Beginning with the End in Mind, Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 18, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Mary’s Rectory Chapel, New Haven, Connecticut
Saturday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Votive Mass of Our Lady of the Cenacle
May 18, 2024
Acts 28:16-20.30-31, Ps 11, Jn 21:20-25

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• It is of course providential that the last day of preparation for our National Eucharistic Pilgrimage is the last day of the Easter Season. Throughout this Easter Season, we learn how to live with the risen Jesus. The Church has us begin this Season by focusing on how the Risen Jesus appeared to and converted his disciples who initially couldn’t fathom his resurrection no matter many times he told them about his upcoming crucifixion, death and resurrection on the third day. Then it brings us through a mystagogical catechesis, as we look to how in Baptism we die in Christ and he raises us to a new form of life, how in the Eucharist we receive him risen from the dead as the source of our life, how Jesus is our Good Shepherd knowing and calling us by name, feeding us, protecting us, and guiding us through dark valleys to verdant pastures, how we are attached to him as Vine to branches and summoned to receive, remain in and share his love, and how he sends us the Holy Spirit to remind us everything he taught us, lead us to all truth, convict us of sin, righteousness and condemnation, and make us truly one as he and the Father are one. This is what we go through in this mystagogy so that we may learn how to live the ordinary time of day to day life together with the Risen Jesus and cooperating with the Holy Spirit to complete Jesus’ saving work. In these last days as we pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we huddle around Mary and she teaches us how to be overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, pray with the help of the Holy Spirit, live according to the Spirit, develop our manifestation of the Spirit for the common good and be ready with tongues of fire to burst forth from the Upper Room of our Churches to go out to the world to proclaim the Good News to every creature that God-with-us is still very much with us, wishing to raise us to new life.
• In the readings the Church gives us on this last day of the Easter Season, we learn how to live our whole life with our end in mind, which is part of the Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom. Jesus came so that we might have life, have it to the full, and have it forever, but we need to order our life in response to that gift. Today the readings help us to see three different ways saints were ordering their lives, at different parts of their spiritual trajectory. There’s much for us to learn.
• The first is Peter’s, on which we focused some yesterday yesterday. Right after the Lord prophesied that he would give his life for him and keep his word that, given a second chance, he would die for him rather than deny him, Peter, like he did in Caesarea Philippi right after Jesus had changed his name from Simon to Rock had it changed again from Rock to Satan because he was opposing what Jesus foretold about his passion, death and resurrection, descends again from fulfilling Christ’s demand to “Follow me” to mere human curiosity, asking what would happen to St. John. Peter had lost focus as to what he was to be about as a shepherd after a Good Shepherd, tending and feeding Christ’s sheep and lambs. Jesus told him in reply that it was not his concern. Peter’s business, rather, was to follow Jesus. That is what he would do after the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, as we’ll celebrate tomorrow. That’s how the Holy Spirit would help him, reminding him of what Jesus had told him and guiding him with ardent love. We, too, can often be distracted by curiosity questions such that we don’t focus on what our task is. Jesus wants each of us to follow him down the path of agapic love by feeding and tending his flock. The Holy Spirit wants to help us to keep that loving focus. St. Peter would eventually follow the Lord Jesus all the way and join him in crucifixion, stretching out his arms and letting another drag him to the stake in the Circus of Caligula and Nero. But he prepared to be faithful to that supreme witness by the martyrdom of each day, sacrificing himself in order to tend and feed Christ’s sheep and feed his lambs. Each of those self-denials to affirm God and others in love was a preparing for the ultimate test. It’s the same way for us. We prepare for the great witness by the witness of each day, of choosing Christ each day. The Holy Spirit helps us to live this daily martyrdom, whether white or red, dry or wet.
• The second end is St. John’s, which we see in today’s Gospel. St. John writes today, “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.” Even though not all the libraries on the planet would be enough to exhaust the mystery of Jesus, St. John didn’t spend the rest of his life writing about details. He essentialized, just like he did in the Gospel. He states today, “It is this disciple who testifies to these things and has written them.” John spent his whole life testifying to Jesus, verbally, then with his writing of the Gospel and letters, and finally by his own life in Jesus. He lived to be very old — hence the rumor in the early Church, which he debunks in today’s passage, that he would live forever! — and St. Jerome says that the story was passed that until he died, the message he proclaimed got increasingly simpler, just repeating, over and over again, “Little children, let us love one another,” saying he never tired of repeating that message because the Lord never did. That’s what he tried to do, to love each other, in imitation of the Lord’s love. That’s what the Holy Spirit wants us to do, too. That’s doubtless what our Lady, whom he took into his home and life, helped him accomplish.
