Courage through Jesus’ Conquering and the Power of the Holy Spirit, Seventh Monday of Easter, June 3, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Charles Lwanga and Companions
June 3, 2019
Acts 19:1-8, Ps 68, Jn 16:29-33

To listen to today’s homily, please click below:

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel there’s a dramatic exchange, taken from the Last Supper, between Jesus and the apostles. Immediately before this scene, in what we heard on Saturday, Jesus had said that the hour was coming when he would no longer speak in figures of speech — parables — but would tell us clearly about the Father. He told them straight out that the Father loves them, that he had come from the Father into the world, and was about to leave the world to go back to the Father. That leads them to exclaim, in today’s continuation, “Now you are talking plainly, and not in any figure of speech. Now we realize that you know everything and that you do not need to have anyone question you. Because of this we believe that you came from God.” They imply that they had been waiting for Jesus’ clear and direct speech to believe and now that he was addressing them in this way they were convinced believers. Jesus, however, reminds them that faith has consequences with regard to the courage to live by faith. “Do you believe now?,” he retorts. “Behold, the hour is coming and has arrived when each of you will be scattered to his own home and you will leave me alone.” Jesus’ words would be fulfilled within hours as everyone scattered from Gethsemane and only one of them was with Jesus on Calvary. Faith isn’t merely an acceptance of certain declarations as true; it’s a total trust given to a person on the basis of which one believes in what the person says and does. They didn’t yet have the courage in Jesus, in his coming from the Father and returning to the Father, in his carrying out the Father’s plan of love, to remain faithful under trial. And Jesus told them both what would happen as well as how they would have their faith challenged, that they would fail “so that you might have peace in me.” He wanted them to maintain their peace in the crucible, the way the Blessed Virgin Mary did at the foot of the Cross despite her tears. Jesus summed up his words saying, “In the world you will have trouble,” just like he was about to experience imminently, namely of all the trouble caused by sin, “but take courage, I have conquered the world.” These words were said before Jesus’ resurrection, because he had already conquered the world in his incarnation, in the plan he was carrying out. The resurrection was the dramatic public sign of that victory that Jesus had already been achieving. The source of our courage is Jesus’ triumph, and that triumph was already being accomplished even as it seemed all was being lost. We need to believe in that triumph especially when we have trouble. Just like the apostles needed to hear Jesus’ words, “Take courage, I have overcome the world!,” when they saw him on Calvary, so we need to take courage when we see the places where the Church is being persecuted, when we see people wandering away from prayer and the Sacraments, when we see things that in the eyes of the world are simply disheartening. Jesus wants us to take courage because he in fact is triumphing, seeking to bring good out of evil, victory out of defeat.
• We know that the apostles left the Upper Room that night and weren’t courageous. Rather than remaining in his peace, they scattered. They weren’t focused on Jesus’ conquering the world but on how the world seemed to be conquering him. But as we know, 53 days later they would leave that same Upper Room and fearlessly proclaim Jesus eternal victory. The change happened through the gift Jesus promised the Father and he would send them, the gift of the Holy Spirit. One of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit is the Gift of Courage, which helps us to remain faithful when fearful, which strengthens us to do what God is asking of us despite our human revulsion of suffering and pain. We pray in the Veni Creator Spiritus that we sing throughout this Decenarium, “Virtute firmans perpeti,” “strengthen us with your perpetual power,” and that’s precisely what the Holy Spirit seeks to do in us. To fill us with the courage we need to believe and to live by that believe on sunny and stormy days.
• In the first reading, there’s the famous passage about the disciples in Ephesus who had been baptized by John and seeking to walk in the way announced by Jesus but who didn’t know that there was a Holy Spirit. They had been baptized as a sign of repentance but had not been baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire. There are still many who merely know about the Holy Spirit rather than really know him and know his power. These days of prayer in anticipation of Pentecost are an occasion for us to grow in this awareness and docility. This is what strengthened Paul to preach in the way that he did despite all that he would have to suffer for doing us. This is what will help us get through each day as well. We need to get to know the Holy Spirit in a particular way as the one sent by the Father “for the forgiveness of sins,” as the priest prays in absolution. We need to get to know him in our prayer, because we do not know how to pray as we ought. We need to get to know him in our moral life, living according to the Spirit rather than according to the flesh. We need to get to know him in our preaching, giving witness with him to everything Christ said and did and says still and does. We need to become, in short, by his power a temple of the Holy Spirit.
