Allowing Others to See Christ in Us as We See the Father in Christ, 4th Saturday of Easter, April 28, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Saturday of the Fourth Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, St. Gianna Beretta Molla and St. Peter Chanel
April 28, 2018
Acts 13:44-52, Ps 98, Jn 14:1-14

To listen to an audio version of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, Jesus continues to speak about his relationship with the Father. On Thursday, he said that whoever accepts us, accepts the one who sent us (Christ) and the one who sent him (God the Father) and similarly the one who rejects us, implicitly rejects Christ and rejects the Father. This is because we’re in communion with Christ and Christ is in communion with the Father. Yesterday Jesus continued speaking about the reality, telling us that the only way to the Father’s house, to heaven, to being united with the Father forever is through him. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” he declared. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” To accept Jesus as the Way means that we will follow him. To accept him as the Truth means that we will believe Him and allow that truth to set us free from the lies on which we often comfortably base our existence. To accept him as the Life means that we will live off of him, deriving our very life from him not just theoretically but practically every day. The Christian life is a communion with God, a relationship, an intimate covenantal bond with Jesus through the Holy Spirit and in him with the Father. Jesus’ words, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life,” would have startled Jews, who always prayed in the Psalms for God to show them his paths so that they might know and walk in his truth, who begged him to show them the path of life. Jesus was saying, “I am that Path, I am that Truth, I am that Life.” Jesus was identifying himself to that degree with the Father.
• Today, when St. Philip asks Jesus to them them the Father, Jesus reveals that anyone who has seen him — the perfect image of the invisible God — has seen the Father because he abides in the Father and the Father in him, because the Father speaks through him and the Father dwells in him doing his works. Then he goes on to elaborate about our connection with him, saying that if we keep our communion with him, Jesus will be able to work in us and those works will be even greater than the works Jesus himself has done in life: “Amen, amen, I say to you,” he swore, “whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” It was one thing for the eternal Son of God to do the works of the Father in Palestine. It will be something even greater for us and the members of his Mystical Body to do works throughout the world. Jesus himself raised the dead, cured lepers, made the blind see, exorcised demons, fed multitudes with paltry starting material and rose from the dead. What we will be able to do in his name is bring him from heaven to earth under the appearance of bread and wine, forgive sins in God’s name, and love others far more quantitatively extensively than he has loved us. And in so doing, bring many others to the the life, the truth and the path who is Jesus and to which he calls us all. Jesus reminds us through Philip that to accept him means to see the Father in Him, to hear the Father speaking through Him, to observe the Father doing his works through Him. Accepting Jesus also means that others will be able to see the Father and the Son in us, to hear his words through us, to see his deeds of love done with our own hands and hearts. That’s why Jesus was able to say to us on Thursday that the one who receives us receives him and in receiving him-and-us, receives the Father. Because of this Communion we’re supposed to have with Jesus, our Way, Truth and Life, Jesus tells us not only that we will go “greater” works than he has done but wants us to do those greater works, so that God will be glorified when others see ultimately God working through us.
• We see throughout the Acts of the Apostles miracles done in Christ’s name. But there are so many other works of Christ we’re called to recapitulate: works of charity, of evangelization, of forgiveness. Over the course of the last two days, we’ve heard St. Paul’s homily in the Synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia in which he covered six points: the Jews’ longing for salvation; Jesus’ coming as Savior; their leaders’ rejection of that salvation through conspiring to have him crucified; God’s response in raising him from the dead; God’s desire to bring that salvation to all; and our choice to accept it or reject it today.  Today we see the response to that homily. Just as in Jesus’ earthly life, some joyfully accepted the salvation Jesus was offering through Saints Paul and Barnabas and others jealously rejected it. Through them, Jesus was coming to his own and his own was rejecting him, but to those who accepted him, he was giving power to become children of God. The setting is the same Synagogue on the following Sabbath. Since their initial “word of exhortation,” the buzz had spread. Now, a week later, “almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord,” a propitious occurrence at first sight. Jews and Gentiles had all come. The Jews had come because of what they had heard Paul and Barnabas say last week. They wanted to hear more. The Gentiles had come almost certainly because the “God-fearers,” the technical term for non-Jews who used to come to the Synagogue each Sabbath to hear the Word of God but who didn’t want to submit to circumcision or other aspects of the Jewish law, had doubtless spread word of the two men who had talked about salvation through the forgiveness of their sins being extended even to them. The Jews, however, were upset that so many Gentiles were there, hearing the Word of God as if it were meant for them. They could tolerate a few “God fearers,” attesting to the worth of what happens in their Synagogue. But to have the whole city there — in which there were far more Gentiles than Jews — risked watering everything down. And so, rather than continuing to listen to Paul as they did the previous week, they turned on him. St. Luke tells us, “When the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and with violent abuse contradicted what Paul said.” A short time later they “incited the women of prominence who were worshipers and the leading men of the city [and] stirred up a persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them from their territory.” Even though the prophets Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel had all prophesied that salvation would be extended to all the nations, these Jews wanted to maintain their privilege, and for that reason they, like many of the scribes, Pharisees, and chief priests in Jerusalem, refused to allow the fulfillment of those words. When Paul and Barnabas said, “The Lord has commanded us, ‘I have made you a light to the Gentiles, that you may be an instrument of salvation to the ends of the earth,’” many of the Jews in Antioch of Pisidia tried to extinguish that light. But the Gentiles there rejoiced in that light. Paul and Barnabas said to the Jews, “It was necessary that the word of God be spoken to you first, but since you reject it and condemn yourselves as unworthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles.” Acts tell us that the Gentiles “delighted when they hear this and glorified the word of the Lord.” They “came to believe” and to help spread the word of the Lord to the whole region. Even after Paul and Barnabas were expelled, “the disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit,” because they had received the Lord and were now walking in his light. In such a short period of time they had become disciples, learning to follow Christ through learning to follow Paul and Barnabas. What an extraordinary work of God carried out through Jesus’ prayer before the Father.
• Today we celebrate the feast of three different saints who similarly revealed Christ under different aspects and allowed others to come to see him working through them.
• St. Peter Chanel (1803-1841) was born in France and became a Missionary in the newly formed Society of Mary (Marists) and was sent to New Hebrides in the South Pacific. At first, after a ten-month journey, they were well received on the island of Futuna by the people and by King Niuliki, but the King’s fears and envy were aroused when they learned the local language and gained the people’s confidence, thinking that his prerogatives as sovereign and high priest might be abrogated. When his son asked for baptism, the King sent worries to club him to death. But his witness of God’s love, traveling so far, immersing himself in their lives, wasn’t forgotten by the people. Within five months, the power of his sign of God’s presence, his willingness to suffer for Christ and for them, helped bring the entire island to conversion. He revealed Christ’s zeal for every one of his lost sheep, he spoke Christ’s word, and he revealed Christ’s paschal willingness to go the path of the grain of wheat so that he might bear much fruit and help others not perish but come to eternal life.
• The second great saint is St. Gianna Beretta Molla, who died on this day in 1962.  Born 40 years earlier, she became a pediatrician and planned to dedicate her life to sick children, but at 33, she met and fell in love with a good Catholic engineer named Pietro Molla, whom she married after a year’s courtship. They sought to live the life of an ordinary Christian couple, combining their careers with their duties to their family. In the first five years of their marriage, God blessed them with three children. During the summer of 1961, they discovered that God had blessed them with a fourth. Two months into her pregnancy, however, Dr. Molla started to feel abdominal pain. She went to see her brother who was an obstetrician, who with his colleagues discovered she had large malignant fibroma in her uterus that was risking her life and the life of her child. One of her brother’s colleagues presented her the options: The first was a complete hysterectomy, which would save her own life but take the life of her child; the second was to abort the child and then try to excise the tumor while saving the uterus, so that she could have other children; the third was by far the riskiest: to try to extract the tumor alone, conscious that the post-surgical sutures could rupture the uterus later and lead to the death both of mother and child. Without hesitation, Gianna resolutely chose the third option, which was the only one that had any chance of saving her child’s life. While she was being prepared for surgery, she insisted with her surgeon to do whatever he needed to do to save the baby’s life, even at the loss of her own. The surgery was as successful as it could be. They got the tumor and the child didn’t miscarry, but both were still at risk. Gianna went on with her life joyfully trusting in the Lord. She kept repeating to worried family members, “Whatever God wants.” She wrote to a friend: “I have prayed so much in these days. With faith and hope I have entrusted myself to the Lord… I trust in God, yes; but now it is up to me to fulfill my duty as a mother. I renew to the Lord the offer of my life. I am ready for everything, to save my baby.” On Good Friday, April 20, 1962, she entered the hospital to deliver her fourth child. She told the medical team, many of whom knew and loved her as a colleague: “If you must choose between me and the baby, have no hesitation: choose — and I demand it — the baby, save him!” A healthy little girl was delivered, whom she and Pietro named Giannina, or “little Gianna.” Giannina was placed in her delighted mother’s arms. But very soon Gianna’s post-partum pains and temperature increased. She was diagnosed with septic peritonitis. The doctors did everything they could do — antibiotics, blood transfusions, injections — but nothing helped. Throughout her agony, she kept saying, “Jesus, I love you. Jesus I love you,” until she fell into a coma. A week later, on April 28th, she died. “No one has any greater love,” Jesus said during the first Mass, “than to lay down his life for his friends.” Dr. Gianna Molla became a sign of that Christ-like love in human, very modern terms, what that love really means. When it came to saving her life or saving her child’s, she chose her child’s. She was willing to sacrifice everything — her career, her family, her very life — for the sake of the gift growing within her. She was able to find joy in suffering, even death, out of love. Her love reminds us of how Christ said to the Father that if it were a choice between saving his life and ours, to choose us!
• Our third witness is St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716), who was a great missionary preacher in France at the beginning of the 1700s, but he really wasn’t appreciated during his life time. He suffered so much from people who thought he was making a fool of himself, being a showman, in preaching missions and trying to bring people to conversion, but he was a sign of Christ’s own “foolishness” in doing everything to try to bring us to salvation. He suffered persecution not only from those who were resisting a basic conversion but also from those clerics and good people from whom he has asking total conversion. So much of his strength came through his devotion to the one who showed him how to be a sign pointing to Christ, to the cause of our joy whose heart was pierced because she was found worthy to suffer with her Son, the Blessed Virgin Mary. He sought to help everyone become truly devout to our Lady. After he had died, his writings were discovered and since have become the greatest preparation for consecration to Our Lady. He would be urging us to find in Mary the illustration of all of the lessons of the Gospel, because it was in her God’s word became flesh. The secret to living the Christian life, to becoming the sign necessary, to offering God all we have and allowing him to use it for a miracle, is to be found, St. Louis stressed, by reliving Mary’s mystery in Christ. He similarly showed Jesus’ own reverential love for his mother.
• As we prepare to receive Jesus today, we ask him for the grace to pray this Mass to the Father in his name and to be so united with him as a result that we will give him true witness,  accept him to so great a degree that we will unite ourselves wholeheartedly to his saving will and go out to announce him to those here in New York with the same boldness with which Paul and Barnabas did in Galatia and beyond. This is the means by which we may recapitulate in our own time what happened in ancient Antioch in Pisidia: the “disciples [will be] filled with joy and the Holy Spirit!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: