Baptism, Faith and Eternal Life, Second Thursday of Easter, April 11, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the Second Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Stanislaus
April 11, 2024
Acts 5:27-33, Ps 34, Jn 3:31-36

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The Easter Season is meant to be a post-baptismal mystagogy, the period in which the Church helps the newly baptized — and those baptized many years before — enter into the reality of the mystery of Christ’s risen life received in the Sacraments, pondering his words, and living the truth so that all our works may be seen as done in God, as we heard earlier this week. Throughout this Second Week of Easter, we have been pondering the mystery of our baptismal sharing in Christ’s risen life through Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus about spiritual rebirth and St. John’s subsequent reflections on it. Tomorrow we will begin eight days of focus on the Eucharistic reality of the Christian life, our ability to receive Jesus’ risen Body and Blood each day. And all of these truths were able to see enfleshed by the members of the early Church in the readings from the Acts of the Apostles.
• Today we have the concluding words of the chapter of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in which St. John — or Jesus, the text is a little ambiguous and scholars go back and forth about whether St. John is quoting Jesus or whether he is giving his own theological reflections on why Jesus said what he said — describes his own mission and the life of anyone born anew from above, as we have been in Baptism. St. Paul told us on Easter Sunday morning, as he told the Colossians, “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Today St. John describes this difference between living with Jesus risen from the dead or living according to the old Adam: “The one who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of earthly things,” St. John writes, “but the one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard.” Jesus witnessed to what he had seen and heard and a Christian must be a witness to what he has seen and heard in his encounters with Christ in person, in prayer, in the Sacraments. The disciple and apostle of Jesus must be someone who seeks, thinks and testifies to what is above. St. John describes that not everybody wants to live with hearts aloft. He says that Jesus came as light into the world but many preferred the darkness. “No one accepts his testimony,” he writes, referring in general to the fact that most don’t seek the things that are above, most don’t leave the darkness to enter the light, most don’t allow Jesus to change their fundamental orientation at its root, most don’t really convert and continue to lift up their hearts to God. But, he adds, “Whoever does accept his testimony certifies that God is trustworthy for the one whom God sent speaks the words of God. He does not ration his gift of the Spirit.” We believe what Jesus says on the basis of our faith in God. Because we trust in God, we trust in what he says and gives witness to. The one born from above allows the Holy Spirit to give witness within him, not putting up any resistance to what God is doing. The Holy Spirit is a witness — just as much as the apostles — to Jesus’ risen life and when we are reborn from him, we give witness together with him. We don’t ration the Holy Spirit’s work, and he helps us, as St. Paul described to the Galatians and the Romans, to “live by the Spirit,” which allows us to be “concerned with the things of the Spirit.”  And for that reason, Jesus says, such a person living by the Spirit is already living eternally because he is through the Spirit in union with Christ’s risen life: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.” That’s the life that begins when we’re baptized with water, the Spirit and fire. When babies are baptized today, the priest or deacon asks, first, what name the parents give the child and then, “What do you ask of God’s Church for [your child]?”  There are three correct answers, but I encourage couples to say all three: baptism; what baptism leads to, faith; and what faith leads to, eternal life. Baptism, Faith and Eternal Life are all connected, for whoever truly believes in the Son has eternal life. And that eternal life always experienced makes us courageous in the face of all challenges and vicissitudes, something that, as we saw earlier this week, Nicodemus, the reluctant disciple, desperately needed in order to leave the darkness and come to live with Jesus in the light.
• We see life according to these principles in the apostles in the first reading. The apostles accepted Jesus’ testimony, they didn’t ration the gift of the Spirit, but with all boldness were giving witness with the Holy Spirit to what they had seen and heard. After the same members of the Sanhedrin who had had Jesus publicly tortured and executed were threatening them with the same fate had given them strict orders to stop teaching in Jesus’ name only to be met by their “fill[ing] Jerusalem with your teaching,” St. Peter and the Apostles said, “We must obey God rather than men.” They kept giving witness, undaunted because they knew that they were already experiencing eternal life and even should they be martyred, that wouldn’t be the end of their life but the passage to life with Jesus. That was the source of their boldness. They sought the things above, they spoke of heavenly things, they grasped that, just like Jesus’ testimony, not everyone would receive theirs, but to everyone who did, they testified that God is trustworthy and would give eternal life. They appeal to us to accept that testimony coming from God the Holy Spirit, to order our life to the things that are above and to fill Columbia University, New York City and beyond with this teaching. That’s what Jesus, whose Risen Life we’re about to receive within in Holy Communion, wants to strengthen us, like he strengthened his first followers, to do. That’s what he was able to do in the life of St. Stanislaw, bishop and martyr, whom the Church celebrates today, who courageously gave a fraternal correction to King Boleslaus II, who out of anger killed the Bishop of Krakow with his own hands.
• The same Jesus who spoke to Nicodemus comes to speak to us today and to feed us, helping us from the inside to live as those born anew from above, helping us not ration the Spirit but put up the sails to the Spirit who blows where he wills, strengthening us boldly to spread his teachings so that everyone for which he poured out his blood might come to have life to the full, in this world and forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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