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Homilies are posted no later than during the week
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6 Easter
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Sixth Sunday of Easter - Cycle B - John 15:9-16
In 1941, the German army began to round up Jewish
people in Lithuania. Thousands of Jews were murdered. But one German
soldier objected to their murder. He was Sergeant Anton Schmid. Through
his assistance, at least 250 Jews were spared their lives. He managed
to hide them, find food, and supply them with forged papers. Schmid
himself was arrested in early 1942 for saving these lives. He was tried
and executed in 1942.
It took Germany almost sixty years to honor the
memory of this man Schmid. Said Germany's Defense Minister in 2000 in
saluting him, "Too many bowed to the threats and temptations of the
dictator Hitler, and too few found the strength to resist. But
Sergeant Anton Schmid did resist."
Name a person who better obeyed the admonition of
the Christ in today's Gospel. "No one has greater love than this, to
lay down one's life for one's friends." The hero Schmid went beyond
what even Jesus encouraged. He laid down his life for strangers.
What a welcome the court-martialed Anton Schmid must
have received from Our Lord when he entered the Kingdom.
Being a Christian requires all the character we can
summon up. However, in the face of people such as Sergeant Schmid, we
should not grow weary and give up the quest. When our Master returned
to His Father, he sent to us the Holy Spirit. It is He who increases
the spiritual marrow in our Christian backbones. It is He who empowers
us to stand up and be counted as Christ followers. As one pundit says,
"What Jesus accomplished for us in His lifetime, the Holy Spirit
accomplishes in ours."
With the Spirit, we can face the might of hell and
win.
William Barclay suggests the Teacher has chosen each
one of us to be advertisements for Himself. Our lives should be
billboards for Christ. He is most anxious that we produce abundant good
works. The only authentic method of spreading the Gospel message is to
be oneself a genuine Christian. History proves we waste our time
arguing or forcing other people into becoming Christians. They do not
want to hear about Christianity. They want to see it work. Our lives
must attract them to the truth of the Gospel.
It was Socrates who told us that the greatest way to
live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.
When the Catholic Al Smith, later four time Governor
of New York, was a member of the New York State Assembly in the
1920s, he roomed with a fellow Assemblyman, Robert Wagner, in the state
capital. Wagner, who was later to be a distinguished member of the US
Senate, became a convert to the Church. He was asked what prompted his
conversion. He replied simply, "Watching Al Smith get down on his knees
every night to say his prayers."
Like Smith, each of us is an ambassador with
portfolio for Christ. Oftentimes, we are completely unaware of the role
we are playing. But the non-Christians watching us do not forget that
we follow Christ. Frequently we disappoint them. Said one agnostic, "I
expected nothing and he did not disappoint me."
You have tried many times to be a Christian only to
fall on your face. Do not grow tired. Reflect, as an historian tells
us, that the first electric bulb was so faint that a lit candle had to
be used along with it. Thirty-two hours were initially required to make
the trip by steamboat from Albany to New York - a trip of but 150
miles. The initial flight of the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina lasted but 12 seconds. The top speed of the first car was
anywhere from two to four miles each hour. We know what those
inventions can do today.
Remember the aphorism that God makes a great finish
out of a slow start and nothing can be done until we take the first
step. Be patient. It takes an oak fifty years to produce an acorn.
Once you have begun to make progress, speak that
prayer of the old man: "Lord, I am not yet what I would like to be. But
thank you, Lord, because I ain't no longer what I used to be."
Jesus gave up His life for our sins. We must give up
ourselves for His service.
Finally one person can make a difference. If you
have any doubt on that point, check it out with any of the 250 people
whose lives Sergeant Anton Schmid saved.
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http://www.st.ignatius.net/pastor.html
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Sixth Easter: Love, the Foundation of Christianity.
The
Apocalypse, or as it is properly named, The Book of the Revelation of
Jesus, begins with seven letters to seven Christian communities. The
communities represent all of Christianity. The letters are the
framework for the entire Book of Revelation. All but two of these
letters condemn the new Churches for watering down Christianity, for
restoring pagan practices, for being part-time Christians, etc. The
first of these seven letters addresses something that is fundamental to
Christianity. This is the Letter to Ephesus. Note now, this is
not the New Testament Letter to the Ephesians, but a message from Jesus
through the Book of Revelation to all who were making the terrible
mistake which was prevalent among the Ephesians.
The
letter begins by complimenting the Ephesians for their courage and
faith. "I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance."
That term patient endurance refers to suffering for the faith including
martyrdom. The Ephesians are commended for fighting against
evildoers and for rooting out false apostles from their
community. They are commended for hating the works of the
Nicolatians. The Nicolatians were people who tried to water down
Christianity saying that Christians could attend and participate in
pagan sacrifices and pagan immorality. Still the Ephesians are
censured. They are told they are fallen. They are told that
unless they change something that is fundamental in what they are
doing, the Light of Christ will be removed from them. What is this they
are doing? The letter says: "I hold this against you: you have
abandoned the love you had at first." You see, the Ephesians were
fierce in defending the faith. They were brutal to others and
among themselves. In the name of orthodoxy, they broke
charity. That is where they were losing their Christianity.
Orthodoxy for the sake of orthodoxy always defeats itself. Orthodoxy
only has value when it is founded upon love.
In
the second reading for today from the First Letter of John, we read:
"the person without love has known nothing of God, for God is love." (1
John 4:8) Stern and fierce in their decisions, never
considering the pain and grief of the person they censured, the
Ephesians were following the rules, keeping the dogmas, but not
practicing the faith. Their community was not reflecting the love of
God. They were orthodox for the sake of being orthodox, but in
reality they were not Christian.
We
can look at the history of the Church and see how in certain areas in
certain epochs this mistake was repeated. For example, how can we
find justification for the Spanish Inquisition, for the pillaging that
was part of the Crusades, for the religious wars occasioned by the
Protestant Reformation, or for the continual persecution of the Jewish
people in the Middle Ages and beyond? The love of God was not in
evidence in any of this.
Still, we, as a community and as individuals, shouldn't be as concerned
with history as with our own tendency to repeat the mistakes of the
Ephesians. For example, take gay bashing. A person may have a gay
orientation and not be engaging in any form of immorality just as a
person may have a heterosexual orientation and not be engaging in any
form of immorality. But even if people are immoral, openly so, no
one has the right to attack them, to treat them with scorn, to refuse
compassion when they are hurting. Where is the presence of the
love of God in the reputedly good Christian who seeks ways to hurt
someone who is gay?
A
number of years ago, one of my cousins and her husband befriended a
house painter from England who had done some work for them. He
had great stories about life in the English countryside. After
about a year, he became sick. My cousin visited him in the
hospital. He told her that he was gay and had contracted
AIDS. His entire family had deserted him. My cousin and her
husband visited and cared for him, almost living in the hospital, until
the day he died. The love of God was evident in their
actions. This love was not evident in those who deserted him,
perhaps, claiming high moral grounds.
Is
the love of God is evident in our own family structures? We
have to have rules in our families. Out of love for our children and
our teenagers, we have to set guidelines so they can grow, develop, and
spread their wings while they are still under our protection. More
important than these rules is the reason for their establishment:
love. You make rules for your children because you love
them. At the same time, we have to be careful that we never allow
a rule to destroy love. For example, saying to a teenager: “You
know the rule. You broke it. Now get out of this house.” or “You
ran off, and now you're in trouble with the law, don’t even think you
can come home. “ or “You broke the rules, you are no longer part of
this family,” are the ways Christians should act. No good was
every accomplished by hiding love behind rules.
"As
the Father has loved me so I have loved you. Live on in my
love. You will live in my love if you keep my commandments.
This is my commandment, love one another as I have loved you." Today's
gospel leads us to pray: Lord, help us to be people whose structures as
a country, a family, and in all relationships, reflect the presence of
your love.
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http://www.geocities.com/seapadre_1999/
* available in Spanish - see
Spanish homilies
6 Easter
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A
Physical Relationship
(May 17, 2009)
Bottom line: Jesus wants to have a relationship with us - mental and
material, invisible and visible, spiritual and physical.
Today's opening reading contains a fascinating progression of events.
First, Peter announces the Good News to a group of non-Jews. To the
surprise of the Jewish (circumcised) believers, the Gentiles receive
the Holy Spirit. Then Peter asks, "Can anyone withhold the water for
baptizing these people?" He makes it sound like we receive the Holy
Spirit in order to be baptized.
Well, in a certain sense, baptism is the goal. Jesus wants to have not
only a spiritual relationship with us - but also a physical, material
relationship. For that reason he gives the sacraments, beginning with
baptism.
This physical, bodily relationship - interestingly enough - Jesus
emphasizes after the Resurrection. When he appears to the Apostles, he
shows them his hands and feet. He tells Thomas, "Put your finger
here...and bring your hand here and put it into my side." To prove the
reality of his flesh, he eats a fish in front of them. Later, he
provides a breakfast of grilled fish. And, best of all, he takes bread,
blesses it, breaks it and gives it to a pair of chosen disciples. Jesus
- the Risen Lord - desires a material, physical relationship with us.
