Sunday, April 19, 2026: Emmaus:
From Hopelessness to the Kin-dom of God
By Yunuen Trujillo on April 19, 2026
“. . . We were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel . . . it is now the third day since this took place.” (Luke 24:20–21)
If I asked you today how your heart feels about the state of the world, would you say hopeful or hopeless? If I asked whether you believe that women, the divorced, LGBTQ people and immigrants will soon be fully celebrated by the Church, what would you say? And if I told you that the Kingdom of God is already here, would you recognize it?
In today’s Gospel reading, we meet two disciples on the road to Emmaus, walking away from Jerusalem, walking away from what they had hoped for, walking in disappointment. They are downcast, discouraged, carrying grief. “We were hoping,” they say—past tense.
They had a vision of what the Messiah was supposed to be: a victorious king, a political liberator, a warrior who would defeat enemies and restore power. A Messiah measured by strength, by control, by power, by dominance. And by that measure, Jesus had terribly failed.
But while they walk in despair, another story is already unfolding. Mary the Magdala has already proclaimed, “I have seen the Lord.” Yet she is not believed—perhaps not surprisingly, especially because she is a woman, because her voice is dismissed, because her testimony does not fit what others are ready to accept.
The two disciples on the road to Emmaus had already heard the good news the women brought, and still, they walked in hopelessness, and in disbelief.
If we are honest, this is not just their story—it is ours. We, too, know what it is to say, “We were hoping.” We were hoping things would be different by now. We were hoping for justice, for inclusion, for change. And so, like them, we are tempted to look for saviors. We look for political leaders who promise to “save us” from those we are taught to fear: immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, one another. Even in the Church, we sometimes wait for someone to fix everything from the top down—a pope, a bishop, a priest, someone with power and a clerical collar. A hero.
But the Gospel reminds us that this was never the vision Jesus left us. The Messiah is not a hero of domination, and the Kingdom is seldom built by those with power.
Instead, Jesus reveals something radically different: a body made up of many, a community, a movement that prophetically reminds those in power they should join us in building a Kin-dom of God. A Kin-dom where no one is less than, where no one is pushed aside, where death and violence never have the final word because love cannot be killed.
Radical love, not domination, is the most powerful–and sometimes threatening–act because it draws those on the margins close to us. It is refusing to participate in systems that exclude. It is sharing bread, extending hospitality in our parishes and communities, and creating spaces where people truly belong. Wherever this happens, the Kin-dom of God becomes present.
The women disciples understood this idea very well. They had already seen it and experienced it, and they knew that a system built on power and dominance could never be the measure of God’s reign because it excluded them. And so they recognized that Jesus was a different kind of Messiah—one who included them, one who revealed a different way.
So what do we do when we feel like those disciples on the road—lost, discouraged, unsure of what comes next? We do what the women did. We do not lose hope. We focus on the next faithful step. We continue building the Kin-dom right here: creating spaces of welcome for LGBTQ people, welcoming the immigrant, listening to women and making room for their leadership and vision, breaking bread together, and tearing down the boundaries that divide us.
We continue challenging those with clerical and worldly power to do the right thing. The world and the institutional Church will, in time, inevitably have to catch up.
And one day, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we will look back and see that God was walking with us all along: she was listening, she was guiding, they were revealing meaning even when we did not understand, inviting us again and again into acts of love and hospitality, as one single body of Christ.
So we do not wait for some distant day when suffering ends and justice is complete. We do not wait for a hero. We rejoice today, because the Kin-dom of God is already here. And we participate in it every time we choose love, every time we choose welcome, every time we embody hope in the midst of hopelessness.
Because Christ is risen—and in Him, we continue rising too.
--Yunuen Trujillo, April 19, 2026
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