“This is truly the Prophet” (John 6:14).

It was Passover. What were thousands of people doing out in the wilderness instead of being in Jerusalem where they belonged? There were enough men in the crowd to form a small army. With Jesus able to feed them miraculously, there was no stopping them from ushering in the reign of God by force, if only Jesus will lead them.

This is the scene set in John 6, both theologically and perhaps historically. Jesus is at the height of his popularity and his powers. Success is within reach. But after feeding the huge gathering with the five loaves and two fish from a child, he retreats into the mountains to pray. The crowds see Moses in him and manna from heaven flowing from his hands. Jesus withdraws to pray as Moses did, meeting God face to face in order to understand his true vocation. Moses once came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments and proceeded to lead the people to the Promised Land. Jesus comes down the mountain with the First Commandment to love and proceeds to Jerusalem to lay down his life. The real food he will give is his life for the world, bread broken and the cup poured out.

We want and need to succeed, and when it is within our grasp we will be tempted to seize and hasten it by any means. But Jesus had been in the wilderness before. During his 40-day retreat at the start of his public ministry he was shown the temptation he was now facing surrounded by the cheering crowds. Give us bread and miracles and we will make you our king. But as he did in his first encounter with temptation, he now again chooses the path of the Suffering Servant. God will save the world not by power but with an invitation to come freely by way of sacrificial love. This was Jesus’ success, and it must be ours as well.

“During the night an angel opened the door …” (Acts 5:18).

Jail time has played an important part in the formation of many revolutionaries, artists and evangelists. Lenin and Dostoevsky were both sent to Siberia, with strikingly different outcomes for world history. Alfred Hitchcock was kept in a jail cell long enough to form a lifelong obsession with terror and the torture of beautiful blondes. Dorothy Day discovered the Bible while in jail. Major portions of the New Testament were composed in the slammer.

Even those of us who have not risked incarceration for some ideal or misdeed can identify with the compression that occurs during a long sleepless night filled with accusation or dread or the burden of having to make a difficult decision in the morning. There is no way out, so we must go in, deeper than we have gone before, forced to explore things we would rather not confront within ourselves.

The story of the apostles in Acts 5 — their night in jail and miraculous release by an angel – matches the resurrection stories in Luke’s first book. A dark night in the tomb guarded by soldiers, an empty tomb in the morning, rumors of angels, another Exodus orchestrated by the God who hears the cry of the poor (Ps 34). So the church now does everything that Jesus did, fearlessly preaching the arrival of the new order, God made flesh and come to earth, in Jesus, in us.

How many jail cells have been unlocked and opened, while their inmates remain inside, choosing the security of jail over the adventure of life. We all start out in jail. Life begins when we hear angels’ voices in the night and then wake to claim the freedom and reprieve God offers everyone.

“Be it done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

We celebrate the moment Mary conceived Jesus today because the usual date of the feast, March 25, fell during Holy Week this year.

Her consent to this conception made present in history the mystery of the Incarnation, God with a heartbeat, a body, a human story in a specific community that both recognized and rejected him. Jesus, the Word made flesh, deepened and altered forever human destiny and the fate of all creation.

One way to look at the story of Mary’s consent is to imagine that, in the moment of her visitation, she was at prayer and pondering a passage of scripture, say Isaiah 7:14: “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’” Because of Mary’s capacity to hear the Word and her openness to receive it, this Word came true in her hearing. The Word became flesh in her body.

On this feast we ought to ask for that same capacity to listen deeply, to be given the passage of scripture that comes alive for us in the same way that it did for Mary. Then say, yes, let this come true. Mary’s act of faith and her desire to do God’s will set in motion a conception and birth that has made all the difference. We are part of the story her consent made possible. Our own consent will continue the story in our time and place, the Word made flesh in us.

The late radio storyteller Paul Harvey entertained audiences with tales of ordinary life that began in adversity and ended in triumph. The stories always reached their lowest point at the commercial break, but then roared back to life with the words “And now for the rest of the story.”

The Gospel of Mark originally ended with the scene at the empty tomb where angels tell the women that Jesus is risen and will reconnect with the disciples in Galilee. But the women depart in terror and tell no one (cf Mark 16:8). Where is the rest of the story? This abrupt end was so shocking that a new ending was added to the Gospel sometime later in which everything is fulfilled as promised and the disciples are sent to preach the good news to the whole world. What are we to make of this?

Among the many explanations, which include a missing part of the papyrus roll the Gospel was written on, or authenticating the later ending as original, is the following idea, which accepts Mark’s text as is, its sense of incompleteness as a deliberate decision on his part. The story ends here because in fact it tells the truth; the women struggled to believe that Jesus was alive, and when they did tell the apostles, they rejected their testimony. Easter faith emerged from later experiences that forced the early church to take up the mission of Jesus themselves. Only when they stopped waiting around for the Second Coming or for Jesus to reappear in history to continue his preaching and miracles, did they understand that the mission was now theirs. Empowered by the Spirit of Jesus, they were to be the body of Christ in history. God was counting on them to continue what Jesus began.

And in fact, when they took up the work of proclaiming forgiveness of sins and the redemption of the world from injustice and violence, they did experience Jesus present with them again. They had the power to preach and even work miracles to advance the reign of God he had preached during his earthly life. He was with them in the Eucharist, in the community and in the mission. Easter faith was now embodied in the church, and despite persecution and many other obstacles, the Gospel spread like wildfire and transformed the world.

We are now those disciples. There is no waiting around or looking for shrines to worship Jesus as the only one who can do the work of salvation. He trusts us to continue his mission. He even told us that if we want to see him, he will always be present in the poor, the weak, those most in need. His life, death and resurrection now live in us and in every word we say and every action we do in the name of Jesus. The resurrection is now, it is us. We are the rest of the story.