I have been thinking about this in terms of my fourteen years here at
Holy Family. So much has changed in our society. To give one of the
most dramatic examples: Fourteen years ago the idea of two men marrying
each other would seem like a great joke - the stuff of a Shakespeare
comedy. Now, those who do not accept same-sex "marriage" are called
bigots - or worse.
Our society has changed - and sometimes people say that we have lost
our sense of spirituality. I say the opposite: We have lost our sense
of physicality. How else could we see being male or female as something
accidental - like having blue eyes or brown eyes? How else could we see
someone's "right to choose" as more important than the physical reality
of tiny baby - with legs and arms, ears and eyes, lungs and a heart?*
To combat that decline, God gave us the Church with its system of
material signs: the Sacraments. Unfortunately, at the time when our
society needs us the most we have been hobbled - by eternal attacks,
for sure, although mainly by our own incoherence. It's easy to point
the finger at our bishops, but we have to examine our own lives. I will
say it again before I leave Holy Family: I ask forgiveness from God and
from you for the many ways I have let you down. Some you know well,
others only a few know, some only I know and many perhaps only God
knows (they have mercifully vanished from my memory).
Jesus says, "You are my friends if you do what I command you." It costs
to do what Jesus commands. I did not want to leave Holy Family, but the
decision came not just from the Archbishop, but ultimately from
Jesus.** Of course, we have to discern what Jesus wants. The bottom
line is that he wants to have a relationship with us - mental and
material, invisible and visible, spiritual and physical. As St. John
puts it, "God has sent his Son into the world" (into this physical
creation) "so that we might have life through him."
************
*Or intellectualize our way to acceptance of torture. When I hear the
word, I think of one of my catechists in Peru who had his head held
under foul water until he fainted. Then the police repeated the
procedure while laughing at him. Once a society sanctions mistreatment
of those detained, it opens itself to the satanic impulses in men. I
pray it is not too late for America to turn back. May St. Michael
defend us against such hideous evil.
**I have been reassigned to St. Mary of the Valley, Monroe, beginning
July 1, 2009. The pastor-designate for Holy Family is a fine priest and
a good friend, Fr. Horacio Yanez.
Intercessions for Sixth Sunday of Easter (from Priests for Life)
Spanish Version
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http://www.agreeley.com/homilies.html
6 Easter
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http://www.saintvincentarchabbey.org/homilies/index.lasso
6 Easter
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May,
17, 2009
John 15: 9-17
Demetrius R. Dumm, O.S.B.
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Gospel Summary
This gospel passage is filled with beautiful statements about the ever
popular subject of love. Jesus tells us that the Father loves him, and
that he in turn loves us, and that we should love one another. Perhaps
we have heard these sentiments expressed so often that we no longer
realize how profound and dramatic they really are.
When Jesus says that the Father has loved him, he is correcting a very
common concept of God. Many people at that time (and perhaps ever
since) pictured God as someone very transcendent and therefore very
distant from them. He was surely all-powerful but, like most powerful
ones, he seemed to be cruel as well. Is God not in some way responsible
for famine and natural disasters? Does he not at least permit the death
of young parents and innocent children?
But Jesus tells us that he knows God much better than we do. As eternal
Word, he dwells in the lap of his heavenly Father (John 1:18). This is
body language, which tells us that Jesus hears the very heartbeat of
his Father. He assures us that God is a loving Father who wishes only
good for us. Most of all, he knows that this loving Father offers us a
love that can enliven and nurture and energize us, just as the sum
energizes plants and trees.
Jesus invites us to experience and to trust this life-giving love, to
live in the presence of it, and to yearn for it, just as the sunflower
follows the sun across the sky in our human gardens. Then we will know
how to become sunshine in the lives of others. We will also know how to
deal with mysteries in our lives. We will also want to share our
treasures with others and thus become part of that divine love that
overcomes all darkness and evil.
Life Implications
The implications of this vision of reality are not hard to see. Most
people who do not love, or do not love enough, are usually persons who
do not feel that they themselves are loved. It is futile to tell people
that they must love others when they have not really been made free to
love by experiencing love in their own lives. Too often it is a case of
impoverished people trying desperately to give more than they have.
That is why it is so important to hear and to trust the words of Jesus
about the love of the Father for us. This love is found in Jesus
himself, who gave his life for us, but it is also found everywhere in
life: in loving family and friends, in the blessings and successes of
life, in every flower and gentle breeze.
