April 19, 2026 (Third Sunday of Easter) - Fr. Steve Moore

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The grace and peace of God our Father, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. And also with you.

When I was a young Jesuit, I was sent to the Bronx to teach at Fordham Prep in a summer program for neighborhood children who were preparing for entrance into possible Catholic school education and needed a refresher in order to take the exam. So the days were structured a little bit differently. We would gather in the morning, and I taught English, which was not my subject, but in the Jesuits we would say, “I’ve never taken it, nor have I ever even taught it.” So, you know. And then in the afternoon, I was a coach.

But I remember one day clearly, after doing lunch duty—you’re on all day long—I walked out of lunch and these two kids were getting into it at the water fountain. Now, I don’t know what the argument was about, but I just remember the scene. There was one little boy—these were seventh or eighth graders—who just… what they were doing was squaring up against one another. But then the rest of the class fell in line as two lines facing each other, basically saying, “I’ve got his back, I’ve got his back,” and so on and so forth.

Of course, I jumped right in and there was no fight. But I’ll never forget that image of people lining up to do battle. And basically, if the first one goes down, the second one will step in.

It occurs to me that that’s the situation we’re in in our world today, and we have to look at the postures we take, because so quickly people line up to do battle and then line up behind their victor to be in line to defend. But the posture we’re given in the Gospel is something quite different.

Jesus walks along the road with them. In fact, that often is a posture suggested in Scripture—journeying together.

Now, there were many other sermons I would like to have preached about this Gospel. In fact, this is one of my very favorite Gospels, and it will be read at my funeral if my wishes are respected. But I’m going to echo the words of the Jesuit priest and prophet Daniel Berrigan, a Syracuse native, who once said:

“It’s terrible for me to live in a time when I have nothing to say to human beings except stop killing. There are other things that I would love to be saying to people. There are other beautiful things that I would love to say. There are other projects I could be very helpful at, and I can’t do them. I cannot, because everything is endangered. Everything is up for grabs. Ours is a kind of primitive situation, even though we would call ourselves sophisticated. Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started: thou shalt not kill. We are not allowed to kill.”

We live in a time that is more divided than ever. In this past week, we’ve seen things that I think we, as a faith community, as Christians, I would not have predicted. I can say I’m not terribly surprised, but I wouldn’t have predicted that things would have gone this far.

Now let me first say: we are hearing a lot about the Church or Christians getting into political matters. Let’s be clear about what politics are. Politics are the running of the government, the state, how you do things, what political party you vote for—that is politics. I have not heard any Christian leader talk about that in these days.

Questions of morality, of ethics, of justice, of care for those who are least—these have political implications, but these are not political issues. In fact, if you want confirmation of this, read your Bibles. And I’m shocked at how many people don’t read the prophets. Read the Gospels. Jesus is always talking about this stuff.

And so the idea that religious leaders would have nothing to say about war and peace, or the treatment of those on the margins, is incredible to me.

And yet people have lined up behind their victor and have accused one another. And we’ve seen the president take on the pope in a way that’s not done since Napoleon Bonaparte in the 1700s.

Of course, I did appreciate—and I’ve not heard anyone notice this—that all this happened on the feast of Saint Martin I in the Roman Church, who was a seventh-century pope who was exiled by the emperor and eventually martyred. So this is not new.

In fact, there’s very little of this that is new. We have had leaders fight religious leaders time immemorial, and we’ve even had leaders hold themselves up as God. And that’s something we’ve also seen over this past week.

And I think it’s upon us to recognize that this is not how we walk together. This is not how we behave. And we must lift our voices through our actions, through our words—however we are called to do so—to say no, and enough is enough.

Jesus walked along the road with his disciples and instructed them in all the Scriptures that talked about him, beginning with the prophets. On into the resurrection, he runs into disciples who are sad, who are discouraged, who feel like they’ve chosen the wrong horse.

In fact, they say to him, “Don’t you know all that’s happened in Jerusalem these days? What happened with Jesus of Nazareth, how he was killed, and how we had hoped that he would be the Messiah.”

