To Live in the House of the Lord: 7th Sunday of Easter

 

Ps 27:1,4, 7-8

Jn 17:1-11

 

Thursday was the Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord marking forty days since Jesus’ resurrection.  One week from today we will celebrate the Feast of Pentecost.  With that the Easter Season comes to an end. 

 

The day after Pentecost the Church will celebrate the recently promulgated Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church after which ordinary time will be visibly symbolized by green vestments rather than white.  Ordinary time will continue until the new liturgical year begins on December 1, the first Sunday of Advent. Because this is a leap year, Christmas 2024 will be on a Wednesday.  

 

During the fifty days after Easter many of the readings come from Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of John.  Acts was written by the same Luke who wrote the Gospel.  The book gives us a window into the early life of the Church.  We see the interpersonal and social dynamics that brought together--and sometimes split apart—a community that recognized Jesus as the Messiah, the Promised One, the Christ. 

 

The formation and growth of the early Church wasn’t always smooth. The sinful side of human nature raised its head more than once in those early years.  It continues to do so today. But despite the challenges the community grew rapidly as it spread the Gospel throughout the world.  There was something unique about this group of believers,  something that had never been seen before.  As we heard in the reading from Acts two weeks ago “It was at Antioch that they were first called Christians.”  The giving of that name was crucial.

 

Once an individual has a name, he can establish a way of being

and a way of proceeding. He can establish an identity.  Similarly, once a group has a name it can begin to assume an identity.  Once they are named groups and individuals become rooted in history.  The name Christian took root very early and has continued for two millennia despite historical and current attempts to erase it.  

 

While Acts gives us history John's Gospel gives us Christology, an understanding of Jesus. That Christology is different from what we find in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, gospels that are more heavily biographical. 

 

The Gospel just proclaimed was comprised of verses 1 to 11 of the John’s 17^th chapter.   Chapter seventeen of John’s gospel is unique. It has no parables, stories, or discourse.  There is no instruction to or dialogue with the apostles.  The entire chapter is a long prayer from Jesus to the Father. It is worth reading slowly at home. 

 

"Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ."

 

"Now this is eternal life . . . "

 

Eternal life is not some distant far-away place.  Eternal life has nothing to do with Dante's Divine Comedy, a work that can be described as exquisite poetry but terrible theology.  When Jesus described eternal life in this prayer, a prayer that he made shorty before His passion, he repeated  what he had said earlier.

 

"Who believes in the Son has eternal life." (3:36)

"Who hears my word and believes in Him who sent me has eternal life." (5:24)

 

In his commentary on the Fourth Gospel Jesuit Father Stanley Marrow wrote:  "To believe in and to know the one whom God has sent does not lead to or result in eternal life. It is eternal life." That is a powerful statement. To believe in the one whom the Father sent . . . is eternal life.

 

Eternal life does not begin after death.  Death continues the eternal life that began when we came to believe in and to know the one sent by God, Jesus, Son of the Father, Son of Mary, Jesus the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Redeemer.

 

The psalmist understood this when he wrote:

 

"One thing I ask of the Lord; this I seek:
to dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
That I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord

 and contemplate his temple."

 

"To dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life"

 

Not after my life has ended but all the days of my life as it is in this moment and in every moment more that I am given to live. 

 

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Photos are from last weekend in Vermont.  Stopped at two of the lakes .  Spring was very delayed at 2600 feet elevation in VT.  Just two weeks earlier they had had 36 inches of snow.  Tends to slow things down.  

 

Lake Madeline which is part of a hydroelectric plant.

Processing allowed for the dark background on a brilliantly sunny day.

Lake Bardo.  The dock was red but it is practically stripped down to raw wood.

 Fr. Jack, SJ, MD

What a Friend We Have . . . Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter

 

Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48

Ps 98

1 Jn 4:7-10

Jn 15:9-17

 

The Acts of the Apostles and John's Gospel come to the fore during the Easter Season.  Acts give us a refresher course in the reality of early Church history, including the conflicts and squabbles.  John's Gospel recalls for us Jesus' teaching on love, most particularly during the farewell discourse.  There is much here on which to meditate.

