Discipleship and Apostolate of Hope, Sixth Sunday of Easter (A), May 17, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A
May 17, 2020
Acts 8:5-8.14-17, Ps 66, 1 Pet 3:15-18, Jn 14:15-21

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Today St. Peter tells us in the epistle, “Always be ready to give an explanation to any one who asks you for a reason for your hope.” The first Pope’s statement implies two things: that Catholics are supposed to be persons of hope; and that we need to be capable, ready and willing to give the reasons for our hope to anyone who asks us — at home, at work, at school, on the streets, in hospitals and nursing homes, in prisons, even, in concentration camps and Gulags — and to do so always. This proclamation of hope that is credible yet towering is an essential part of the Good News each of us is called to experience and proclaim.
• This Gospel of Hope is needed today as much as ever because so many people are living without hope. Many are led to fear and despair by things in the world, struggles in their family and work, the various forms of evil in the world, like governmental corruption, organized crime, the threat of terrorism, the ascendacy of maleficent regimes, or physical threats and cyberbullying, or declining health and rising pain, or the fear of failing those who are depending upon them, the truth getting out and being proven a fraud, or the incapacity of drugs, booze, porn and other escapes to anaesthetize one’s existential pain and assuage one’s loneliness. Even within the Church, there are other problems that make people forlorn: how many people are not practicing the faith and coming to worship God with us, the growing immorality in our culture, the Church closings due to the shortage of priestly vocations, the failure of many in positions of leadership to lead the types of holy, sacrificial lives that God and his people expect, not to mention the depravity that has been brought into the light over the course of the last couple of decades. All of these problems are beyond the personal frustrations we feel when we cannot seem to kick our addiction to sin and succeed in the struggle to live as God wants.
• Despite all of these challenges, despite everything that can cause our hope to wane, St. Peter calls us to be “always ready to give an explanation to any one asks you for a reason for your hope..” He himself faced so many of those challenges and more and hence his testimony is all the more powerful. His first words to Jesus were that he was a “sinful man” (Lk 5:8) prone to weakness (as he showed in the high priest’s courtyard [Mt 26:48]). He was surrounded by a bunch of other very ordinary men, sinners all, one of whom accounted Jesus less valuable than 30 silver pieces, and all of whom abandoned the Lord when he was arrested. Yet Jesus made them, respectively, the Rock (Mt 16:18) and the living stones (1 Pet 2:5) on whom he was to build his Church. If what Jesus was able to do through them isn’t a cause for hope, then what could be? Jesus gave them the mission to change world history. They easily could have despaired because that task far exceeded their human abilities, but they didn’t. They counted on the Lord to give them what they needed. That’s why Peter’s words to us today in his first letter are so important. The challenges we face are not greater than the challenges he faced. After Pentecost, he became a witness to hope and was always ready to give the explanation of his hope to others, doing it so powerfully that 3,000 people converted on that day. Today we ourselves need to focus within our Christian hearts on those reasons for Christian hope, so that we might likewise be able to take this Gospel to every corner.
• The fundamental reason for our hope has nothing to do with our individual talents, cheery personalities, upbeat ideas, past accomplishments, supportive friends or helpful connections. The essential reason of our hope is GOD. Hope is based on the deep conviction that God is faithful to his promises, that he cannot lie, and that he will always give us what we need and what is best for us. He who is the omnipotent Lord of the universe loves uswith an everlasting love, from which no human situation, no matter how seemingly desperate, can separate us (cf. Rom 8:39). During this Easter Season, we celebrate the fact that not even public execution on a Cross can extinguish hope! During these fifty days, we ponder another reason for hope: God the Father loved us so much that he sent his own Son to die for us and our sins, so that we might live with Him forever. As St. Paul asked the Romans, “If God did not even spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all, will he not give us, with Him, everything else besides?” (Rom 8:32). That’s why he was able to say, “We know that everything always works out for the good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28).
• We can further specify some of the fundamental ways that our hope comes from God.
  • Our hope is based first on God the Father’s providential love. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes aim at our worrying, which can cause us to lose hope, and tells us instead to trust in the loving care of His Father and ours: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. …  Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?  … Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt 6:25-34). The heavenly Father knows all that we truly need and will give us everything we truly need. That fills us with hope!
  • Our hope is also based on God the Father’s Mercy. No matter what we’ve done, he loves us with the love of the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, and looks for us longingly, hoping and waiting for the day we use the freedom he gave us to come back to his paternal home (cf. Lk 15:11-32). There’s nothing we’ve done that will cause him to withhold his loving mercy. So often the source of our despair comes from the fact we cannot forgive ourselves for what we’ve done. The guilt eats us alive. But if God the Father can forgive us for murdering his own Son, nothing we could do could ever be as wicked as that.  The only thing that can prevent us from receiving this gift of his mercy is our refusal to seek it in the sacrament his Son established to take the guilt and despair away (cf. Jn 20:19-23). His mercy is part of the reason for hope we’re called to give to everyone who asks.