I think it’s instructive for us, because we often hope that the world will be a certain way, or that God will work in a certain way in our lives, or in our politics, or what have you. And we have these expectations that we bring to God and to our world and forget that God is God and we are not.

And we simply must hold on to the words and message and life and mission of Jesus, which reminds us to be people of nonviolence and of peace.

Now, we’ve heard a lot this week about the just war theory from people who know nothing about the just war theory. Yes, there is a Christian tradition that it is permissible at times for states to go to war. I won’t get into the fact that for my master’s comps at Catholic University I wrote, I think rather convincingly, that just war no longer applies in the age of nuclear weapons. I passed, by the way—although it went to a third reader. Yada yada yada. A little gutsy for a seminarian.

But we have these people now, these politicians, telling popes and others how to do theology, how to reason in the moral world as if they didn’t know.

And we have many people, Christian and otherwise, who are reminding us all to stay in our lane. But I will quote again my dear friend Dan Berrigan, who wrote that some people argue that equanimity is achieved by inner spiritual work—necessary. So we have to do our spiritual work before we can work for peace.

He writes:
“The notion that one has to achieve peace of mind before stretching out one’s hand to one’s neighbor is a distortion of our human experience, and ultimately a dodge of our responsibility. Life is a roller coaster, and one had better buckle one’s belt and take the trip.”

As we walk along the road with Jesus, as we encounter our walk as disciples, we recognize that we do so in the messiness of our world. And often we have to live into our convictions and challenge our beliefs.

Whenever we notice ourselves rewarding the desire to violence or fear, we recognize in the best of our voices during these days people who are standing up and saying no—no to the annihilation of civilizations, no to war just for the sake of war, no to capricious putting down of the weak and the marginalized in favor of what people are calling the righteous vengeance of God.

This is a co-opting of the Christian religion. It is cherry-picking parts of our Bible out of context and not filtering them through the vision of Christ and the experience of Christ that we’ve had in our Scriptures and in the lived tradition of our Church. We must repent of this.

Jesus walks along the road with his disciples and he explains—he unpacks the Scriptures for them. And as they reflect on it afterwards, they ask, “Were not our hearts burning within us as he explained the Scriptures to us on the road?”

And their eyes were opened to him in the breaking of the bread.

That is the fundamental call to each of us during this Easter time: to gather, to break open the Scriptures, and let our hearts again take fire. That means that we are inspired. We are changed for the good by the words we hear here. That means that the Scriptures break us open to greater depths of love and possibility, of seeing the world in a different way, and having the courage to stand up when people are being abused or misused.

And it means that when we gather around this altar table to share in the breaking of the bread, we recognize our own transformation.

This is difficult to live into because it’s something that we only get a taste of in this life. We still live in this world where we feel powerless. We still live in a world of confused voices.

But I promise you, if you choose to walk along beside Christ on the road rather than lining up in your particular camps, you and I—we will find our way.

But we have to walk the road.

One of the parts of this Gospel story that I love the most—and you’d have to… I’m not going to go into a deep theology on Luke and traveling and stuff—but they are walking away from Jerusalem. They have been just tragically disappointed. They’re sorrowful, they’re sad.

But they have to go back.

When they recognize the resurrected Christ, it’s not time to leave Jerusalem yet—not until you’ve had that full experience of the resurrected Christ. And then the disciples are sent into the world to spread the good news.

That’s the message of the entire Book of Acts, which was also written by the Lucan author. In Acts, it begins in Jerusalem with the pouring out of the Spirit, and then the disciples are sent forth into all the world to spread the good news of Jesus.

But at the road to Emmaus, they’re not ready to go yet.

You and I have to experience the risen Christ and walk the road. You and I are challenged to do both at the same time, shoring each other up, being companions on the journey, and being voices of a different way of being in our world.

We cannot let this discourse bring us down. You and I, as disciples, as followers of Christ, are charged to be people of peace.

The first words he speaks after the resurrection are, “Peace be with you.”

May we make it so.