 

One of the things that has mystified and amused me over the years is apostle bashing.  Apostle bashing is a popular indoor sport for theological and scripture types. It reaches its apogee during Lent when we are reminded of the apostles misstatements and miscues and, of course, Peter's triple denial.  Alas, the bashers never admit, indeed they are most often blissfully unaware, that their underlying assumptions are: I never would have acted that way.  I never would have misunderstood, rejected, or tried to manipulate Jesus were I there. 

 

The reality is that none of us would have responded any better than the apostles at best and, most likely, would have reacted to Jesus' teaching more like the Pharisees.

 

The bashers have much less to say about the apostles' behavior and motivations, especially Peter's, after Jesus' glorification.  You don't have to be too psychiatrically sophisticated to figure out the dynamic underlying that.  Over the past weeks we have seen a different Peter, a Peter who is confident, eloquent and humble as opposed to the brash, shoot-from-the-hip-and-the-lip target of the bashers.  The man who swung a sword in Gethsemane is now abashed by Cornelius' homage.  "Get up.  I myself am also a human being."  

 

This particular reading from Acts was, for whatever reason, fragmented by those who put together the lectionary.  We miss much of what the newly eloquent Peter said to Cornelius and those assembled at his home.  We miss the background that makes Peter's assertion radical. 

 

That God is impartial, that whoever fears him and acts "uprightly is acceptable to him" was not, and is not, a new or uniquely Christian teaching.  Jesuit Xavier Leon-Dufour traces the evolution of understanding God's impartiality to the Old Testament beginning in the psalms and moving to Jonah.  He writes, "And gradually we see the emergence of the idea that apart from the Jew Yahweh's love even embraces the pagans as well. . ."  Thus it is no surprise that Peter ordered the Gentiles be allowed to be baptized. 

 

The second reading from the First Letter of John and the reading from John's Gospel are perfectly intertwined.

 

The passage "In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins" recalls Paul's Letter to the Romans,

"(God) shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us."  

John and Paul both defined the human condition; that we are sinners. And they limned God's response to that condition: His love. 

 

We are sinners loved by God.  That is why we rejoice during this Easter Season.  We are sinners loved by God and redeemed by God.  Jesus' valedictory words, "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" are among the most well-known and poignant in John's Gospel.  Jesus’ words beg the question, what is friendship with Hiim? 

 

We have to work at all friendships.  It takes time.  It takes effort. I suspect all of us have had the experience of being so dazzled by a new acquaintance that within an unseemly short period of time we've decided that he or she is my new best friend forever.  Too often, though, we become disillusioned. Or we disillusion the other.  We may suddenly reject or be rejected.  Infatuation is a dangerous

and  potentially painful state. 

 

Friendship with Jesus is like those long-time friendships that are a blessing as one ages, the ones that go back thirty or forty years or more.  Friendship with Jesus doesn't need big mystical experiences, tear-inducing consolation at prayer or apparitions.  It is the kind of friendship where both friends can sit together in a room in silence for hours on end without the need for constant stimulation, novelty, or activity.  True friendship tolerates silence.  Infatuation doesn't. 

 

Friendship with Jesus involves living with Him day by day, walking with Him, listening to Him and being nourished by His word, His body and His blood.  True friendship nourishes our lives and our souls.

 

In commenting on this Gospel, the late Jesuit Father Stanley Marrow  writes that that loving with utmost generosity and utter selflessness, even to laying down one's life, is not uniquely Christian.  What distinguishes, or must distinguish, Christians is that  when they love, they love as Christ loved them and because he loved them.

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Had some free time this AM.  Went to monastery overlook on Mt. Equinox to shoot with a 70-300 lens.  Took the shots of the monastery and turned to see a paraglider emerging from behind Mt. Equinox.  No way.  No how.  No never.  

Fr. Jack, SJ, MD