Building Our Life on Christ the Living Cornerstone, Fifth Sunday of Easter (A), May 7, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year A
May 7, 2023
Acts 6:1-7, Ps 33, 1 Pet 2:4-9, Jn 14:1-12

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today as we celebrate our last student Mass of the academic year and think not only about the exams and papers we still have this week but what we will be doing this summer and beyond, God speaks to us through our readings today about a building plan. In the Gospel, Jesus tells us that he is going to prepare a place for us at his Father’s house, which doesn’t mean merely heaven, because to Jews of Jesus’ age, the Father’s House was always considered the temple and Jesus’ work was prepare a permanent dwelling place for us in the new Temple God was building in Jesus himself. In the epistle, St. Peter buttresses that image, by telling us that we’re called to be built into a spiritual house of living stones on Christ the living cornerstone. In the Acts of the Apostles, we see the building up of the structure of the early Church with the calling of the first deacons for the service of charity so that the apostles could dedicate themselves with urgency to the word of God and prayer, since charity, preaching and prayer are all essential in the building up of the life of the Church. Both as individuals and as the community of the Church, we are called to construct our existence on Christ and allow him to build us up into his Mystical Body and beloved Bride. We’re supposed to make Jesus our true foundation and give him permission to make us living stones, solid members, in a holy temple offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to the Father through him. That is God’s architectural plan for our life, for Columbia Catholic Ministry, for the Church and for the whole human race.
• Because Jesus made us free, however, we have a choice in whether we make him the foundation of our existence on campus and off, now and into the future. St. Peter in the second reading tells us that Jesus is a stone that “the builders rejected” because they wanted another foundation. Jesus will either become a “cornerstone” or, as St. Peter said, basing himself on a prophecy of Isaiah, a “stone that will make people stumble and a rock that will make them fall.” In his conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that there are ultimately two ways we can build our life, on rock or on sand. The person who builds on rock is the one who hears Jesus’ words and acts on them and when the storms come and blow and buffet against the house it remains standing. That’s the type of foundation he wants us to construct. That’s how we become a living stone. The one who builds his life on sand, however, hears Jesus’ words but let’s them pass through the other ear, not acting on them, and when the rains and storms come, the house is swept away. And so today, as we hear Jesus’ words about how we’re to ground our life, it’s important for us to hear them as words to be lived, as words that are meant to be the solid granite foundation of the gift of our whole life. Otherwise, we’ll be just as foolish as someone who builds a house out of cheap unreinforced concrete on an earthquake fault line.
• In the Gospel, Jesus shows us how to build ourselves on him. In one of his most memorable phrases, he says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” In other words, no one can come to the Father’s house, no one can become a living stone in the Father’s holy temple, no one can come to the place Christ ascended to prepare in heaven except by building their life — not just a portion of their life, but their whole life — on Jesus. We’ve heard Jesus’ self-description as the Way, the Truth and the Life so many times that their revolutionary shock value is almost entirely lost on us, but to first century Jewish listeners, they would have heard Jesus saying that he was the full realization of their three deepest religious aspirations. Jews had been praying for centuries, “Teach me your way, O Lord” and Jesus was saying, “I am the way.” They had been imploring God, “Teach me your decrees” that “I may walk in your truth,” and Jesus was saying, “I am the Truth.” They had been begging, “Show me the path of life,” and Jesus was indicating, “I am the Life.” Jesus was saying that he was the personification of all their religious aspirations and the answer to so many of their most insistent prayers.
• But these aspirations for direction, truth and flourishing are not exclusively Jewish. They point to the perennial needs that spring up in every human life. Many times we’re lost, we don’t know where to go, we’re wandering through a valley of darkness with no clear sense of the route. To all of us in those circumstances, Jesus says, “I am the Way.” There are many others who are stumped before life’s biggest questions, who are searching for answers and meaning, who don’t know what to believe, who find it difficult to trust because they don’t know whom to trust. Jesus tells us, “I am the Truth. …You have faith in God, have faith also in me.” And there are countless others who are struggling to have hope, who feel like they are having the marrow of existence sucked out of them, who seek happiness and human fulfillment sometimes down dead ends; to them, Jesus responds, “I am the Life.”
