Filled with the Holy Spirit to Speak with Boldness, Second Monday of Easter, April 29, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Monday of the Second Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church
April 29, 2019
Acts 4:23-31, Ps 2, Jn 3:1-8

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today there’s a huge contrast between the spiritual timidity of Nicodemus, a powerful member of the Sanhedrin, in the Gospel and the spiritual audacity of the apostles and members of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles. These readings are given to us as we begin, with this second Monday of Easter, the period of mystagogy in the Church, helping all of the newly baptized along with all baptized members of the Church, to appreciate the change that has occurred in us through baptism, the change that’s supposed to take place from Nicodemus to a Christian like Peter and John and the other first disciples.
• Let’s begin with Nicodemus. He comes to Jesus at night. He’s too afraid to come to Jesus by day because Jesus was a controversial figure and he didn’t want publicly to be associated with him. We’ll see the same thing when Jesus is being tried. He’ll ask a question to try to slow down the proceedings, but he doesn’t defend Jesus whom he knows is innocent of the charges being made against him. He’s obviously struggling with understanding the full import of Jesus’ miracles. “No one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him,” but he doesn’t have the courage to become a disciple in the light. Jesus points to the reason why: “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless one is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” He needs new wine skins. He can’t process what’s happening by former categories. Nicodemus seeks to ask a question about entering anew into a mother’s womb — which was not a question of curiosity or modality, because he well knew that was impossible, but one in which he seemed to be engaging in foolish talk —  but Jesus was describing the rebirth God needs to give us, so that one may live by the Spirit rather than by the flesh. This is what happens to us when we are reborn by water and the Holy Spirit in baptism, which is meant to be the reality of Christians. As St. Paul told us during the Easter Vigil, “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death,  so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead  by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.” That’s our rebirth. And it’s carried out by the work of the Holy Spirit, the “pneuma” (Greek) or “ruah” (Hebrew) — words meaning both “spirit” and “wind” — who “blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” To be a disciple of Christ is to put up our sails to allow the Holy Spirit to blow us where he wishes us to go. It’s a docility, confidence and boldness that comes from life according to the Spirit. It’s something that the future Pope Francis, in a 2006 retreat to Spanish Bishops, said in very strong language Nicodemus, “the reluctant disciple,” did not have.
• We see that type of Spirit-led life in the members of the early Church as well as in the saint that the Church celebrates today. We see in today’s first reading how the first Christians relied on and responded to the Holy Spirit at a time of persecution. Peter and John had just been released from prison after having been sternly warned not to speak in Jesus’ name. They had previously been filled by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, which had changed them from being cowardly to courageous men, from apostates to apostles, from men too much like Nicodemus when the going got tough to men much more like Jesus. It really wasn’t even a option for them to obey the Sanhedrin’s warning rather than God. They got together and didn’t strategize about how to avoid punishment, but rather prayed, and prayed “all together,” in unison, Christ’s body praying as one. They didn’t pray that God would remove all persecution from their midst but that they might preach the Gospel all the more boldly in words and in deeds. Their prayer is the Church’s longest in the New Testament. After recalling what Christ himself underwent and how God brought the greatest good from his persecution, they asked, “And now, Lord, take note of their threats, and enable your servants to speak your word with all boldness, as you stretch forth your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are done through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” And just as Jesus promised that whenever we ask the Father for bread, he won’t give us stones, but rather give “the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Lk 11:13), so God the Father powerfully sent the Holy Spirit upon them in what has been called the Church’s “little Pentecost”: “As they prayed, the place where they were gathered shook, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.” That word for “boldness” in the original Greek is parrhesia, which is a word we should know. There is no easy translation for it in English. It’s a Spirit-led boldness, the expression of the Gift of Courage of the Holy Spirit.
• Today we celebrate a great saint who was totally docile to the way the Holy Spirit wanted her to grow and speak with all boldness. Even though she couldn’t read and write until late in her brief life, she became a doctor of the Church because she was “docta” (or instructed by God). She was one fully born anew from above. When she was six she had a remarkable mystical experience: looking up into the sky, she beheld the Lord seated in glory with St. Peter, St. Paul and St. John. Jesus looked upon her, smiled at her, extended his hand toward her and blessed her. From that point she was in a special way his and sought to live by prayer despite the various sufferings caused by her family for her not wanting to be like her many siblings or other children her age. She began to have interior dialogues with God, dwelled in a “cell” within her family home, and spent her formative years cut off in a sense from the world to be with God. She was mystically wed to him, with the Lord’s placing a ring on her finger invisible to everyone except her but one that would leave a mark finally visible to all upon her death.
• In her Dialogues, communicated to her in prayer over the last few years of her life, God spoke to her about the meaning and power of baptism, of being born anew from above. The grace of baptism, God told her, makes us “trees of love with the life of grace that they received in Holy Baptism.” Through Baptism, “the vessel of the soul is disposed to receive and increase in herself grace, more or less, according as it pleases her to dispose herself willingly with affection, and desire of loving and serving Me.” Our life is determined by our correspondence to this gift. “Although [the baptized] all have one and the same material, in that you are all created to My image and similitude, and, being Christians, possess the light of holy baptism, each of you may grow in love and virtue by the help of My grace, as may please you. … You increase your strength in love, and your free-will, by using it while you have time.” And so God told her, “Manfully, then, should you follow this road, without any cloud of doubt, but with the light of faith which has been given you as a principle in Holy Baptism.” Manfully, or courageously, she did. With courage she went to work in the hospitals, to care for plague victims, to bind the hideous wounds of lepers, and wash and to bury the dead, to be a Good Samaritan to those no one else would care for. She also courageously went out as a peacemaker between warring factions within families, within cities, and among battling city-states. She also brought the Church back together after the 70 year Avignon captivity of the papacy, boldly persuading Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome in 1378. Upon his arrival, the Pope, whom she called the “sweet Christ on earth,” summoned her to Rome to be at his side and advise him. In her relationship with the Holy Father, but also with many priests, religious and lay people, she served as a spiritual mother, with many voluntarily calling her “mamma,” as she helped nurture the graces of baptism given to each one.
• She was able to grow continuously as this “tree of love with the life of grace” through union with Christ in the Holy Eucharist. For the last seven years of her life she subsisted off of nothing but Jesus in the Eucharist, whom she received every day. That was a rare privilege in the 1300s, when most religious and non-ordained monks received Holy Communion only a few times a year, because there was the sense that to receive him, you really needed to be detached totally from sin and few were living those types of lives to warrant it. And that love for and of Jesus in the Eucharist overflowed in her exercise of charity toward others.
• Today as we pray the Mass, we seek to become trees of love with the life of grace we have received in baptism, trees with strong roots that can resist the storm, trees that stretch out even further, so that all the birds of the air can take rest in its branches. Like the first Christians prayed in the upper room when the Holy Spirit shook the place where they were praying, we ask to experience a similar “little Pentecost” revivifying and completing the graces of baptism. We ask that we may like St. Catherine and the first Christians be docile to the work of the Holy Spirit and correspond more to the holy parrhesia with which he wishes to endow us. And God willing this chapel and the world will never stop shaking!

The readings for today’s Mass were: