Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter

The message we receive in our Scripture readings today is that before Jesus could rise to glory on Easter, He first had to suffer and die. Peter puts it this way in our first reading today: “God has thus brought to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand through… all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer [before being raised to glory].”

Jesus refers to this in our Gospel reading today. He adds elsewhere in the Gospel that what has happened to Him must also happen to us when He says, “Remember, no slave is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”

What the Gospel is saying is that if we are to rise to glory as Jesus did, we must also suffer as He did. When this happens, we may beg God to take it away as Jesus begged His Father in the Garden of Gethsemane but, in the end, we will cry for joy just as Jesus did.

St. Augustine put this same message this way in a sermon more than 1,500 years ago. He said, “You are like a piece of pottery, shaped by instruction, fired by tribulation. When you are put in the oven, therefore, keep your thoughts on the time when you will be taken out again; for God is faithful and will guard both your going in and your coming out.”

Back in 1954, the great French painter, Henri Matisse died at the age of 86. In the last years of his life, arthritis crippled and deformed his hands making it painful for him to hold a paintbrush. Yet, he continued to paint, placing a cloth between his fingers and the brush to keep the brush from slipping.

One day, someone asked Matisse why he submitted his body to such suffering. Why did he continue to paint in the face of such great physical pain? Matisse replied, “The pain passes but the beauty remains.”

In a similar way, the pain you and I experience in being shaped into something useful and beautiful for God will pass. But the beauty of what we become in the process will remain for ever.+