• We need to ask, however, what it means to build our lives on Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life. Let’s take each of Jesus’ affirmations individually and see.
• Jesus says, “I am the Way.”
  • Probably every one of us has had the experience of being lost when we’re driving. Even in this age of ubiquitous GPS devices and Waze, Google and Apple cell-phone map programs, when we lose the satellite connections or cell phone reception, we can be lost even more than we were in the day before these helpful gadgets. Several years ago, I was heading to southern Rhode Island to give a speech. The organizers had given me directions but I had also printed a map from Google maps with every turn marked out and mileage delineated. Neither got me to my destination. I kept driving around, unable to find the address. Finally, I saw a policeman parked at an intersection. I pulled up aside him, rolled down my window and he rolled down his. I asked him if he knew how to get to the particular address, which I still remember: 4780 Tower Hill Road. “Sure, Father,” he replied. “I could give you directions,” he continued, “but I think you’d still miss it because it’s hard to find. The easiest way is that you just follow me.” And then he kindly led me to where I needed to go.
  • That’s what Jesus wants to do with all of us. It’s true that in his Word — in the Commandments, the Beatitudes, the Parables, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy and more — we have the directions we need to get to where he wants us to end up, to the place he’s prepared for us in this life and forever. Jesus, however, wants to personalize those directions, saying to us far more than “follow the map” but rather, “Come, follow me!” He’s the Good Shepherd who comes out to search for us whenever we’re lost. Often he meets us when we’re like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, wandering away from Jerusalem and everything it stands for. Jesus comes to us on that road to help us to rediscover our path. He sends us the Holy Spirit as our spiritual GPS. He gives us a sure and true set of coordinates in Sacred Scripture and in the Catechism and teachings of the Church he founded. In a life full of going through unchartered territory when we meet various roadblocks and detours, he wants to help us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on him so that he can lead us to the Father’s house.
  • But the most important thing for us is not merely to know that Jesus is the Way but to follow Him on the way he indicates. His way is not easy. It’s certainly not popular. Many prefer to base their path in life on doing their own thing, rather than remaining step by step with him. Jesus is the cornerstone, but he’s a cornerstone who’s dynamic, who’s moving, and if we’re going to be building our life on him, we need to be moving together with him. This means that we need to be ready to get up and go, to change, to leave where we are now and like Abraham go to a place God will show us. Like the ancient Jews at the Passover, we need to have our loins girt and sandals on our feet ready to move with Jesus. Jesus’ path is the way of the Cross, not the way of the crowds, a path of self-giving love instead of self-gratifying egotism. Jesus’ route is a way of continual conversion. It’s the path of the beatitudes, not the way of the world. It’s the path of the Good Samaritan, in which we follow Jesus across the road to care for those in need, loving them, sacrificing for them, helping to save them. Jesus’ path, in short, is an uphill climb, leaving sin behind and ascending with him along the path of morality and holiness. But Jesus took on our humanity and entered the world precisely to lead us on that path. To be a Christian means to build our ways on Him who is the Way, to follow him, to journey together with him on the pilgrimage of life. Today, as we wrap up the semester and look ahead, he wants to strengthen us anew to do just that.
• Jesus, next, tells us, “I am the Truth”
  • The day after Jesus pronounced these words to the apostles in the upper room, Pilate asked Jesus, “Quid est veritas?,” “What is truth?” If we’re going to understand Jesus’ expression and how we’re supposed to respond, we need first to answer Pilate’s question. Truth is, basically, the correspondence between something — a phrase, a thought, an idea — and reality. Truth is what is real. For example, if I tell you, on May 7, “It’s snowing,” you can go outside to verify if that statement accords with reality. When Jesus says that he is the truth, he is declaring that he is the ultimate ground of all reality, that he is the source of all truth, that after everything we know passes away, everything we see and deal with on a daily basis, even our own body, God still is.