• The third end is St. Paul’s. Today we see the end of the Acts of the Apostles. It doesn’t describe St. Paul’s martyrdom by decapitation in the forest to the south of Rome, what is now called Three Fountains. It ends with St. Luke’s description of what he was doing under house arrest in Rome awaiting trial: “He received all who came to him, and with complete assurance and without hindrance he proclaimed the Kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.” He wasn’t complaining about his imprisonment but using it for the Gospel. We see how hospitable he was, receiving “all who came to him.” We see his faith and boldness, proclaiming Christ the King and his Kingdom with “complete assurance and without hindrance.” One would have thought that it was impossible to proclaim a triumphant kingdom of one who was crucified or a kingdom at all that involves unjust imprisonment, but Paul did so with great faith. He was helped in giving this witness by the Holy Spirit who was advancing the Gospel in this way — not just then but with the future of the Church in mind — perhaps even more than he would have been had Paul been free. The Holy Spirit wants us likewise to receive everyone as dearly beloved of God and announce Christ to them without fear and full of faith.
• I’d like to add a couple of other ends.
• The first is St. John Paul II. Today is his 104th birthday. How happy he would doubtless be that his beloved young people would courageously be making a 1200 mile pilgrimage out of love for the Eucharist. The Eucharist was his whole life. As he drew toward the end of his life, he proclaimed a Year of the Eucharist, a year in which God would in fact come to take him. He wrote in his beautiful encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia (“The Church draws her life from the Eucharist”), “When I think of the Eucharist, and look at my life as a priest, as a Bishop and as the Successor of Peter, I naturally recall the many times and places in which I was able to celebrate it. … I have been able to celebrate Holy Mass in chapels built along mountain paths, on lakeshores and seacoasts; I have celebrated it on altars built in stadiums and in city squares… This varied scenario of celebrations of the Eucharist has given me a powerful experience of its universal and, so to speak, cosmic character. Yes, cosmic! Because even when it is celebrated on the humble altar of a country church, the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world. It unites heaven and earth. It embraces and permeates all creation. The Son of God became man in order to restore all creation, in one supreme act of praise, to the One who made it from nothing. He, the Eternal High Priest who by the blood of his Cross entered the eternal sanctuary, thus gives back to the Creator and Father all creation redeemed. He does so through the priestly ministry of the Church, to the glory of the Most Holy Trinity. Truly this is the mysterium fidei which is accomplished in the Eucharist: the world which came forth from the hands of God the Creator now returns to him redeemed by Christ.” He celebrated Mass with that cosmic dimension in mind. He saw the celebration of the Mass as what united God and man, heaven and earth, and prepared him for heaven. That’s why in an exhortation for the Year of the Eucharist he sought to increase what he called “Eucharistic amazement” so that we would see the Eucharistic Jesus as the magnetic pole of our whole life drawing us to him and in him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to the Father. But I’d like to focus on just one aspect of his Eucharistic teaching, what he says about the eschatological dimension of the Eucharist. We pray in the Memorial Acclamation he notes, “until you come in glory.” He said, “The Eucharist is a straining towards the goal, a foretaste of the fullness of joy promised by Christ (cf. Jn 15:11); it is in some way the anticipation of heaven, the ‘pledge of future glory.’ In the Eucharist, everything speaks of confident waiting ‘in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.’ Those who feed on Christ in the Eucharist need not wait until the hereafter to receive eternal life: they already possess it on earth, as the first-fruits of a future fullness which will embrace man in his totality. For in the Eucharist we also receive the pledge of our bodily resurrection at the end of the world: ‘He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day’ (Jn 6:54). This pledge of the future resurrection comes from the fact that the flesh of the Son of Man, given as food, is his body in its glorious state after the resurrection. With the Eucharist we digest, as it were, the ‘secret’ of the resurrection. For this reason Saint Ignatius of Antioch rightly defined the Eucharistic Bread as ‘a medicine of immortality, an antidote to death.’ … Proclaiming the death of the Lord ‘until he comes’ (1 Cor 11:26) entails that all who take part in the Eucharist be committed to changing their lives and making them in a certain way completely ‘Eucharistic.’  It is this fruit of a transfigured existence and a commitment to transforming the world in accordance with the Gospel which splendidly illustrates the eschatological tension inherent in the celebration of the Eucharist and in the Christian life as a whole: ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ (Rev 22:20).” And so he urges us to receive every communion as Viaticum, as Jesus “with us on the way,” as we together with the whole pilgrim Church on earth make our journey through time with the Eucharistic Jesus until he comes in glory anew.
• The one who shows us this Eucharistic eschatology that helps us to follow Jesus rather than get diverted by curiosity, who helps us to essentialize everything to Christ’s love shown for us here as a way of life, the one who helps us learn how to proclaim the kingdom with complete assurance and without hindrance is Our Lady of the Cenacle. The Archangel Gabriel said to her at the Annunciation, what St. Teresa of Calcutta called her “first communion day,” “the Lord is with you.” And as St. John Paul II loved to point out, she was able to receive the blessed Fruit of her womb within her anew in the Holy Eucharist from St. John, St. Peter and the other apostles in the Masses they would celebrate for the early Church. She teaches us how to consecrate our whole life to this mystery, how to have our “Amen” echo her “Fiat” and how to live this Eucharistic Pilgrimage as the overflowing of the Mystery of the Visitation, as we take Jesus with and within us out to others so that he can make them leap for joy. We ask her help so that we might live this Eucharistic eschatology, this Christian life with the end in mind, each day of our pilgrimage and beyond.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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