3rd Sunday after Easter 11.5.14 Leaven in the bread
For forty days after His resurrection Our Lord stayed with His disciples. But He was preparing to leave them. He could not stay with them (in that bodily form) forever.
He expected them to take charge of the newly-formed Church. It seems a great drop in quality to have mere mortals taking the place of Christ Himself. But it was all part of His plan, to impress upon us that we have a role to play in our own salvation.
When Our Lord worked miracles He always caused a sensation and people would tend to crowd around Him even more.
He tried to defuse this effect, telling people not to make known what had happened to them; avoiding the crowd when they would try to make Him King (cf Jn 6,15).
This was because the nature of the salvation that He brought required the understanding and cooperation of those being saved.
Our Lord wanted to avoid the idea that He was simply the dispenser of divine graces, and that all people had to do was come to Him and receive what they wanted. He was not just a free-food counter or a free medical centre. The people were not just passive receivers of His graces. They had to be transformed within, to be made into new people.
His hope was that, beginning with the apostles, His disciples would derive from Him a new heart and mind, and thus become like Him in all their actions.
The work of saving would be carried on by the whole Church and not just Our Lord Himself.
This is how the Church of today should be running. If we are all Christ-like in our thoughts, words and actions then we carry Him to the world (as to each other).
Healing and other blessings will flow naturally from such an arrangement. In the very early days of the new Church the apostles did duplicate the healing miracles of Our Lord. Even the shadow of an apostle going by could heal people (Acts 5,12-16).
We all need healing and other blessings, but we also must report for duty to be a carrier of those same blessings to others.
We are to be the leaven in the bread, along the lines of today’s epistle. We must be good citizens, but more than just law-abiding. We must make Christ present in our neighbourhoods by the way we live.
It is not just spectacular miracles or fine preaching that will move the world. These things are good when they happen, but most of the work will be done just by ordinary disciples doing ordinary things well, or rather, perfectly.
We probably all would have a fairly high degree of self-doubt regarding our own ability to change the world.
The power still comes from Christ; but we can activate that power in the here and now.
We go to Him to receive what we need. We are transformed as we do receive it. We then live our lives in this new way of thinking and doing things.
And the Church grows organically, as Our Lord always planned.
This will work for our greater happiness, because we are conscious receivers of His grace, privileged to participate in His works.
This is why He had to leave us. We discover that He has not really left anyway, but is present in a different way.
We have to work a little harder to find Him but He is very definitely in our midst.
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