Building our Path, Knowledge, and Existence on Christ the Way, the Truth and the Life, Fifth Sunday of Easter (A), May 10, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year A
May 10, 2020
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: 

The Place Jesus is Preparing

Today Jesus tells us words that are relevant not only during the time of the coronavirus pandemic but always. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he tells us. “You have faith in God. Have faith also in me.” He wants to calm our hearts by assuring us that he is going to prepare aplace for each of us in his Father’s house so that where he is, we also will be. He’s referring not merely to his desire to come back again and take us to be with him eternally. He’s also referring to the fact that, right now, he is going to prepare a place in the Father’s house for us, for our prayers, for our hopes, sorrows, joys. When he told the apostles, “Where I am going, you know the way,” Saint Thomas protested that the apostles neither knew Jesus’ destination or path. They would in fact journey that very path with him beginning that night with his passion, death and resurrection. We, too, have journeyed that path with him. We know the way to that house he is building. And today all of the readings speak to us of the architectural plans for that house and how to participate in the construction crew.

St. Peter tells us in today’s second reading that God summons us to be built into a spiritual house of living stones on Christ the living cornerstone. In the reading from 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 indispensable service of charity so that the apostles could dedicate themselves with urgency to the word of God and prayer. Both as individuals and as the community of the Church, we are called to construct our existence on Christ and thereby allow him to build us up into his Mystical Body. We’re supposed to make Jesus our true foundation as he seeks to make us living stones, solid members, in a holy temple offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to the Father through him. That is God’s design for our life, 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. St. Peter in the second reading tells us that Jesus is a stone that “the builders rejected” because they wanted another foundation. He will either become a “cornerstone” or 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 talked about two ways we could build our life, on rock or on sand. The person who builds on rock is the one who hears his 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 build his life on sand, however, hears Jesus’ words but doesn’t act 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. Otherwise, we’ll be just as foolish as someone who builds a house out of cheap unreinforced concrete on an earthquake fault line.

The Fulfillment of All Desire

In the Gospel, Jesus describes for us how to build ourselves on him. In one of his most memorable phrases, he said, “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 dwelling place except by building their 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 were 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 direction. 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 don’t 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 have having the marrow of existence sucked out of them, who are seeking happiness and human fulfillment sometimes in right places, often in wrong. To them, Jesus responds, “I am the Life.”

What does it mean to build our lives on Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life? Let’s take each of Jesus’ affirmations individually and see.

The Way

Jesus says, “I am the Way.”

Probably every single one of us has had the experience of being lost when we’re driving. Even in this age of GPS devices and 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. I remember several years ago I was heading to southern Rhode Island to give a speech. The organizers had given me directions. I had printed a map from Google maps with every turn marked out and mileage delineated. But even with both, I kept driving around and around, unable to find the address. Finally, I saw a policeman stopped 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. “Sure, Father, I do,” he replied. I asked him if he would be kind enough to give me directions. “I could give you directions,” he said, “but I think you’d still miss it. 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 the Commandments, in his Word, we have the directions we need to get to where Jesus 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. Many times 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 as our spiritual GPS the Holy Spirit. 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, occasional roadblocks and detours, he helps 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 first 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.  This clearly means that we need to follow on the path of morality he indicates to us. 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. Jesus’ path is the path of the beatitudes, not the way of the world. Whereas the world says we have to be rich to be happy, Jesus says we need to be poor in spirit and place our treasure in God. Whereas worldly logic says that human happiness is built on the foundation of putting other people in their place and finishing fights others unwisely started, Jesus says it involves becoming meek and a peacemaker. Whereas worldly gurus say that happiness consists in having all our sexual fantasies fulfilled, Jesus says that the truly blessed are the pure in heart who see God in others and never use them for one’s pleasure. Whereas the world says that the path to a happy life involves being voted Miss Congeniality and Most Popular in our high school graduating class, Jesus says that the living stones are those who are persecuted on account of his name. Jesus says that if we’re basing our life on him and following him along the path to the Father’s house, we will be following Jesus across the road as he seeks to make us Good Samaritans caring for those in need, loving them, sacrificing for them, helping to save them. Today (May 10), as the Church remembers St. Damian of Molokai, we remember his charity and how he identified so much with the lepers in the Kaluapapa leper colony, that he became one of them and helped them over time to build their lives on Christ. Jesus’ path is an uphill climb. But he has entered the world precisely to strengthen and to guide us. To be a Christian means to build our path on his path, to journey together with him in the world. Today he wants to strengthen us anew to do just that.

The Truth 

Jesus next says, “I am the Truth”

The day after Jesus pronounced these words to the apostles in the upper room, Pilate asked Jesus, “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 told you yesterday, on May 9, “It’s snowing,” you could go outside to see if that statement accorded with reality. When Jesus says that he is the truth, he is ultimately declaring that he is the ground of all reality, that he is what is most real, 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 money in our pockets, the people we’re meeting, or the 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 spiritual monopoly money. It’s actually the other way around. Jesus is most real of all. In a relativist age, he says not just that he teaches truths but is the Truth. To be most real, to ground ourselves most deeply in reality, he calls us to base everything we are and do on him.

But the question we need to answer today is whether we’ve been responding to his help to build our life on the foundation of the Truth he is and indicates to us. Do we seek to see everything through his light, the light of faith, or do we see even the things of faith through the suspicious and hyper-politicized eyes of a secularized world? Are we grounding ourselves on the Truth he has taught us? Are we humble enough 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 can build our lives on it. 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 so that they won’t be constructing their life on quicksand. We should be striving to know the truth in such a way that it will set us free to love God and to love others and keep us from being enslaved to the lies and slogans to which so many in our day succumb.

The Life

Third, Jesus said, “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 is life 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. And, God-willing, we will owe our eternal life to him, if we share in his life in this world, so as to share in it without end. Jesus came, as he said to 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 Jesus is more than simply electricity for the soul that keep us going. It’s supposed to be the principle of our existence so that, eventually, we are 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, forming this personal, life-changing friendship with Jesus.

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 said during his Bread of Life Discourse in the Capernaum Synagogue, “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 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 wants us even 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.

Mother’s Day 

Today on Mother’s Day we can ponder how the Mother God the Father chose for his Son and he from the Cross chose for us built her life on God in faith. While he was drawing his oxygen through her lungs in the womb, she was constructing her existence on him. Before the way even had the tiniest of feet, before the truth could speak, before the life was even known to the world, she was building her life on the cornerstone. When an anonymous woman shouted out to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore thee and the breasts that nursed thee!,” he praised Mary not for her inimitable privileges but her emulable faith: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and do it!” She heard the Word of God and did it so perfectly that the Word became flesh and dwelled in her. As we celebrate her maternity as Mother of God and Mother of the Church, we ask her to nourish us by faith and help us build our life on the rock of her Son.

We also thank God today for the gift of our own Mothers. The first place that Jesus ever prepared for us was within our mothers, who, like every woman, were prepared by God with space for another within. Our mothers have passed on to us not only the gift of life (bios) but, at least for most of us, they were among the greatest divine instruments for passing onto us the gift of supernatural life (zoe). Most of us have first learned from them how to follow Jesus the Way, how to have faith in God and in Jesus and believe the truth of what they teach us, how to set our hearts on a life that will know no end. We pray in gratitude today to God for the gift of our mothers and beg Him in a particular way to prepare a special place for them in the bosom and house of the Father.

The Place Jesus Has Prepared to Build Us Up

It’s at Mass that Jesus’ great 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 meaning and happiness. We rejoice that Jesus has led us on the way here today, to hear his Truth and to 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 storms come, 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.

The readings for today’s Mass were: