In the Old Testament Book of Wisdom, there is a powerful passage that looks back on the exodus, the liberation of the Jewish people from 400-plus years of slavery under the Pharaohs of Egypt. That event was real and yet was also a type, a foreshadowing, of the ultimate rescue mission God was going to engage in through Jesus. This rescue wouldn’t be from the tyranny and slavery of some earthly king but from the powers of Sin, Death, and Satan. Reflecting back on that first exodus Wisdom says,
“For while gentle silence enveloped all things,
and night in its swift course was now half gone,
your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne,
into the midst of the land that was doomed, a stern warrior” (Wisdom 18:14-15).
One very real day, probably in the month of March, in a town so insignificant that it's not even mentioned in the Old Testament, an angel appeared to a young teenage girl and invited her to do something, invited her to be something unthinkable and unimaginable. He invited her to be the mother of God’s Son. And suddenly those words from the Book of Wisdom were no longer poetry. They literally happened. Suddenly, hidden away from the powerful and the wealthy, the God who made the universe begins to grow inside the womb of a woman he himself created.
During these days in which we celebrate the Paschal Triduum and the Octave of Easter, the ultimate purpose of the Incarnation—God becoming man—is made clear to us.
Jesus Mission: the Re-Creation of the Universe
Jesus became man to go to war on our behalf in order to defeat the powers of Sin, Death, and Satan by dying on the cross and rising from the dead. And on that day when Jesus rose from the dead, he wasn’t simply showing off. No, on Easter Sunday, Jesus began the re-creation of this universe—a universe that he loves and that came into existence through him.
If Jesus was beginning on Easter the re-creation of this world that God loves, then our mission, rightly understood, is to be a continuation of that mission until he returns.
So what exactly does that look like?
In one sense, it begins with the Eucharist. Just as Jesus pitched his tent, so to speak, on pilgrimage to the human race in Our Lady through the Incarnation, so he pitches his tent on pilgrimage to you and me, in a very personal way, through the Eucharist. Why does Jesus give himself to us like this? For many reasons, to be sure, but three stand out for me.
First, in the Eucharist he gives us access to power to live new lives. Like all the sacraments, the Eucharist imparts grace, and one way to understand grace is as supernatural power that enables us to do things that we otherwise would not be capable of doing on our own.
Second, Jesus unites himself to us through the Eucharist. Love wants union. This is why a man and a woman, when they love each other and get married, are not content to just say, “I love you.” Oh, that’s important, to be sure, and we should all say it more than we probably do. But love wants more. It wants to show it. That love is consummated when the lover and the beloved, the husband and wife, give themselves to each other and become one. Why? Because love wants union. If God is love, and he is, then what does God want? God wants union. With us. This is, needless to say, a jaw-dropping reality many of us probably do not allow ourselves to linger with enough.
Third, when we receive the Eucharist, it transforms us. Jesus wants us to look more like him and our hearts more like his. This is one of the reasons Jesus established the Eucharist on that night before he died: he wanted to enter physically into you and me--in order to transform our stony hearts into hearts of flesh--so that you and I might love as he loves and desire what he desires. The Eucharist is a kind of spiritual transfusion. When we eat his Body and drink the Precious Blood, we are remade into new beings.
Rescue Your Brothers and Sisters Held Captive
Against the backdrop of an increasingly divided and polarized culture, it’s worth reflecting a bit deeper on how receiving the Eucharist is both an intimate encounter and a missionary call. In the Gospel of Luke, we read about the first encounter between Jesus and a man named Peter. Peter is a fisherman, in business with his brother, Andrew, and two other brothers, James and John. Together, they run a sort of co-op. As the crowds press in on Jesus while he preaches, he asks if Peter will let him get into his boat so he can preach from offshore. When Jesus finishes preaching, he tells Peter, “Put out into deep water, and lower your nets for a catch.” Peter protests that they had worked all night long and had caught nothing, but perhaps because of the authority in Jesus’ voice, he does what he is told. A miraculous catch of fish follows, the likes of which Peter and Andrew had never seen. There were so many fish, in fact, that they had to call their partners, James and John, to come and help, and still both boats were in danger of sinking due to the huge haul.
Realizing something supernatural has happened at the command of Jesus, Peter is overwhelmed with a sense of his own humanity and falls to his knees before him. “Depart from me, Lord,” he says, “for I am a sinful man.” Ignoring the plea, Jesus tells Peter, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.”
At least that’s how it’s usually translated.
Zogron is the Greek word Luke uses that we translate as “catching.” It has nothing to do with fishing. It means to capture alive, or spare the life of, but when it’s found in the Old Testament it is always presented in a military context. In the New Testament, we find the word twice, and both instances are metaphorical, referring back to that military meaning. Remembering how the only enemy captured our race way back at the beginning, we could perhaps better understand what Jesus says to Peter this way: “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be going behind enemy lines and rescuing your brothers and sisters who are held captive.” This he is going to be able to do, of course, because of the rescue Jesus accomplishes by his death and resurrection.
This detail can help us better understand that, as important as it is to grasp the personal intimacy of the Eucharist, it can’t stay there. God’s desire is for all of his children to be gathered together again, reconciled both to him and to each other. He created us to be his family. A little-known Collect of one of the three Masses for the Church in the Roman Missal makes this remarkable point abundantly clear:
O God, in the covenant of your Christ you never cease to gather to yourself from all nations a people growing together in unity through the Spirit; grant, we pray, that your Church, faithful to the mission entrusted to her, may continually go forward with the human family and always be the leaven and the soul of human society, to renew it in Christ and transform it into the family of God. ("Collect for Mass for the Church, B," The Roman Missal, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), 1238).
Join "The Resistance"
So, mindful that the enemy is the enemy—and nobody else is; that God is a good Father; that Jesus is Lord, and that this world is crying for God, even if it doesn’t know it, I would like to argue that his call to follow is nothing less than a call to join “The Resistance,” to go out into this world that he loves and participate in its re-creation through acts of love and mercy and kindness and forgiveness and reconciliation. To go out and rescue, renew, and transform the human family into the family of God. That’s the mission that Jesus launched on Easter Sunday.
Let’s go do it.
Fr. John Riccardo was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit in 1996. In 2019, after 23 years in parish ministry, he founded ACTS XXIX to proclaim the Gospel in an attractive and compelling way and to equip clergy and lay leaders for the age in which God has chosen us to live. Fr. John is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Gregorian University, and the Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family.
