Ascension/Seventh Sunday of Easter (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, May 15, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Ascension and the Seventh Sunday of Easter (B), Vigil
May 15, 2021

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday. I should probably say “conversations” in the plural, since, depending upon where you live in the United States, you will have one of two Gospels. Those in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nebraska will the Gospel of the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Those everywhere else will have the Gospel of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus, since the bishops in those ecclesiastical provinces decided in 1998 and 1999 to transfer the Ascension from the 40th day after Easter to the Seventh Sunday. They did so because they recognized that if they didn’t, Catholics who do not attend on Holy Days of Obligation would always miss this celebrating liturgically this very important event in the Lord’s life. Ironically, however, in making that decision to move the Ascension to the 43rd day after Easter, the bishops in those provinces were eliminating that Catholics would hear Jesus’ words on the importance of Christian unity from the 17^thChapter of St. John’s Gospel, a third of which is proclaimed on the Seventh Sunday each year. That Catholics in the US do not have unity with regard to the celebration of the Solemnity of the Ascension is unfortunate and I would urge that just as the Church is praying for unity to be restored to the celebration of Easter between Catholics and Orthodox, so we might pray and speak to our bishops about restoring unity on the celebration of the Ascension on the 40th.
• But since there is not unity, please permit me to say something about both Gospels, conscious of the fact that since Jesus is our interlocutor in every prayerful and consequential liturgical conversation, everything is intrinsically coherent.
• We’ll take the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter first, since it happened first in time. In it we have the awesome privilege not only to eavesdrop on the extraordinarily rich interpersonal dialogue Jesus had with God the Father the night he was betrayed but to enter into that conversation.
• In the section we have this year, Jesus mentions five things:
  • Jesus prays first that God the Father would protect us that we may be one in communion just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one. A little later he asks the Father specifically to keep us from the evil one. The point is that the devil constantly seeks to divide us, whereas God wants to bring us into true communion with Him and each other. Any of us who really believe in Jesus, who love him, must pray and work for unity. The fact that Christians as a whole have been divided by so many schisms across the centuries, the fact that even Catholics are often divided into ideological camps, is a great scandal, one that Jesus wants us to help remedy.
  • The second thing Jesus prays for is that we may share his joy completely. He came so that his joy might be in us and our joy be made complete. The Easter Season is meant to help us to focus precisely on that joy, the joy that flows from God’s love, from his continuous presence, and from his triumph over sin and death. If we don’t live the Christian faith with joy, we risk making the Good News seem like a lie.
  • The third thing Jesus mentions is that the world will hate us, just like it hated Jesus, because we do not belong to the world any more than Jesus does but belong to God. Jesus many times in the Gospel has promised us that we would be hated by those who don’t want to believe, love and follow God, that what they did to him, they would try to do to us. He said God would permit this, just like God the Father permitted it to happen to Jesus, so that we would be able to give witness to God. At the end of the Beatitudes he would say, “Blessed are you when people hate you, revile you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me” for “your reward will be great in heaven.” This hatred we suffer from others is not strong enough to take away our unity, or negate the Father’s protection, or rob us of our joy. It only will if we fear that hatred from others more than we trust in the love of God.
  • The fourth thing is that Jesus asks the Father to consecrate us in the truth, adding that he himself has consecrated himself for us so that we may be consecrated in truth. To be consecrated literally means to be cut off (sacer) to be with (con) some other reality. In consecrating us, God sets us apart, he cuts us from worldliness, from the profane, so that we can be with him. Consecration is a sacred dedication in which we transfer our belonging, the title of the ownership of our life, totally to God. It’s like the Covenants of the Old Testament in which he becomes our God and we become his people, the sheep of his flock. He does this first in baptism, in which we’re marked by a special seal. He does so also, as Jesus says, by his Word, which is meant, like a double-edged sword, to prune us of anything in us that doesn’t belong to God. Do we live this sense of belonging? That we belong to God, for example, more than the most loving husbands and wives belong to each other?
  • All four of these points culminate in mission. Jesus says, “As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.” Being set apart to belong to God, we now share Christ’s mission. Just as the Father sent him, so he sends us. He sends us consecrated in the Truth that sets us free, as messengers of the Words of Eternal Life. He prepares us for the opposition we will receive from some, just like the apostles and missionaries in every age endured, but likewise promises the Holy Spirit who will help us in trial to give witness to Jesus. He sends us as joyful messengers of challenging proposals, as Pope Francis likes to stress. And he sends us out united, seeking to bring them into community. Jesus says in next year’s portion of John 17, that he wants us to be one “so that the world may believe that you, Father, sent me and love them just as much as you love me.” To help others believe in Jesus and in the love that God has for them, we must evince that love and faith toward each other.
• That’s what the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter is all about. If we turn to the Gospel that the Church proclaims this year on the Ascension, which took place 43 days after Jesus’ words in the Upper Room, we see how Jesus essentially reiterates what he said in John 17. He tells us, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized,” whoever in other words, accepts the gift of consecration, “will be saved. He mentions the opposition we will get from demons, serpents, even others who who seek to poison us, so that we won’t be afraid of “any deadly thing.” And we see how the apostles respond to Jesus’ valedictory as he ascends to heaven by going forth and preaching everywhere, while, St. Mark tells us, “The Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.” Those signs were not just physical healings and other powerful miracles. They were the compelling signs of Christian joy, unity, and courage in the face of threats. They were the witness of their belonging to God, their consecration within Christ’s consecration, that no intimidation, that not even torture, could sever. And we’re Christians today because of the way they responded to Jesus’ words in the Upper Room and Jesus’ words before he was taken to heaven.
• As we prepare for the gift of Sunday Mass, no matter what Gospel we’ll hear, we give God thanks that his prayer during that first Mass on Holy Thursday and his Great Commission have no expiration date. And we ask the Holy Spirit whom Jesus ascended to heaven to send down to us will help us to respond to Jesus’ words as faithfully as his first followers, so that great multitudes after us may hear and live Jesus’ life saving, joy-filling words.

The Gospels on which the homily was based were: 

Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year B

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