Bearing Fruit in Work through Our Communion with Christ, Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker, May 1, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker
May 1, 2024
Acts 15:1-6, Ps 122, Jn 15:1-8

To listen to today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we mark the Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker, which was instituted 69 years ago in 1955 by Pope Pius XII both to give a spiritual context to “Labor Day” in many European countries as well as a spiritual response to the “May Day” celebrations in communist countries where the meaning of human work and the relationship between human worker and the State were distorted. Pope Pius XII wanted the whole Church on this day to go on pilgrimage to a carpenter’s shop in Nazareth to find in the hardworking St. Joseph and his diligent foster Son the key that unlocks the meaning of the dignity, beauty and redemptive importance of human labor as part of Christ’s mission of love, so that we might not perish but have eternal life. So many today are confused about how important work is. Some, for example, behave as if work is just a necessary evil that we have to endure until we earn enough money or get to the magic age when life can become an unending vacation on the golf course or lounging at the pool. Others fail to see in the crisis of unemployment, especially among the young, that we’re dealing with something far greater than a pressing economic problem, but rather a profoundly dehumanizing one that can gradually deprive millions of a sense of moral worth through a sense of being useless. And sometimes we can see a combination of both of these confusions when people who can work just choose not to do so, opting rather to take advantage of the generosity of family members or other workers in society so that they can seemingly remain on vacation 365 days a year. Insofar as most people will spend at least 25 percent of their week, from the time they’re five through when they’re 65 or older, doing some form of work, it’s important that we learn from St. Joseph how to turn our work into a pleasing offering to God.
• Today’s readings help us to focus on aspects of the Gospel of Work epitomized by St. Joseph. In the Gospel, we have for the second time in four days the powerful and beautiful image of the Vine and the Branches. I won’t repeat what I said on Sunday at the student Mass. I want to highlight rather how the fruit of all our labor is meant to come from the unity we have with Jesus. Apart from him, we can do nothing; but with him, our work can become a crucial part of the redemption. Through the Sacrament of Baptism, we enter into an ontological communion with him, one intensified by the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. But he wants us to remain in a moral communion with him, by working together with him always. This union is the essence of the Christian life. We enter into an interpersonal communion with the Lord that flows into deeds. And through this mutual communion with Christ, we also enter, as we see in this image, into communion and collaboration with all others who are similarly attached as branches on the same Vine. At the end of today’s Gospel, he says, somewhat shockingly, that to become his disciples, we must bear fruit. To become his disciples, we must be in communion with him the Vine and allow his fruit to mature in us: that’s the way we become true disciples. Part of that fruit is our communion with others, which is, as Jesus would say later on Holy Thursday, one of the means by which the father will be glorified and the world know that the Father sent the Son and loves us like he loves the Son.
• This focus on this communion with Christ and with others, and bearing fruit in communion, is the background for the dramatic firsts reading we have today, which documents one of the most pivotal events in the history of the Church. It’s the Council of Jerusalem, the first such Council in the history of the Church. It came about because “there arose no little dissension and debate” after some Christians coming from Judea were telling the Gentile Christians in Antioch, “Unless you are circumcised according to the Mosaic practice, you cannot be saved.” The question was far broader than merely of circumcision, but about the role of our action, our works, in salvation, something that similarly impinged upon the way we relate to God, the role of the Mosaic law in the faith and the manner in which Jewish and Gentile Christians were to behave with regard to each other. Paul, Barnabas and others had gone up to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles and priests about it. St. Paul was once a Pharisee and believed that salvation happened through the human act of rigid observance of the Mosaic Law in all its details. But after he was converted on the road to Damascus, converted from a false notion of the holy life to a true one, he began to see that one is saved by Christ and not by our own actions obeying all 613 commands and all the other precepts of the Mosaic law. We’re saved by God’s mercy rather than by our merit. We are saved by Christ’s attaching us to himself the Vine so that we can bear fruit not principally from our own efforts but by him working through us. He would spend most of his apostolic life proclaiming this truth. He wrote two letters (one to the Romans and another to the Galatians) explaining in detail how Christ, rather than the law, is our Savior, and he spent parts of two other letters (Colossians and Philippians) talking about how baptism rather than circumcision enters us into the life of faith and the Covenant with God. He brought all of these inspirations to the Council in Jerusalem and we’ll see tomorrow how the Holy Spirit led the early Church to the solution with regard to the Gentiles. We learn in this scene two essential truths. First, that we’re saved by God’s action to which we freely respond, not principally by our own action. The Mosaic law functions to help us prepare to receive the fullness of that saving action in Christ, when he comes to bring us fully into communion with God through his passion, death and resurrection and through the sacraments he instituted so that we might enter into his life. Second, we learn how to relate to each other. One of the reasons why this dispute between Jews and Gentiles was such a big deal was not simply the question of whether Gentiles needed to live as good Jews before they could be good Christians, but it was because stricter Jews, like the Pharisees, had no interaction with Gentiles. They avoided them as if they were lepers. They didn’t eat with them. They didn’t enter into their houses. This is the partial background as to why the Hellenist widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of the bread, because many of the Jewish Christians would just keep their cultural tradition of complete separation. That obviously couldn’t work in the communion of the Church. The Council of Jerusalem was crucial so that Christians would live in communion with each other, which is what Jesus intended from the beginning, that we would be one as he and the Father is one, all attached as fruitful branches of him the Vine.
• St. Joseph is someone who shows us how to live this way. His work, especially after the incarnation, was all done for and in communion with his foster-son the God-man. And he is one who shows us how to collaborate with God and others in the Church to bear fruit that will last into eternity. These lessons of his life and of the Gospel have their source and summit from Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Jesus gave us the image of the Vine and the Branches on Holy Thursday so that we could enter into the Holy Communion with him to which the image of the vine and branches points. In the Mass we attach ourselves through the “transubstantiated fruit of the vine,” through Christ’s Body and Blood, to Him and in that communion, enter into a bond with others far greater than blood. And we don’t celebrate Mass with the raw material of grain and grapes, but rather bread and wine, which are not just the gifts of God but the “work of human hands.” From the beginning Jesus wanted to incorporate our collaboration into his supreme sacrifice. It’s here at Mass that we learn how to pray our work so that the entire world becomes God’s work shop. As we enter more deeply into this mystery of the Vine and the Branches, let us pray that we may abide in Christ so much that we, like St. Joseph, might bear fruit always for the Father’s glory,  do our work well all the days of our life, and come at last, together with each other, with St. Joseph and all the saints, to abide in God forever.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download