Today's gospel challenges us to acknowledge the dark evil in life but
it asks us to notice especially the luminous good that is also there.
And as we pay attention to the good in life, we will be able to let the
evil go by or, at least, to keep it in its place, which is never at the
center of life. This is exactly what Jesus did and, with him, we too
need to feel the warmth of the Father's love and to share that warmth
with all whom we meet in life.
Demetrius R. Dumm, O.S.B.
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http://www.christusrex.org/www1/mcitl/lowhome.html Meeting Christ in the Liturgy
6 Easter
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SIXTH
Sunday
Acts 10, 25-26. 34-35. 44-48; Psalm 98 (97);
1 John 4, 7-10; John 15, 9-17
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Everybody needs love. Man and woman were created to love and to
be loved. The burning desire for love in the human heart cannot
be extinguished by any earthly power. It is when we look for love
"in all the wrong places", as the popular song goes, that unhappiness
results. 100% genuine, authentic love comes only from God. The
commandments protect us from falling for the counterfeits, the shams
and the lies that often pass for love in our world.
"If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have
kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I
have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be
full." (Jn 15: 10-11) Joy comes with the moral life lived in love of
God and neighbor, not one in which the commandments are kept only out
of fear of the fires of hell. There are many souls in the world who
wonder why they find no happiness in going to Mass, in living a morally
good life, by good works and faithfulness in prayer. All of these
things must be done, but if the fire of God's own love is not present
in them they will not bring joy, will fail to satisfy. What is needed
is the fire of charity.
"The practice of the moral life animated by charity gives to the
Christian the spiritual freedom of the children of God. He no longer
stands before God as a slave, in servile fear, or as a mercenary
looking for wages, but as a son responding to the love of him who
'first loved us.' "(CCC 1828)
St. Basil, (c. 330-379), teaches how to do good and find joy in it: "If
we turn away from evil out of fear of punishment, we are in the
position of slaves. If we pursue the enticement of wages, ...we
resemble mercenaries. Finally if we obey for the sake of the good
itself and out of love for him who commands...we are in the position of
children." (CCC 1828) Children who know they are weak and small find
joy in pleasing their parents by doing good. They look to their parents
for all that is good.
Loving God is the response of those who believe in God as a
loving and faithful Father. St. Therese of Lisieux, whose 100th
anniversary of death we recently celebrated, was a master of the
spiritual life, now a declared Doctor of the Church, and taught well of
the love which is the essence of Faith. She taught the "little way" of
childlike simplicity and obedience to God as the way to grow in
love. She wrote, "It seems to me that there will be no judgment
for victims of love, or rather, the good God will hasten to reward,
with eternal delights, His own love which He will see burning in their
hearts."
The living of the commandments is the love of God in action for the
human person. The commandments were revealed by our heavenly
Father so that we might understand the practical implications for us of
authentic love in word and action. Those who love God long to be
holy as he is holy and so live the commandments by holy thoughts, words
and deeds. But they do it out of love and not because of fear of
punishment. "In the heart of the Church I will be love," St. Therese
exclaimed upon discovering her true vocation. Though bound by the walls
of her cloister, she knew unlimited freedom to reach the heights of
holiness through courageous devotion to charity. We too are students of
the love of God. The commandments are the lessons by which we simple
children will master the love of God our Father in thought, word and
action.
The love of the Holy Spirit, divine love, burns in the heart of the
Body of Christ, the universal Church. Our hearts are warmed and
quickened by this fire of love as we live and grow in the way of the
Church, the Spirit’s beloved Spouse.
Let us pray: Ever-living God, help us to celebrate our joy in the
resurrection of the Lord and to express in our lives the love we
celebrate. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Fr KM Cusick http://www.christusrex.org/www1/mcitl/
(For further reading see also these paragraphs in the Catechism of the
Catholic Church: 434, 459, 609, 737, 1823, 1824, 1972, 2745.)
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http://www.ctk-thornbury.org.uk/
6 Easter
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Sermon
by Father Alex McAllister SDS
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B—2006 Homily
‘This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you.’ This is
the central text of today’s Gospel reading and indeed one could
consider it one of the most fundamental texts of the Christian faith.
And yet it seems at first sight to contain a basic contradiction. How
can one be commanded to love? We are all well aware that genuine love,
real authentic love, must by definition be an entirely free choice. So
how can Jesus ‘command’ us to express love one for another?
