Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter (A), Vigil
May 9, 2020
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
The text on which the homily was based:
- This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.
- He will speak to 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 a place 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,” meaning what he already told them three times, that he would be handed over to death and on the third day rise, Saint Thomas protested that the apostles neither knew Jesus’ destination or path. That’s when Jesus summarized everything, for them and us, in one of the most famous self-identifications Jesus ever gave us: “I am the way, and the truth and the life” and said that no one could come to the Father’s house except through him. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
- 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, sometimes 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.
- Jesus says, “I am the Way.”
- Probably every single one of us has had the experience of being lost when we’re driving. We lose the satellite or cellphone signal for our GPS and don’t have a map. Jesus comes into our life and says, simply, “Follow me.” He personalizes our direction in life. 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, they help us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on him so that he can lead us to the eternal destination of 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 or popular. It’s the way of the Cross, not the way of the crowds, a path of self-giving love instead of self-gratifying egotism. It’s the way of the Beatitudes, not the way of the worldly fame, fortune and fetishes. It’s the way of mercy, crossing the road as Good Samaritans, caring for those in need, sacrificing for them, helping to save them. Jesus’ way is an uphill climb, but to be a Christian means to build our path on his path, to journey together with him in the world.
- 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?” Truth is, basically, the correspondence between something — a phrase, a thought, an idea — and reality. Truth is what is real. When Jesus says that he is the truth, what he is ultimately declaring is that he is the ground of all reality, that he is what is most real, that after everything we know passes away, 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, are the clothes we’re wearing, the money in our pockets, the people we’re meeting, or the silly reality shows we’re watching, that the real is what’s being determined by politicians or the courts, or the strength of military might, or the consequences of scientific discoveries. But the real world where God is. We enter it in prayer, in the Sacraments, in God’s word, in life according to the Holy Spirit. Jesus says not just that he teaches us truths, but that he is the To live in the real, real world, we need to ground ourselves most deeply in him as our cornerstone. When we build ourselves on him as our rock, then we can withstand the storms that inevitably come. To build ourselves elsewhere is to build on sand.
- Third, Jesus said, “I am the Life”
- Jesus is more than just alive. He is life incarnate. We owe our physical life to him and if he didn’t hold us in existence right now, we would disappear. 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 eternally in the next. Jesus came, as he said to us in last week’s Gospel, so that “they 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. But the life of Jesus is more than simply batteries 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 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.
- We rejoice that this Sunday we will have the chance to have a consequential conversation with Jesus, to follow him to the Upper Room, Calvary and from the empty Tomb, to hear his Truth and to receive His Life. We ask him as we get ready to give us the grace he knows we need to build our entire life on him so that no matter what storms come that blow and buffet against us, 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 gone to prepare for us.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download