  • That leads to the third reason for our hope: Christ Jesus’ own love and friendship. Twice during the Last Supper, Jesus said, “I love you.” He said first, “Just as the Father has loved me, so I love you” (Jn 15:9). Later he added, “As I love you, love one another” (Jn 15:12). One of the great causes of sadness and despair is when a person begins to think that no one else cares, when one imagines that he or she is alone in facing all of life’s daunting challenges, when one lives without love. As we prepare tomorrow for the centenary of the birth of St. John Paul II, we remember what he wrote in his first encylical back in 1979: “Man cannot live without love,” he stated in Redemptor Hominis. “He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.”The great antidote is to remember how madly Jesus loves us — a madness that made him willing to be tortured and killed so that we might never be alone but live forever with him.  Jesus is the solution to or at least the light and salvation for the greatest problems we face, and his love for us is our great hope. Alone we can do nothing. But with him as our Good Shepherd, we really do have it all (cf. Psalm 23:1) and can do it all (Mt 17:20; Lk 1:37; Phil 4:13).
  • The final reason for our hope I’ll mention is the Holy Spirit. This Thursday we will celebrate the Lord’s Ascension into heaven and immediately afterward, like Jesus’ first followers, the whole Church begins a decenarium — or 10 days of prayer — to the Holy Spirit. In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that when he goes the Father will give us “another Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, who will be with us forever.” The word Paraclete means an advocate, a helper, a defender, a coach. He says the Holy Spirit will be “another Paraclete,” because Jesus is our first advocate, helper, defender and strong-right arm. Later on during the Last Supper, Jesus tells us that it is better for us that he go, because unless he go, the Holy Spirit will not come (Jn 16:7). He’s telling us that if we had to choose between having Him with us or having the Holy Spirit, that we should chooose the latter! Because many people do not have the same relationship with the Holy Spirit as they do with God the Father and God the Son, they often do not know how the Holy Spirit helps to fill Christians with true hope. But we can briefly sketch the ways:
    • The Holy Spirit fills us with hope by teaching us how to pray. Prayer puts our hope into action. St. Paul tells us, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Rom 8:26-27). Prayer helps us to recognize that no situation is hopeless!
    • The Holy Spirit fills us with hope by making us aware of our dignity as beloved sons and daughters of God. “Because you are children,” St. Paul says, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God” (Gal 4:6-7). The Holy Spirit convinces us that we are “heirs” of all God has promised us — including the promise of heaven! — which obviously fills us with Christian hope. With St. John we can say, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are! … We are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like himfor we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:1). Recognition our divine filiation by the help of the Holy Spirit is a great source of hope.
    • The Holy Spirit makes us hopeful by leading us “into all truth” (Jn 16:13) and teaching us everything (Jn 14:26). Sometimes we can feel so lost and bewildered by events that we begin to despair that there’s any meaning to it all. The Holy Spirit works within us — through his gifts of knowledge and understanding, wisdom and prudence — to allow the truth about God, about ourselves, and about His love for us, to set us free (cf. Jn 8:32). The Holy Spirit does this objectively through the Church, so that we can be even more certain that we’re not deceived and find God’s light when we’re walking in the valley of darkness. This light fills us with hope even on dark days.
    • The Holy Spirit lifts up our hearts by “remind[ing] us of everything Jesus has taught us” (Jn 14:26). He prevents us from forgetting all that Jesus said and did, and Jesus’ words and actions for our salvation fill us with a deep, imperishable hope, no matter what situation we’re in.
    • Finally the Holy Spirit makes us hopeful by allowing us to share in God’s life here in this world. He is active in all the sacraments, making and keeping us a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19). In Baptism, he comes down upon us, as he did on Jesus in the Jordan (cf. Lk 3:22). In Confirmation, he seals us with his strength for the Christian life. By his power, men are made to be other Christs in the sacrament of Holy Orders. By his dynamism working through the priest, our sins are forgiven and the bread and wine a priest become Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity. The Holy Spirit’s mission is to overshadow us like he overshadowed Mary, so that we, like her, may be tabernacles of God. When the Lord is with us, and we’re aware of it, we, like Mary, cry out “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior!” (Lk 1:46-47). A soul and spirit filled with the Holy Spirit in this way cannot but be hopeful!
• So God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — is the principle cause and reason for our hope. His past deeds for us make us confident that he will keep all the promises he made to us. His living presence within us through the diving indwelling of the Sacraments, making us “temples of the living God” (2Cor 6:16), is the deep inner source of our hope and joy.
• And this reality should make very clear to us what is the cause of the lossof hope in us and others. The principal explanation for despair is separation from Godthrough sin. All the problems in the world and in human hearts — from terrorism and war, to domestic strife and violence, to the bloodshed that scourges our world, to the difficulties that plague the Church — are all a direct or indirect result of sin. And the despair that often flows from these problems occurs when we don’t respond to them by turning back to God, but rather allow them to drive us away from the Lord.
