Suppose you and I are strolling along in the countryside and a stranger starts to stroll with us.

  “What are you discussing as you walked along?” he asks, a little too boldly.

We stop. We are tempted to admit that we were worrying about the 2020 pandemic. Plus so much else.

One of us—maybe you—says to him, “Are you the only person in the world who does not know what things have happened during these years and these centuries?”

He replies, “What sorts of things?”

You stammer these words, “we had promised to continue Christ’s works, to revere his presence, to preserve his love so it could overflow through us to everyone.” You look away. “But the Church is fragmented. So many bad things are happening.

  “Bad things?” the visitor asks.

  “Yes,” you say.

A number of our own priests have gone against the very mission they swore to preach. Some have been predators! So few are entering the priesthood now—how are we going to have sacraments when the virus won’t allow us to?

I give you a “calm down” signal, but you go right on, now louder.

We are crucifying Christ all over again! Oh, we were hoping that he would make the whole world come right! What can we do?

Jesus says quietly, “you are slow of heart. Don’t you know it is necessary that Christ should suffer and so bring the world into his glory?”

Silence.

Then you reply.

What do you mean—why should the Christ keep suffering? And worse, why would he let all these horrors happen through the world? This virus, for one thing. And remember Nazi Germany? And Sri Lanka, and Indonesia and Bosnia and Rwanda and Iraq and Afghanistan?

So he begins to tell us the things that referred to him in scripture, beginning with Moses and all the prophets. His voice is calm. He shows how God had long sought a loving relationship with his people, and how they would enter into it for a while but then would turn their backs on him and walk away.

Battles and wars, belief and unbelief, rich versus poor—and worst of all, the sick, the very ones who are aching for love. Is there no way?

He tells us that there is a way the human heart can say Yes to God and mean it.

One human being has done it on behalf of us all, one who is human to the core and yet even so will not stop trusting God—though trapped like the rest of us in mindless suffering and death. As often as you and the others, your brothers and sisters, join with me in human faithfulness and love, the world will be changed.

He walks with us further.

And stays with us. His love is so gently strong that we can always count on it, even if we are sinners. It sends us out to others. It is in fact, God's love for people.

You have now become calm. So have I. “Maybe the resurrection did happen,” you are whispering so that the stranger cannot hear it. We both nod. We have recognized him. We have seen him in the breaking of the bread.

We see him in the breaking bones of the world.