St. Pius X Roman Catholic Parish

Third Sunday of Easter

“We cannot love life with God if we do not hate it without Him.” For all of us struggling to have a quiet, peaceful life that offers us true fulfillment, we should remember this fact. We cannot love life with God if we do not hate it without Him. It is only in recognizing the emptiness of a life apart from God that we can truly appreciate the depth of His presence in our hearts. When we turn our longing for peace and fulfillment toward Him, we find a purpose that rises above the distractions and restlessness of the world.

The disciples in the Gospel today were confronted with their own doubts and fears. Their hearts and minds were in their own uncertainty. What they were experiencing was the difference between their lives before they encountered Jesus and their lives now without Him. Their surrender to Christ’s love, and the transformation it brought, shows us that only when we turn away from the shadows of life apart from God can we fully rejoice in the light of life with Him.

It’s kind of the adage “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”  Even if, giving the disciples the benefit of the doubt, they believed they had lost their Messiah (and not a political leader or reformer), in their hearts they already knew they had lost something especially important when Jesus died. Perhaps they realized it even more as they walked home to Emmaus, wondering what they were going to do next.

This encounter reminds us that even in our darkest moments, God draws near, inviting us to recognize His presence and embrace a life filled with meaning and joy. When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and honest about our longing for something greater, we become receptive to the grace that only God can offer. In other words, when we realize that our lives have more meaning when it is filled with His presence, we start to do everything we can to hold onto that life with God.

The disciples learned another lesson: we cannot place our eyes on Jesus until we take them off ourselves. As Jesus broke open the Word to them, filling them with hope and encouragement, they took their eyes off their own sorrows and despair and placed them on the Resurrected Lord. Every one of us has one or two things in this world that we are attached to. We carry around this burden, this false security. But if our arms are full of these things we are carrying with us, how can we fully and properly embrace our Lord?

To truly welcome Christ into our lives, we must let go of the burdens that distract us and make room for His grace. It is in this act of surrender that we discover freedom, joy, and a fulfillment that cannot be found anywhere else. As we walk our own roads, much like the disciples on the way to Emmaus, we need to open our hearts to the possibility of encountering Jesus anew every day, trusting that His presence will transform our fears into hope and our uncertainty into purpose. With each step like that we draw closer to the life God desires for us—one marked by peace, meaning, and the fullness of His love.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux said it best:

“It is hard for someone to run if they are weighed down by heavy burdens. A free person, on the other hand, runs faster and more easily…the road is short; there is no need to bring too many things for the journey.”

We cannot love life with God if we do not hate it without Him. We can encounter God every day, but we often (even when we are looking for Him) walk right by Him without noticing. We are all looking for something greater for our lives and the world around us. Well- He’s right next to us, walking with us, on sunny days and cloudy and stormy days. Whether we want to admit it or not, we feel the absence of God in our lives from time to time- but it is not He who abandons us, but we who abandon Him.

Let us pray for a heart that, in its search for greater meaning and purpose for our own lives, it will be open to encountering God who always walks right beside us. He is the greatest meaning and gives us the greatest purpose in our lives. If we are tired of living through life rather than actually living it, let us pray for the courage to put down the burdens we are carrying so that we can fully embrace our Lord without anything in our hands to make that hard.

If the Gospel is to reach “to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8), then we, its messengers, like athletes in a race, need to be light, free, and unhindered, so that “the word of the Lord may spread rapidly”(2 Thess 3:1). I cannot stress enough the importance of daily prayer in encountering Jesus, but just as important is, in those prayers, remember to give thanks for the blessings in your life. These are the signs that God is there, and they help us to love our life more as we know at the same time that He is in it.