3rd Sunday of Easter - Year C - 2025

Jeff Bagnall • 23 April 2025

In the Acts of the Apostles ( Acts 5:27-41 passim ), Luke tries to present to us his ideal vision of the church. He writes from a time when the number and placement of Christians has grown and spread into the wider world; a time when it has become distinguished from its roots in the Jewish religion and, through the initiative of Paul, opened up to the Gentiles. But he writes from this later standpoint about the beginnings of it all in the early days in such a way as to express and address his contemporary issues. So it seems awkward to us in our different situation and after centuries of developing thinking about the impact of Christ on everything. We now want to distance ourselves from any hint that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ; for we see the way humanity both in the centuries before and after Christ has fallen short of all that it should be and appears to thwart the creative intent of God. Notice that a section of what Luke wrote is left out of the lectionary reading; the missing verses tell of the wise conclusion that the Jews came to about this matter.

The second reading is from the Book of Revelation ( 5:11-14 ) (or as I explained last week, the Apocalypse). We saw in last week’s reading that the writer can produce a visionary description in a style of writing that is as unfamiliar to us as the cartoons and computer games of our days would be to him and his original recipients. Here he tries to picture the glory of heaven where Christ is now present after the success of His earthly life and, especially, death – the completion of His life’s work. From our standpoint it is a vision of the future that we expect to experience but it is a setting which we already key into at times – we become a remote part of this heavenly scene symbolically when we celebrate together in communion with the saints, but also when we live out the life of Christ by applying His attitude of loving care and forgiveness in the ordinary meetingswe havewith people daily. It is in these that we are amongst all the creatures and the thousands that worship in this scene of heavenly praise. However, the people that lived nearer than us to the time of Jesus had no difficulty with his humanity, but him being divine was all the more difficult to comprehend; so in this scene, there is no mention of the Holy Spirit, but rather an emphasis on Jesus being praised and worshipped as God.

The third reading is from chapter 21 of the fourth gospel ( John 21:1-19 ). Chapter 20 ended “All this has been written so that you may believe … and believing may have life;” that ends the original work, but then a final chapter was added. It has an account of Jesus meeting the disciples after a night’s unsuccessful fishing – have they not yet settled down to the task of founding a new community of the followers of Jesus? Yet they do have a large catch and the net isn’t broken, which may symbolize the growing community (and no one really knows the symbolism of the 153 fish for certain). The chapter also has the purpose of confirming the leadership position of Peter; he was the one that in the passion account denied having anything to do with Jesus – three times! Now, in a touching tale, the risen Jesus asks him three times, “Do you love me?” and Peter is able to counter his denials, saying at last, “Lord, you know everything, you know I love you!” In our present time, we notice the role of leadership in the church is meant to be one of feeding the followers.

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Jeff Bagnall was a lecturer for many years at Craiglockhart College teaching RE to many future Catholic Primary teachers.

4th Sunday of Easter 2026 - Year A

by Jeff Bagnall • 21 April 2026

The first reading repeats the introduction from last week so as to make sense, for there follows a continuation of the previous words spoken to the crowd by Peter. The people have been moved by the accusation of putting Jesus to death, and they want to know what they can do. Peter calls upon them to be baptised. As John the Baptist seems to have preached to his listeners, Peter begins with the need for repentance and the need for baptism. You could feel sorry for the past but this repentance means ‘change your attitude to life.’ Baptism is a washing symbolic of starting with a clean sheet; here it is for starting a new life caught up in the life of the risen Christ. In his life our past is transformed; those baptised will have the forgiveness of past sins. The words translated ‘forgiveness of’ could equally well be translated as ‘release from,’ meaning a freedom from the debilitating affects of past sins. Those baptised will share in the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit of God. God wants people of all kinds to come into this communion with Him.

3rd Sunday of Easter - 2026 - Year A

15 April 2026

In Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, today’s first reading is the first sermon from Peter after the resurrection. The literary style is not that of a Galilean Jew, but the content is believable as a very early expression of the initial preaching about Jesus. In this first century account of the beginnings of Christianity, Peter is a key figure in the growth of the early church, together with Paul, the missionary to the Gentiles. It is significant that it is a Jewish audience in Jerusalem that Peter is addressing. Jesus is referred to as the Nazarean and there is uncertainty whether this means a man from Nazareth or one specially dedicated to God, as for example, Samson in the Old Testament, called a Nazirite. The understanding of Christian beliefs develops over time, so Peter speaks about God working through Jesus where we might be clear that Jesus is Himself God; but he does see Jesus as the fulfilment of the hopes of the Old Testament and quotes Psalm 16 verses 8 to 11, which was a song originally about someone faithful to the Lord, maybe king David, being looked after by Him; (it is used for the responsorial psalm this day). In the sermon Peter accuses the Jews of engineering the death of Jesus in an anti-Semitic way; this attitude was decried by the Church most noticeably in the 20th century in the Second Vatican Council initiated by Pope Saint John XXIII, with the words: “Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any person, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” (The Church and non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate, Oct. 1962). But for us the positive message from Peter’s sermon is that the Spirit of God is now poured out into creation because of the resurrection of Jesus destroying the deadliness of death and the power of evil in our lives. The second reading is part of an address to early Christians, probably Gentile converts. It is about what it means to be a Christian, noting that it is brought about by Christ – the writer uses the word ‘ransomed’, but no words can really capture the mystery of it. The mystery is that the final age has been initiated thanks to the work of God in Christ, through His life and death. The imagery of the sacrificial lamb which is used is derived from the bloody sacrifices of the Jewish Temple which at the time of this letter had been destroyed. And those addressed are living like people in exile and are urged to conduct themselves reverently in this situation; this reflects how the Jews were when they were in exile in Babylon, they had to work at it to keep themselves true to their calling. So, though we are elevated in our being through the work of God in Christ, we are for the time being in this world and must live here in a way becoming of our status.