Third Sunday of Easter, Year C
First reading: Acts 5:27-32, 40b-41
Second reading: Rev 5:11-14
Gospel reading: Jn 21:1-19

The Second Sunday of Easter used to be called “Low Sunday.” After the week-long glory and ecstasy of Easter, the rest of the Easter season seems like an anticlimax.

We return to everyday routines: we face that although Christ has redeemed us and given us another chance to be “divinized,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, we are still sinners, subject to the effects of original sin and the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

I love the Church’s seasons: the change from green vestments to purple on Ash Wednesday; the sombreness of the church during Holy Week, with statues and crucifixes veiled; the grief of Good Friday, when even the sanctuary lamp is out; and the expectancy of Holy Saturday, when we kindle the new fire and light the Easter candle.

I welcome Lent as the prod I need to turn back to God: to repent, fast, give alms, and make reparation for my sins. However, I would not want it to last any longer.

At Easter, I love the change into white or gold vestments and the transformation of the church during the Easter Vigil, when the statues are unveiled, flowers are carried in, the bells ring, and the organ bursts forth with the Gloria.

Humans are “amphibian,” says C.S. Lewis: spirit and animal. As spirits, we belong to the eternal world and can direct our souls to the unchangeable God, but as animals, we inhabit time, with our bodies, passions, and imaginations in continuous change.

Our nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is “undulation,” Lewis says: a series of “troughs and peaks.”

We see it all through our lives: in our affections, physical appetites, and interest in our work.

In our spiritual lives, we sometimes wonder why God does not make himself known to us more convincingly. Surely he can make himself present to us unmistakably!

Yes; but God wants us to love him as he loves us, and no lover demands proof. What would happen to your relationship with your spouse if he or she demanded continual, indisputable, irresistible proof of your fidelity?

Trust is essential for love. “Do not doubt, but believe,” God says to us, as he said to Thomas last Sunday.

The “irresistible,” the “indisputable,” and the “overriding” are weapons God will not use. “In a certain sense, confronted with our human freedom, God decided to make himself impotent,” or powerless, said St. John Paul II.

Only if we already trust God can he give us irresistible intimations of his presence, as he did to St. John in this Sunday’s second reading.

When we first come to know him, God is “prepared to do a little overriding,” Lewis notes. For example, he may communicate his presence to us “with emotional sweetness and easy conquest over temptation.” In the first days of the Church, even Peter’s shadow could cure the sick, as we heard last Sunday.

However, sooner or later, the honeymoon ends: God seems to withdraw those supports and incentives, leaving us to carry out, by willpower alone, duties that have become humdrum.

It is during such trough periods, much more than in peak periods, that we grow into the sort of creatures God wants us to be. Some of the greatest saints experienced the longest “dark nights of the soul.”

The prayers we pray from a state of dryness are those that please him best: when we no longer desire, but still intend, to do his will; when we feel forsaken and yet still obey, as Christ did on the Cross.

This Sunday, we continue to come down from the heights of Easter. It is time to start bearing witness to what we believe in our everyday lives, as Peter and John did in the first reading – perhaps even to start preparing for martyrdom, as Christ warned Peter in the Gospel reading.

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1–30 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 31, “Love of God and Neighbour,” will be available in YouTube form starting May 1.