We tend to experience commands or laws or obligations as oppressive and
as limiting to our freedom and personal autonomy. We think of rulers as
overlords who wish to impose their will on us and we are instinctively
reluctant to comply with external rules foisted on us in this way.
What we are dealing with here though is not the command of some
dictator or oppressor but the command of God. This is the command of
the only one who has our best interests at heart, the unique being who
is more interested in us than we are in ourselves. It is the command of
our creator, sustainer and redeemer and his command to love is entirely
in our best interests.
It might seem quite elementary but it is worth just mentioning our need
for rules and commands even if they are imposed from above. We often
need them for the good ordering of society.
Driving on the left is perhaps the most obvious example. Some countries
drive on the right, some on the left; which side of the road doesn’t
really matter as long as in a particular country it is either one or
the other and everyone knows and complies with the rule.
This rule prohibits us from driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road but
this does not restrict our freedom, rather it enhances our ability to
drive safely from A to B. If anarchy reigned on our roads then driving
would be impossible and we would consequently experience a loss of
freedom.
So some commands handed down from above are good and perhaps even
necessary for a fulfilling life. Even so this command to love is above
all these other rules and conventions because it is concerned with
helping us to conform to our true nature.
Understanding this is very important when it comes to the moral life.
We are made in the image and likeness of God and becoming virtuous is
about learning to express our true nature.
I’ve been reading an excellent book by the Dominican Father Timothy
Radcliffe called ‘What’s the Point of Being a Christian?’ In it he
makes this very point.
He explains, in accordance with the insights of St Thomas Aquinas, that
freedom is not about having a lot of choices, it is not about being
able to pick and choose depending on our whims.
No, it is about doing what is good because that is what we most deeply
desire.
Real freedom involves not making random choices but acting
authentically from the very core of one’s being—where God is. It is in
doing that which is best for us, doing only that which is in accordance
with our true nature and our highest destiny.
In order to become the kind of person that does this instinctively we
need to train ourselves to act virtuously—to do the right thing in an
utterly spontaneous way.
We need to replace all our bad habits with good habits. We need to
assiduously acquire the virtues and develop them in our lives.
There are various lists of virtues but the seven classical virtues are:
chastity, liberality, abstinence, diligence, patience, kindness and
humility. In the Catholic Church we usually speak about the three
Theological Virtues which are faith, hope and charity and the four
Cardinal Virtues which are: prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.
The lists of virtues don’t really matter because everyone can recognise
the difference between a virtue and a vice. A virtue of its very nature
tends towards the good and a vice inevitably tends towards that which
is evil.
What we need to do is to reflect on the deeper meaning of each of the
virtues and make them a real part of our lives.
It is in acquiring and cultivating these attributes that we become a
truly good person, a person of real character.
It is acquiring the virtues that we learn what true love is, that we
overcome selfishness and infatuations and fleeting desires and so begin
to act in an authentically free way.
The final result is that we will have learned to conform our will to
that of God and come to realise that what he wants is actually also
what we want. This is the way to achieve real fulfilment as a human
person. This is, of course, also the way of holiness.
We can see this in the life of Jesus. To the outsider he was a complete
failure: betrayed, arrested, convicted and judicially murdered. Of
course, that could happen to anyone, innocent or guilty. But in the
case of Jesus he deliberately let all those things happen to him. He
freely chose to undergo the suffering and death on the Cross because it
was the Father’s will. To the outsider that makes his case even worse.
But to the Christian this was obedience to the Father in its highest
form but it was also an entirely free act. It was free because it was
entirely characteristic of his true nature. It was his spontaneous
response to the Father’s will. And this entirely good act brought about
salvation for the whole world.
We rejoice in what Christ did for us, and we celebrate in this Mass the
victory he won. In the deeply powerful symbolism of the Last Supper
Jesus brought all this together in one sacred action, a sacred action
which we repeat each day on this altar.
Through our celebration of the Eucharist we are united with Christ’s
great act of sacrifice and draw strength from him and are enabled to
become ever more conformed to the will of the Father. By this we, in
our turn, become ever more free and ever more truly ourselves.
‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ Yes, this certainly is a
commandment but there is nothing at all negative about it since it is
entirely in accordance with our true nature and inevitably leads us to
our ultimate destiny which is only to be found in God.
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Father Bonar will not be posting homilies for Cycle B to allow himself
time for other projects. His collection of homilies (including homilies
for Cycle B) is available at www.clydebonar.com.
6 Easter |
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These
homilies may be copied and adapted for your own use;
however, they may not be commercially published without permission of
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