3rd Sunday of Easter 2026
Acts 2:14, 22-23; 1Peter 1, 17-21; Luke 24: 13-25
When this passage was read on Easter Thursday, I invited people to reflect on when the first Mass was celebrated. Our instinct might be to reply “At the Last Supper” which is partially true, but doesn’t tell the whole story.
Certainly, at the Supper, there was a Liturgy of the Word, the first part of the Mass, with scripture readings telling of the Passover and Exodus, and the singing of psalms; and a Liturgy of the Eucharist, as Jesus consecrated the bread and wine of the Passover meal, thus making them His Body and Blood. What then was the difference between the Last Supper and Mass?
Crucially, if you will pardon the pun, at the Last Supper, Jesus had not yet entered into His Passion. He had not yet given up His life on the Cross; He had not yet risen from the dead. These are elements at the heart of the Mass, which makes present for us today the whole of Christ’s sacrifice, His self-offering to the Father, culminating in His Death and Resurrection.
I would therefore say that the first Mass BEGAN at the Last Supper, but CONTINUED in the Garden of the Agony, in the High Priest’s palace, in the residences of Pilate and Herod Junior; REACHED ITS CLIMAX on Calvary; and WAS FULFILLED in the Resurrection. This whole sequence of events formed Christ’s sacrifice, that once-and-for-all self-offering, which is made present for us IN ITS ENTIRETY every time Mass is celebrated.
What we are celebrating now brings together all these aspects of Christ’s redeeming sacrifice, beginning in the Upper Room and reaching its conclusion at the Empty Tomb. Hence, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council (1962-5) defined the Mass (the Eucharist) as “the source and summit of the Christian life”.
Perhaps we shouldn’t speak at all of the First Mass, the Second Mass, and so on because the Mass is always one with the sacrifice of Jesus the Christ, bringing that sacrifice to the here and now. However, as celebrations of the Mass are separated in time, we may perhaps legitimately ask when Mass was celebrated for the second time, to which the answer would be “in the passage we have heard today, on the road to, and in the house at, Emmaus”.
It's all there, isn’t it? We have the Liturgy of the Word, when Jesus recalls the Books of the Law and the Prophets, and “interprets to [the disciples] in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself”.
Then we have the second part of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, as He takes, blesses, breaks and gives the Bread of the Eucharist, opening their eyes to recognise Him, and “vanishing from their sight” as He is now present in His Body and Blood. When they have received Christ under the appearances of bread (and, presumably, wine) they leave to tell what they have experienced in word (“what had happened on the road”) and sacrament (“how He was known to them in the breaking of the Bread”) just as we are sent out at the end of Mass to proclaim what we have experienced. Indeed, the Mass takes its name from the sending out: “Ite, (ecclesia) missa est”.
One other thing strikes me. The stranger who speaks to them proves to be the Christ. Is that not also the case for us? “Whatever you did to the least of mine YOU DID TO ME.” Christ is always present in the stranger, and especially in the gathering of His people, when the Community, along with the Priest, the Word, and the Sacrament, is one of the four ways in which Christ is present in the Mass. In conclusion, we can never exhaust the mystery of the Mass, the “source and centre” of our Christian lives.
