In that first reading we heard from the Acts of the Apostles, we heard that the early church community in Jerusalem felt so close to one another that they did something amazing, they shared all their property as if it were all common property, the idea being that if anyone needed anything, they would be taken care of.
The question is, where did they get this idea? It’s not as if Jesus told them that private property had been abolished, or really said anything at all about how his followers were supposed to organize themselves, or even if they were going to be very organized at all. But the resurrection changed everything. The resurrection proved that what Jesus said about a new Kingdom of God emerging from his death was true, and life going forward couldn’t possibly be the same as it had been in the past. If Jesus was alive, then the whole world looked different, and what mattered was that there was now a new order in the world, even if the rest of the world didn’t see it yet. How could you go back to the way everyone else lived, or to the way you used to live? Jesus told people over and over that there was going to be a kingdom where people lived differently, and these ancestors of ours thought that what that meant first of all was that if there were people who needed the necessities of life then everyone pulled together and fixed that. It wasn’t up to individual charity and decisions, it was something that everyone made happen, because in the world after the resurrection, a radical equality took over their view of the world. It was going to be like the parable of the workers in the vineyard, where they all got a living wage no matter how much time they had put in.
Now you might notice that this tradition of the early church has not caught on. We don’t pool our possessions and divide them up to make sure no one around here is in need. We could all debate for hours why exactly that happened. But I think we could all agree that real equality and a sense of real mutual responsibility are very hard things to sustain in this world. And especially when it comes to possessions, whatever that word means to you, we all tend to think that what we do with them is a personal decision, some of us generous, some of us generous now and then. But there’s more to this world of possessions than that. The church does say there’s such a thing as private property, but as Pope Francis likes to remind us, the things of this world also have what the church calls a universal destination, the goods of creation are meant for the whole human race, even those who don’t deserve them, because we’re often so wrong about who deserves what. How we work that out is up to us, and just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Why do we hear this reading just a week after Easter Sunday? I think from these readings from the Acts of the Apostles we’re going to hear in the next few weeks, we’re supposed to get a sense of the energy and the joy that was released when people realized the resurrection was real. People weren’t sure about exactly what to do, but they knew that everything was supposed to be different now. The worst wounds in the world did not destroy Christ, in fact, in the gospel today we find out those wounds are how we know he is real. That’s still how we know where Christ is, we go to where there is loss and suffering, and we don’t worry about being victorious over it, we know we will, because Christ already has been. People after the resurrection, it appears, have things to do, not to earn their salvation, but to live like people who know they have been given everything that matters for free, and that now it’s time to share it.