with his own will always find its way to us, no matter what human
measures we might take to make ourselves “safe”, unreachable, perhaps even to
him! As someone, echoing Augustine, has
dared to exclaim: “Restless is your heart, [O Jesus,] until it rests in
me! Restless is your heart until we rest
in you!”* Urged by his divine restlessness, “Jesus came
and stood in their midst.” Suddenly, and against all expectation
and possibility, he was there, at the very center of their group, attracted to
them by their very fear and confusion.
Jesus always takes the initiative in coming to us, because he always
loves first and always anticipates our needs and desires. What he brings us is the peace that he has
won for us at the price of his wounds, which he now shows us as trophies of his
battle with death. Only the One wounded for
us is to be believed, since true love is always a wounded love and Jesus’
wounds speak to us far louder than his words.
His gesture of proving his identity to his friends by showing them the
gleaming wounds in his hands and side is the gesture of a lover baring his entire
being to the beloved he wants to seduce and make his own forever. Jesus has nothing to hide from us, since he has given us
the very substance of his body, soul and divinity for our possession. That is the way love works. He gives us everything he is and has. In return, he wants our act of faith, by
which we declare that we believe he is Who
he says he is, and by which we also accept the peace he brings us and allow
it to drive out all our fear.
*Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World.
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