Jesus breaks for us – Luke 24:13-35

Third Sunday of Easter, Year A; Moreau Seminary.

A couple of months after my priestly ordination, I ended up checking in to Holy Cross House. For about a week, I’d been really tired and had an annoying cough that wouldn’t go away, and then one Sunday evening, I passed out while saying Mass. It turned out that I had walking pneumonia, which isn’t a lot a fun at the best of times I’ve heard, but that also interacted another condition that I thought I had been managing adequately, and resulted in gastric fluid collecting in my lungs. After a few really difficult days of isolation on the medical floor, which were certainly difficult because of the pain and the fever, but even more because of the complete lack of knowing what was going on, I was finally allowed out of my room, and allowed to come down to concelebrate Mass. Still smarting from the realization of how out of breath I was from walking from the elevator to the chapel, I remember well the first time I concelebrated Mass at Holy Cross House. I remember saying, “This is my Body,” and it meaning something new and different than the last sixty or so times I’d said that. I remember seeing the Body broken at the fraction rite and knowing that I now knew Christ in a new way. I knew him in the breaking of the bread.