Homily: Second Sunday of Easter

April 12, 2026

My dear brothers and sisters, we are celebrating the liturgy of the second Sunday of Easter. The readings of today present to us the immediate events that followed the resurrection of Jesus in the life of His Apostles. In fact, the first readings of the Sundays after Easter are all taken from the Acts of the Apostles. This book tells the story of the spread of the Gospel after the Resurrection of Jesus and the formation of the first Christian communities throughout the world. Four elements characterized this first Christian communities. All followed the teachings of the apostles; secondly, they had everything in common; thirdly, they met together for the celebration of the Eucharist, and finally, they prayed together. We read in the first reading of today, “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” The way this independent clause sounded, “they devoted themselves,” shows a constant and assiduous fidelity, a lively faith, a sincere commitment, an enthusiasm in living one’s life totally in relation to the risen Lord, and a zeal for spreading the Good News.

Brothers and sisters, our Christian community should be attentive to the teachings of the apostle, so that we deepen our knowledge and faith in the risen Savior. The truth about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are not so self-explanatory or self-evident. Many explanations other than that of the apostles have been given. For instance, while the apostles were witnesses to the resurrection, met one-on-one with the risen Jesus, and testified to the whole world that Jesus is risen, the chief priests paid the guards who guarded the tomb of Jesus some money and they polluted the air with the fake news that Jesus’s disciples came and stole his body while they were asleep. These two versions circulated in the air about the fate of Jesus after His resurrection. In our own time, there are also many versions and narratives about Christ. The version where the truth lies and which we Christians are to embrace is the teaching of the apostles which subsists till today in the teachings handed down through the bishops of the Church. Any form of Christianity which feels itself free to reject the Apostle’s testimony is a false Christianity.

Like the Christian community of the Apostolic times, our Christian community should be a community attentive to prayer. Our Christian community should gather to celebrate the Eucharist. The Eucharist should be the source and center of its life. Very remarkably, Jesus went to meet with His disciples when they were gathered in prayers on a Sunday morning, the very time we usually gather to celebrate the Sunday Eucharist. It was at that Christian gathering while they were at prayers that Jesus breathed His peace on them and poured His Spirit upon them and they experienced the joy of the risen Savior. Jesus did not go to search and breathe His Spirit on them one after the other, some in the coffee shop, one or two where they were vaping tobacco at the backyard during weekend Mass and some others in the hockey pitch. No, it was at their prayer gathering that He met them. This meant that if anybody was absent from this holy gathering, the person did not receive His gift of peace, the person would not sample His joy as the other disciples did, the person would not receive His Spirit and above all, the person would not meet Him.

We can see what happened with Thomas. He withdrew from the Christian fellowship. He sought loneliness rather than togetherness, and because he was not there with his fellow Christians, he missed the first coming of Jesus. The terrible result became that his faith in Jesus started immediately to fail. Had he not retraced his steps by rejoining the community of the Christian brethren, he might have been a lost apostle too. We miss a great deal when we separate ourselves from the Christian fellowship and try to be alone. It is in this community of prayer that we feed ourselves with the teachings of Christ handed down to us through the apostles, in this community we breathe-in the peace and Spirit of Christ and strengthen our faith in the risen Savior.