  • Too often, like many in the world, we can treat other things as more real than Jesus and the truths of faith. The real, real world, we convince ourselves, is what’s being determined by the President or Congress or the courts, what’s being enforced by military might, or what’s being driven by scientific discoveries; we can think the real, real world are the clothes we’re wearing, the food we’re eating, the money we’re carrying, the people we’re meeting, or the television programs or silly reality shows we’re watching. This spiritual worldliness can lead many to treat God’s word as if it’s a group of fables or morality plays, to consider prayer as just a time of rest, to treat the Sacrament of Confession as an optional psychological exercise, to view the Eucharist as a metaphorical piece of bread, to regard the gifts of the Holy Spirit as just make-believe moral powers, to think of the life of grace as imaginary spiritual monopoly money. It’s actually the other way around. In a relativist age, Jesus says not just that he teaches truths but is the He is the most real of all. To ground ourselves most deeply in reality, he calls us to base everything we are and do on him.
  • On a secular university campus, even one with the motto “In your light, we will see the light,” this is a shockingly counter-cultural reality claim. Some of our fellow students and professors believe, in self-contradictory fashion, that it’s true that there is no truth, just subjective values. They claim there’s “my truth,” “your truth,” but not anything that could be called “the” Many others, while not denying the possibility of objective truth, see truth as an almost infinite number of distintegrated truth claims, with the truths of science, history, metaphysics, anthropology, ethics, etc., having virtually nothing to do with each other. And in some places there’s a full out assault on truth, not just through the chronic lying of public figures and propagandists, but an industry of fake news, deep fake videos generated by artificial intelligence, and more. To this culture, Jesus’ words, “I am the truth” are perhaps even more challenging than the truth of the resurrection.
  • To us Christians, called by Jesus to build our life on him as the truth, however, we need to learn how, with his help, to erect our day to day existence on Him and the truth he indicates to us. This means to try to see everything through his light, the light of faith, rather than through the suspicious eyes of a secularized world. This means to ground ourselves on the truth he has taught us, even and especially when it challenges us personally or socially. It means to be humble enough, despite the gift of the blessed education we’ve received, to know that we don’t have all the answers and to go to him for light about not just the most important questions but ordinary ones. At a practical level, if we’re really building ourselves on Jesus the Truth, then we should have a real hunger to get to know what the Master teaches. We should be praying, so that we can receive his help to see the things we need to deal with day-by-day from his perspective. We should be studying with ardor his holy word so that we live by every word that comes from God’s mouth. We should be taking advantage of opportunities to get to know our faith much more deeply so that we can have become a living stone of truth in the midst of a world that often blows and buffets against spiritual houses and so that we can pass that truth on to others. We should be striving to know Christ the truth in such a way that he will set us free to love God and love others and keep us from becoming enslaved to the lies and slogans to which so many in our day succumb. This is one of the most consequential decisions we’ll make if we wish to become a true living stone, the type of sturdy pillar our Church, our country, our present and future families all need.
• Third, Jesus says, “I am the Life”
  • Jesus is more than just alive. He does more than give physical life to the world he created, to the plants, to the animals and to us, by making fruitful the love of our parents and infusing a soul. He does more than give us spiritual life through the sacraments he instituted for our salvation. He islife incarnate. To the extent we’re alive at all, we’re alive in him. We owe our physical life to him and if he were not holding us in existence at this instant, we would cease to be. We owe our spiritual life to him; every grace comes from him. And, God-willing, we will owe our eternal life to him, if we share in his life in this world so as to share it without end. Jesus came, as he told us in last week’s Gospel, so that we “may have life and have it to the full,” but he doesn’t force his life on us. He wants us to choose to live off of him, to draw our very existence from him.
