Friday in the Octave of Easter 2025
The last of the prophetic books of the OT, Malachi, concludes with a description of the “day of the Lord,” on which “all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble” and will be burned up leaving them with “neither root nor branch.” But for those who fears the Name of the Lord, the “sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” Then the good people who stayed loyal to God would go out “leaping like calves from the stall.” Moreover, they would then stamp on the wicked.
That’s like what happened shortly before this incident from Acts that resulted in the arrest of Peter and John in the Temple. Peter called on a paraplegic beggar in the name of Jesus to rise and walk, and the beggar not only miraculously rose, but he began to walk and leap and praise God. That scene attracted a crowd to Solomon’s portico and explained how, subsequent to His murder, Jesus was raised by God to life from death. And this was the same Jesus who raised the disabled man to perfect health and ability. Peter has just told the Jews that this was the fulfillment of the promise to their father Abraham: “in your posterity shall all the families of the earth be blessed,” beginning with those now assembled in the Temple area.
What struck me about the story is that the onlookers must have seen the Sadducees and Temple guard arrest the apostles and drag them off to a holding cell, but that, even so, they believed and allowed the remaining apostles to baptize them—five thousand of them! And we just heard that the next day, far from being cowed by their arrest and overnight stay in a stinky jail, they boldly proclaimed that Jesus is the stone sung about in Psalm 118, rejected “by you builders” and now the cornerstone of a new assembly, the Church. Would that all Christians, even under threat, would so boldly proclaim the truth.
We then sang from that same psalm, understanding that, as in so much of the OT, what was proclaimed over thousands of years by the Hebrews has been fulfilled in Our Lord.
Our Gospel was one of the favorites of the Church Fathers in the first three or four centuries because it is so rich with Biblical fulfillment. The Church is evangelical, reaching out to all humans, or She is nothing.
We are told that the haul of fish after the apostles obeyed Jesus was a hundred and fifty-three megalon ichthyn. “Mega” we all understand. These were huge fish, and since a hundred and fifty-three was the number of species of fish catalogued by the ancients, it meant the Church was charged to go out to preach and baptize every race of humans. This suggests that each of us has that same task in this culture of death—to bring them the good news of Jesus and His redemption, and do it now, not someday far off.
