Communion with Jesus and Other Christians as Branches to the Vine, Fifth Wednesday of Easter, May 10, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Damien of Molokai
May 10, 2023
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 in the Acts of the Apostles, we come to one of the most pivotal events not only in the history of the early Church but the history of the Church, period. 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 ground of salvation, 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. So Paul, Barnabas and others went up to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles and priests about it.
• St. Paul was once a Pharisee and believed that salvation happened through 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. 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 later 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.
• And that brings us to the Gospel, where Jesus gives us the powerful and beautiful image of the Vine and the Branches, which is an image of the type of unity we’re all supposed to have in him, an image of how our works are supposed to flow from our saving bond with him rather than detached from him and his redeeming grace, and an image of how we’re supposed to be in communion with the other Branches on the Vine. Over the course of Jesus’ Holy Thursday instructions to the disciples, he’s already called us to a union of love, telling us to remain in his love by keeping his commandments and remaining in his word. He’s told us our union with him should be so profound that whoever receives us receives him, because whoever receives us should be receiving us-in-communion-with-Christ-who-is-himself-in-communion-with-the-Father. Today Jesus points not just to a moral union but to a spiritually-ontological union that precedes and is coupled to it. This union is the essence of the Christian life. We enter into an interpersonal communion with the Lord that flows out into deeds. How beautiful is this reality that Jesus wills! And as we attach ourselves to Christ the Vine as his branches, as God’s life flows from the Vine into us the branches, we recognize that we are connected to each other precisely in Christ the Vine. As he remains in us and we remain in him, we remain in communion with each other. We bear fruit in communion with him and in his body the Church. This is the way he says, somewhat shockingly, at the end of today’s passage that we will “become” his disciples. We’re not disciples if we merely know what he’s taught or simply follow him on the outside. We become disciples when we unite ourselves to him on the inside and through, with and in him with each other. If we become disciples in this way, united with Jesus and with other branches on the Vine, that is what will glorify the Father. All of us who together with Jesus love the Father must therefore want this type of mutual inter-abiding.
• These lessons about salvation in Christ, about the loving communion we’re meant to have with him and with each other, are the proper context with which to appreciate the holy life and work of the great saint we celebrate today: Joseph de Veuster, whom we remember as Saint Damien of Molokai. Born in Belgium to a religious family, when he was 24, his brother Auguste, whom he had followed into the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, was too ill to go as a missionary to Hawaii, and Damien took his place. He was ordained a priest there and worked for nine years mostly on the island of Hawaii. He showed early signs of his pastoral zeal in a letter he to his parents, imploring them, “Do not forget this poor priest running night and day over the volcanoes night and day in search of strayed sheep. Pray night and day for me, I beg you.” In 1873, Bishop Louis Maigret briefed the Sacred Hearts Fathers on the need for priestly ministrations in Kalaupapa on the Island of Molokai, which King Kamehameha V had set up seven years earlier to quarantine lepers. Of the 816 with Hansen’s Disease in the enclave, 200 were Catholic, and he had received letters from several of them begging him to send a priest so that they might suffer and die with the consolation of the sacraments. The bishop knew what he was proposing: a slow martyrdom, as chaplain to a walking graveyard. Fully conscious of the consequences, Fr. Damien stepped forward to take the assignment. When he arrived on May 10, 1873 — 150 years ago today, and the reason why we celebrate his feast day on May 10 — Bishop Maigret prophetically introduced him to the colony of lepers as “one who will be a father to you, and who loves you so much that he does not hesitate to become one of you, to live and die with you.” Attached to Christ the Vine, he was living out his attached to each of them.
• The 33-year old priest got right down to work — every type of work. He built churches, homes and beds. He created farms and schools and worked to enforce basic laws. He fought to have medicine sent and to get his people whatever medical care was possible. At first, it was hard for him to approach the lepers because he had a natural revulsion to the fetid odor given off by their leprous sores. To overcome this olfactory repugnance, he began to smoke a pipe so that the smell of tobacco would make it possible for him to approach the lepers with dignity as he began to dress their ulcers. While what he could do for their deteriorating bodies was limited, he knew that he could help prepare their souls to meet the Lord, to help them live with an eternal purpose. The first thing he did was to give increased attention to the funeral rites, so that, as we prayed in today’s Psalm, they could go rejoicing to the house of the Lord. He knew that if the lepers saw how much care he showed them at their death, they might begin to sense the value of their lives. He brought them the sacraments at their bedsides and tidied their rooms and beds to await the imminent visit of the Lord Jesus. He formed choirs, taught them how to sing beautiful hymns at Requiem Masses, and trained others to play musical instruments. He cleaned the cemetery and adorned it with flowers. He even made coffins. At the same time, he instituted perpetual adoration, so that the lepers would know that the Lord Jesus was with them always and so that they would have the opportunity to pour out their hearts to Him in their need. Father Damien knew, too, that this was what sustained him. “I find my consolation,” he wrote in a letter, “in the one and only companion who will never leave me, that is, our Divine Savior in the Holy Eucharist.… Without the Blessed Sacrament a position like mine would be unbearable. But having Our Lord at my side, I continue always to be happy and content.” It is unsurprising that his witness began to win over the members of his community. Six months after his arrival, he had 400 people — half the village — preparing for baptism. A cheerful spirit began to radiate in the community in place of the former dejection.
• In December of 1884, Fr. Damien discovered that he had contracted leprosy. He wrote, “My eyebrows are beginning to fall out. Soon I will be disfigured entirely. Having no doubts about the true nature of my disease, I am calm, resigned, and very happy in the midst of my people.” He had entered into communion with their leprosy as well, but was suffering in Christ. To those who asked him how he was holding up, he said, “Our Lord will give me the graces I need to carry my cross and follow him, even to our special Calvary at Kalawao.” He died during on Tuesday of Holy Week in 1889. Just as the Lord Jesus loved us enough that he came into our world, took on our human flesh, and redeemed it, so Fr. Damien entered into the lepers’ world, courageously took on their dreaded disease, and united it and them to the Lord. In the Opening Prayer of the Mass, we asked God the Father to grant us, through St. Damien’s intercession, that we may be like him “faithful witnesses of the heart of your Son Jesus” through being “servants of the most needy and rejected.” Together with the Holy Spirit, he was a faithful witness of the heart of Jesus, because with faith, he heard Jesus’ words about loving his neighbor and acted on them to the point of laying down his life. He lived out the moral communion that flows from our baptismal communion, loving the lepers with the very love of Christ, and becoming for them and for us an icon of Christ’s tender, merciful love for every person, which no illness, however repulsive, can disfigure.
• Jesus said all of these words about the Vine and the Branches on Holy Thursday and there’s a reason for that, because it’s on Holy Thursday as Jesus gave us his Body and Blood for the first time 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. Jesus in Holy Communion is the source of our unity, for which the early Church worked so hard, for which St. Damien labored and gave his life. 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. Damian, might bear fruit always for the Father’s glory and come at last, together with each other and with all the saints, to abide in God forever.

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