• Today’s readings address this connection between sin and despair. Before St. Peter tells us to be always ready to give an explanation for the hope within us, he exhorts us: “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts!” And immediately after his summons for us to be witnesses to hope, he says, “keep your conscience clear!” He knows, from personal and pastoral experience, that unless we’re sanctifying Christ as God in our consciences, unless we’re living moral lives based on his promises, we cannot and will not be people of true hope and therefore will not be able to bring that hope to others. If our hearts and consciences are not “sanctifying Christ as Lord,” then we will be separated from God and suspectible to the despair, sadness and lack of peace that flow from sin that we see all around us. Holiness and hope go together, as do sin and despair.
• Jesus points to the same reality in the Gospel in another way. He points to the connection between love of God and keeping his commandments. The commandments are divine gifts, heavenly road signs to keep us on the path to holiness. “If you love me,” he tells us, “you will keep my commandments.” Later he reiterates the same point: “Whoever accepts my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me.” Love is ultimately a union with the beloved, a holy communion, which is the source of hope. He tells us, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” and “Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one that loves me.” Jesus tells us that we cannot have that communion with him unless we do what He commands. There’s a clear reason for this: because Jesus is the Word-made-flesh. We cannot separate Him from the word he put into flesh. We can’t truly love him and at the same time choose not to love his will expressed in the commandments. We cannot have a union with him and not have union with him at the same time. We cannot love him and at the same time fail to be faithful to him, for example, by breaking the commandments, all of which hang, Jesus tells us elsewhere, on the two-fold command to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor. We cannot love God and then choose other gods over him, or use his name as a throwaway word, or prioritize non essential work, cartoons, sports or political talk shows over him on Sunday. We cannot love him and at the same time disrespect those through whom he gave us life or hate or kill, steal from or lie to those he loves. We cannot love him and at the same time think that his love is not enough, by coveting what others have, or the ones others love. It’s pretty simple conceptually, but in practice so many of us try to separate Jesus from his Word, thinking that we love him as long as we have “positive feelings” about him, “respect” him, and have “affection” for him. But he tells us love is shown in deeds. Just like a husband’s love for his wife is shown not by how many times he whispers “I love you” in her ears, but by his faithful love for her in all his deeds, so our love for Jesus is shown by our loving fidelity in remaining faithful to him in all the areas specified by the commandments.
• Out of love for us, Jesus gave us the commandments so that we might be filled with his peace and joy and become people of hope. As he himself said later during the same, lengthy homily of the First Mass, he gave us the commandments “so that [his] joy may be in [us] and [our] joy may be complete” (Jn 15:11). Anyone with a properly formed conscience knows first-hand this connection between the commandments and peace, hope and joy, because we’ve all experienced it from the other side: the sadness, pain and sometimes the despair that flows from sin and the separation from God. After the first sin, Adam and Eve experienced great shame and sadness due to their shattered communion and lack of trust toward God and each other, symbolized by their covering the naked vulnerability from each other and God (cf. Gen 3). Whenever we give in to the devil’s lies, we experience the same shame and sadness.
• This path of the commandments, of “sanctifying Christ as Lord in our hearts” of “keeping our consciences clear” is the way God helps us become people of hope and give explanation in each of our moral actions of the divine reason of our hope  — God, his love for us and our love for him. This is a hope based on faith and love that, as St. Peter tells us in the second reading, no amount of suffering or pain can take away. Even and especially when we remain hopeful while suffering out of love for Christ and he remained hopeful when suffering out of love for us, we are able to proclaim a Gospel of hope that can inspire people no matter what their situation.
• In order to help us become disciples of hope capable of becoming apostles of hope to everyone, the Lord Jesus instituted the Mass. It’s here that God wants to fill us with hope — by giving us his word, vy feeding us with his very self, by helping us to experience not only his extreme love but the love and friendship of his family on earth, the Church. God comes to dwell with us and within us so that we are able to bring Him as the true hope of the world. There’s a beautiful prayer after the Our Father that summarizes what we’ve been talking about today, both the reasons for our hope and how our hope is squandered. The priest turns to God the Father and says, “Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress as we await the blessed hopeand the coming of our savior Jesus Christ.” The “blessed hope” is the hope of eternal life and love with God, with the communion of saints, with, we pray, all our loved ones, both deceased and alive. But here on earth the Mass is the foretaste of that blessed hope as we receive God within together with each other. May the Hope we here receive in Jesus by the love of the Father and the power of the Holy Spirit, fill us with enduring hope and help us to go, always and everywhere, just as St. Peter did in his own time, and bring that hope, the reasons for it, and the Source of it, to a world that is wounded by despair. This is the Gospel Jesus at the end of every Mass sends each of us to announce!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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