• Today the Church celebrates those who were strengthened in courage by the Holy Spirit and by their confidence in Jesus’ having conquered the world by his incarnation, passion, death and resurrection. These 22 Ugandan martyrs cooperated fully with the graces of baptism, all dying between 14-25, from a few days to a few years from their conversion and baptism. Their story, as Saint Paul VI said at their canonization in 1964, is every bit as moving as that of the heroic martyrs of the early Church, because they were martyrs soon after having received the faith. When the White Fathers arrived in Buganda, the southern part of what is now Uganda, in 1879, they found the local King Mtesa hospitable to outside influence in the hope of improving his personal and national situation. Mtesa had already welcomed in Anglican missionaries a few years earlier. Because he liked the Christian teaching on the afterlife, he even allowed the missionaries to evangelize the members of his court. One of his young pages was Mukasa Balikuddembe, who rose in prominence at the palace after he courageously saved Prince Mwanga’s life by capturing and killing with his bare hands a venomous snake threatening him. For 3 years, Mkasa received a very thorough catechumenate at the palace from the White Fathers before being baptized in 1882 with the name of Joseph. After the White Fathers needed to go into exile for a couple of years because the dying king feared outside influences, Joseph Mkasa became the de facto catechist for the converts and hundreds of catechumens. When the priests returned after Mtesa’s death in 1884, they saw that Joseph Mkasa had helped the new converts bring family members to the Lord, renounce slavery, polygamy and other practices against the Gospel, and dedicate themselves heroically to serving those in need. Once Prince Mwanga had succeeded his father, Joseph Mkasa became his majordomo, the top assistant in charge of the king’s palace and court. To be head of the pages, Joseph appointed a young catechumen, Lwanga. What both men soon discovered, however, was that King Mwanga was homosexually-attracted to the teenage boys and solicitous to have them brought into his private company. Through various means, Joseph and Lwanga successfully and repeatedly conspired to thwart the king’s designs, but the king grew increasingly frustrated. After King Mwanga had had an Anglican missionary bishop murdered, Joseph went into his presence and reproved him for the murder as well as for his perverse attraction to the boys in his service. Even though it was technically the majordomo’s traditional responsibility to correct the king, Mwanga would have nothing of it. His anger boiled against Joseph and his fellow Christians whom he knew were training the boys to resist his advances. Under the pretext of Joseph’s disloyalty for putting the commands of another king, “The God of the Christians,” over his own, King Mwanga sentenced him to be burned alive. To the executioner who was having trouble carrying out his orders against the majordomo, Joseph said, “A Christian who gives his life for God has no reason to fear death. Tell Mwanga that he has condemned me unjustly, but I forgive him with all my heart.” After that, the executioner took it upon himself to behead Joseph and burn his body rather than have him burned alive. The day of Joseph’s martyrdom, Lwanga and the other catechumens among the pages were baptized. King Mwanga had made it known that he was intending to put to death all the Christians in his court and they wanted to make sure that they were baptized by water and the Holy Spirit before they were baptized in blood. Lwanga took the Christian name Charles. Several months later, after the king returned from a fishing trip and saw one of the routine objects of his sordid desire receiving catechetical instruction, he summoned the catechist, St. Denis Ssebuggwawo, put a spear through his chest and then had his executioners hack him to pieces. The following day, the king, fuming, assembled all the pages and demanded that they make a choice, between God and him, between prayer and the predator, between life and death. “Let all those who do not pray stay here by my side,” he said, waving to his right, and “those who pray” he told to stand by the fence at his left. Charles Lwanga and a group of 26 Christian pages, 16 Catholics and 10 Anglicans, headed toward the fence. He asked them whether they intended to remain Christians. “Until death!,” they replied. “Then put them to death!,” Mwanga responded, sentencing them to be burnt alive in Namugongo, a village 37 miles away. They began the death march, which they turned into a religious procession with hymns, prayers and expressions of joy. This was in the sharpest contracted to the brutality of their “chaperones,” who beat them so fiercely that three of them died along the way. Once in Namugongo, they were forced to watch for days as the pyre awaiting them grew and became increasingly intense. The executioners decided to kill Charles Lwanga first, in the hope that after his death, others might abandon the faith. To increase his sufferings, he was placed in a reed mat and fire was set first to his feet first so that these would be charred to the bone before the flames would reach the other parts of his body. In the midst of his suffering, Charles said to his executioner, “You are burning me, but it is as if you are pouring water over my body,” a reference to the sweet solace of his baptism, the foretaste of his imminent new birth. After he was dead, the others remained steadfast and entered the pyre. One young page said to a priest present who was mourning the death of so many young Christians, “Why be sad? What I suffer now is little compared with the eternal happiness you have taught me to look forward to!” They died on June 3, which was fittingly Ascension Thursday. It’s no surprise that, on the foundation of their heroic faith, the Church has continued to grow in Uganda. Even though Christianity was less than a decade old in their kingdom, they had already gotten what it was about, and they were willing to die rather than to sin, to be killed rather than to allow sinful predation to happen to the young and innocent, to be burned alive rather than to betray the faith in the least in order to keep their lives. This was the work of the Holy Spirit in them.
• Today as we come forward to receive Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, we ask for the grace to act on his “talking plainly,” to believe even and especially when it’s tough, to find our peace in me even in the midst of whatever difficulties we will face today or tomorrow, and to be filled we joy not only that he has conquered the world but that by grace we are the disciples of that Conquerer who did all of that, and all of this, for us! We ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit to make us fitting temples of God’s holy, saving presence.

The readings for today’s Mass were: