Belonging Not to the World but to Christ, Seventh Wednesday of Easter, May 15, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Mary’s Church, New Haven, Connecticut
Wednesday of the Seventh Week of Easter
May 15, 2024
Acts 20:28-38, Ps 68, Jn 17:11-19

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

The following points were considered in today’s homily: 

• Today the Church ponders part of the valedictory words of Jesus in the Upper Room and of St. Paul in Melitus that we would have begun to listen to yesterday if we didn’t have the proper readings for the feast of the apostle St. Matthias. Jesus’ words were to the Father, but he said them aloud so that the apostles could hear them — and through them, we could hear them — and that we might “share [Jesus’] joy completely.” St. Paul’s words were to the presbyters of Ephesus, so that they could continue the work that St. Paul had labored for “three years, night and day … with tears” to try to accomplish. As we’ll see, St. Paul’s words were an echo of what Jesus prayed to the Father. These words are highly relevant not just to the type of legacy we should be prepared to leave one day, but also help us to understand where all the charitable works that the Knights of Columbus Charitable Fund aims to catalyze ultimately originate and to which they’re meant to tend.
• Today Jesus stresses his relationship to the Father and to the world as well as the relationship he wants us to have to the Father and the world.
  • He says that he’s one with the Father and he wants us to be as united to each other as the Father and the Son are united. This ontological communion as vine and branches, and moral communion seeking to remain in his love and to love others as he has loved us first, are meant to lead us to the fruit of perfectly sharing his joy. This unity is meant to influence the way we collaborate as well as the sense of solidarity we have with those we’re seeking to serve.
  • Jesus says that our communion with him and with others is meant to separate us from worldliness. He underlines twice that he doesn’t belong to the world and we shouldn’t belong to the world, emphasizing that we do not belong to the world “any more” than he does. Those are extraordinary words. He says that we’re supposed to have the same relationship to the world that he does and that we shouldn’t be any more worldly than he was! What joy we have when we are not enslaved to the world!
  • He asks the Father to consecrate us so that we might belong not to the world but to the Father just like he belongs to the Father, just as Jesus does. To be consecrated means to be cut off from the profane (sacer) to be with (con) God to such a degree that we share the mission the Father gave the Son. Jesus wants to cut us off from the world to be united to him so that united to him we might come out of love for the world to continue his work, so that the world might be saved. What joy we have to belong to the Father like Jesus does! While remaining in the world, we’re not of it.
  • The way we will be consecrated to the Father is “in the truth” of his word. The Word of God is like a two-edged sword that cuts us off from the world. And Jesus is the Truth, the Word made Flesh, who does the cutting! To be consecrated in the truth means that we remain in Jesus. It also means that we earnestly seek to remain in him through his Word, that we listen to his words as words to be done, words that help us to enter more deeply into the communion of God. That means we are “living the truth” and not attached to the world and the prince of this world, whom Jesus calls the father of lies. What joy we have because of the gift of God’s word, to know it, to live by it, to trust in it!
  • To be consecrated — sacer (cut off), con (with) — means that we are cut off from the profane so as to be with Jesus, to belong to him, the Word made Flesh, to such a degree that we share his mission. He tells the Father he has sent us into the world just as the Father had sent him, and that can only happen when we’re consecrated as a part of his Mystical Body, when we bring into the world the truth of his word. Pope Francis says famously in his exhortation The Joy of the Gospel that we evangelize precisely because of the joy we have in our relationship with God, something we cannot keep to ourselves. We know the different Jesus makes and we want others to experience that same joy flowing from consecration to God and not belonging too the world.
  • Finally, in this consecration, Jesus asks the Father to protect us, just as Jesus himself sought to protect us in the Father’s name. He says that the world will hate us because, like him, we do not belong to the world, and the darkness of the world will seek to extinguish the light of Christ. For that reason, Jesus prays, not that we be taken out of harm’s way, but that we be protected from the Evil One and what the Evil One ultimately wants to accomplish, which is to make us worldly and through that alienate us forever from God. The response of Jesus to that diabolical strategy is consecration. What joy we have knowing that the Father is our protector, that he will deliver us from evil, that he will strengthen us not to fall when tempted.
• In all of these petitions to the Father, there’s a central point: that Jesus wants us in the middle of the world, as salt, light and leaven. There’s a tendency for some Christians to try to say, “The world is evil. I’m getting out of here.” Jesus, however, prayed that the Father not take his disciples from the world, but consecrate us in the truth so that we could go out into a world that would hate us and make it a place of divine love and ineradicable joy.
• St. Paul got this message and lived it. He retired for 14 years to Arabia to pray, and more time in his native Tarsus, and it was from there that he became the greatest missionary in Church history. In his final words to the presbyters of Ephesus meeting him in Melitus, he reiterated the points by which he tried to live, points Jesus made in today’s Gospel, truths that he believed God was calling all of them to imitate:
  • Just as Jesus prayed that the Father protect the flock of those entrusted to his care, St. Paul instructed the priests to “keep watch over yourselves and over the whole flock of which the Holy Spirit has appointed you overseers, in which you tend the Church of God that he acquired with his own Blood.” He warned them to be vigilant in this way because the Evil One would be at work, trying to attack the Church from within and without, to disrupt the consecration, to destroy the unity, to replace the truth with a lie. He said, “After my departure savage wolves will come among you, and they will not spare the flock.” We would see those savage wolves in the Roman emperors and soldiers who for 250 years assailed the Church. But they would not be the only ones. “From your own group,” Paul continued, “men will come forward perverting the truth to draw the disciples away after them.” These would be the heretics who would try to change the Gospel to suit their own desires, rather than change their desires to conform with the Gospel. So St. Paul said, “Be vigilant,” reminding them of his three years of tears admonishing them about the false gospels so that they might live the true one. His words have no expiration date!
  • Just as Jesus prayed to the Father that the disciples may be consecrated in the truth, St. Paul likewise entrusted them to God in the truth of God’s word. “I commend you to God and to that gracious word of his that can build you up and give you the inheritance among all who are consecrated.” Consecration in the word of God builds us up in communion, it unites us, and it gives us the inheritance of God. That’s why it’s so important for us to live out our baptismal consecration so that we may experience the communion that convinces the world of Jesus and of God the Father’s love.
  • This leads us to share Christ’s mission, to be sent out into the world as Christ was sent by the Father, as the apostles and Paul were sent by Christ. “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” Paul reminds them, and his mission to the world out of the love God has to save the world is a far greater gift than remaining apart from the world exclusively with God. God loved us so much that he gives us the privilege to give with him as generously as we have received from him.  That is our particular joy with KCCF. That was St. Paul’s joy in sharing the Gospel together with his very self.
• The greatest way we live out all of the truths contained in Jesus’ prayer is here at Mass, where in the midst of the world, we consecrate ourselves anew within Jesus’ consecration in the Mass to the Father. This is where we each day reiterate before all that we belong to God and not to the world as, within the world, we are strengthened against the wiles of the evil one to complete Jesus’ mission! May the Holy Spirit to whom we pray with fervor during these days strengthen us to be faithful and always joyful in completing the task Jesus has entrusted to us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: