20 April 2017 - homily - Thursday in the Octave of Easter - Acts 3:11-26

      I really enjoy the readings from the Acts of the Apostles that we hear each year in our daily masses during the Easter season about the development of the Early Church. Today’s passage takes place after a lame man asks Peter and John for help at the gates of the Temple area.  We heard about the beginning of this reading yesterday.  Instead of just giving this man a few coins, they heal him through the invocation of the Holy Spirit. This lame man is so full of joy at his healing that he leaps around, shouting praises to God.  The commotion that he makes draws the attention of a large crowd, giving Peter the opportunity to preach to the people about Jesus.  Peter explains to the crowd about what happened to their Lord.  He wants the people to repent, to change their lives, to become followers of the risen Christ. That is the thing about miracles: it is not the miracle itself, the healing of the lame man, that should draw our attention, but rather the power and the truth behind that miracle, the way it teaches us about God’s kingdom and about our faith. 

     We hear a lot about repentance in our Catholic faith, don’t we. I keep a blog where I post my homilies as a priest.  As of the time I was writing this homily, I had 2,264 posts to my blog over the course of more than 6 years.  Wow, unbelievable when I think about it. I did a word search on the word “repent”; it has appeared in 171 different posts in my blog.  “Repent and believe in the Gospel”: that was the admonition we each had proclaimed to us at our Ash Wednesday liturgy as we received a smudge of ash on our foreheads. We were called to repentance in a special way during the season of Lent.  We are called to a constant cycle of repentance on our journey of faith.  How we repent and how we respond to the resurrection of Christ and how his resurrection becomes a reality in our lives of faith is what this joyful Easter season is all about. We can all probably think of many little things that we can do to live out the resurrection in our lives, how we can reach out to others in the spirit of the resurrection. The lame man and the crowd were called to respond to and to repent at hearing the message of our Lord Jesus Christ in the words of Peter and John. His Gospel not only comforts us, but it also challenges us. It is up to us to respond and to repent.