  • We do this most especially in the sacraments, in prayer and in the moral life of love. The life Jesus gives is more than electricity for the soul that keeps us going. It’s supposed to be the principle of our existence so that, eventually, we will be able to say with St. Paul, “It is no longer even I who live, but Christ who lives in me” and “the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave his life for me.” Whereas the world believes that the most important things in life, that the essential foundations, are stuff like money, property, education, influence and health, we recognize that it’s our relationship with Jesus. The most important thing in life, we realize, is this personal discovery of Jesus, and forming a life-changing friendship with him.
  • If we’re building our foundation on Jesus who is the life, we will be responding to his help to unite all parts of our life to him. We see this revealed for us in the second half of today’s Gospel. Jesus tells the Apostle Philip that whoever has seen Him has seen the Father, that the words he speaks are the words he has heard from the Father, and that the works he does are not his own but rather “the Father who dwells in me is doing his works.” Jesus was saying that in Him, the apostles should see the Father’s face, hear the Father’s voice, and behold the Father’s deeds. That’s the type of transformation that is supposed to happen in us if we’re grounding our life on the One who said, “I am the life.” Jesus told us during his Bread of Life Discourse in Capernaum, “Just as the Father who has life sent me and I have life because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.” Jesus wants us to base our lives so firmly on him with whom we enter into holy communion that others in seeing us will see a reflection of him; that others listening to us will hear an echo of his voice and even his very words; that others in observing us will see us carrying out his work of charity and mercy. Our union is supposed to be so profound that Jesus even wants us to pray totally united to him, promising us at the end of the passage from which today’s Gospel is taken that whatever we ask the Father in his name, he will do. This is what it means to base our life on Jesus.
• So as we celebrate our final Student Mass of the academic year and, with gratitude to God, seek to consolidate the graces God has been giving us over the last nine months, it’s important for us to recognize that God is asking us to make a choice, a decisive commitment that carries with it lots of practical consequences. Whether we’ll be back here in September or moving on to new missions, Jesus wants us to commit to become a living stone in the spiritual edifice of Father’s house, to build our life on him as our Way, Truth and Life, and to help others who are lost find in him their compassion, who full of doubts and confusion find in him their solid, unchanging truth, and those who are having the life drained out of them or building their life on the sand of earthly pleasure, power, or popularity to come to find in Him life to the full. Like an oral exam at the end of a year-long course, Jesus turns to each of us today and asks whether we have faith in God and faith in him, whether we trust him enough to build our whole existence upon him, whether we love him and others enough to try to help them do so, too. Before him who is the truth, we can’t obfuscate or pretend. And if we are prepared today to make the commitment to build our life on him, that will obviously impact how we live the summer and beyond, seeing it as an opportunity really to grow and become more solid in faith, by walking in his way, learning more deeply his truth, and receiving, especially in the sacraments, his life.
• It’s at Mass that Jesus’ great and big building project advances. From the earliest days of Christianity, the saints have stated that the Eucharist builds the Church. It makes us Christians, living stones together built into a spiritual edifice on Christ the cornerstone. It’s here that Jesus makes us a holy priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God the Father. It’s here he constructs us into a chosen race, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that we may announce the praises of him who has called us out of darkness into his wonderful light. It’s from here that Jesus sends us out to help everyone else discover that Jesus is the direction they most need in life, the answer to their profoundest questions, the source of life that will lead them to lasting meaning and happiness. We rejoice that Jesus has led us to follow him here today, so that we may hear his Truth and receive His Life. We ask him to give us the grace he knows we need to keep this communion and build our entire life on him so that no matter what the future holds in store, we may remain always firm in the faith that will bring us to eternal happiness in that house of the Father that Jesus out of love has built, so that we might be with him and, we pray, reunited with each other forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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