It is not the case that God is satisfied with blood. It is not the case that He is bloodthirsty. It is not that only human blood can satiate a God who desired for it to be shed. That is not the essence of the self-gift on the Cross.

Neither is the sacrifice of the Cross on Calvary a suicide. The Lord is not killing Himself. He is put to death on account of our sins, on account of our disobedience. And thus, with the great disobedience of man towards their Creator, only the great obedience from that same Creator could possibly reset the clock.That is what we see in the post-Resurrection teachings of Our Lord.

Going to Galilee has been a theme of reflection during this Eastertide. It is something which brings us some very interesting reflections. First of all, we enter into it in the Gospel today, because we do not know which mountain the Lord went to meet the Apostles. They know. He knows. We do not know. It has not been reported to us.

In the Holy Land, most of the places where Our Lord did something extraordinary are reported. These locations are memorialized by the building of shrines and churches; Byzantine churches, first. After these were destroyed by the incoming Muslims,  the Crusaders  came to build new churches on the Byzantine foundations, which were then, themselves, destroyed when the Muslims returned.  So it has been sort of a ‘to and fro’ in the Holy Land. Most of the churches that you see there today date from the 1920s and onwards, in the time when Palestine was given over as a mandate to the British. But what we see there are not just holy places, we see the record of history, the record of people designating places as holy. It is rather unusual, then, that we do not know the precise location of one of the places of the Resurrection appearances of Our Lord.  We can have a good guess that it is somewhere near Lake Galilee itself. There is one very good contender: a mountain near the town of Capernaum, Mount Arbel, but we do not know for sure. And there is something very interesting in the delicacy of that situation. The fact is, this is the way of the Church. Things are not always fully revealed to us. And our role and our work in this life is to be faithful to what we know and to trust in God for what we do not know.