Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, New York, NY
Sunday after the Ascension (Extraordinary Form)
June 2, 2019
1 Pet 4:7-11, Jn 15:26-27.16:1-4
To listen an an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
Two weeks ago we pondered Jesus’ astonishing declaration, “I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” Jesus was witnessing of how important the Holy Spirit must be in the Christian life, so important that if we had to choose between Jesus and the Spirit, Jesus himself was saying that the Spirit is more important. The Holy Spirit is, Pope Benedict said, “the highest gift of God to humankind.”
On the Solemnity of the Ascension, we mark Jesus’ going away so that the Holy Spirit could be sent. Jesus trusted us and trusted the Spirit enough that he would depart. He could have stayed, of course, until the end of time, to fulfill his mission of redeeming everyone entrusted to him. He was interested in 100 out of 100 and would go after the one lost sheep. It would have been easy for him, looking at your and my defects as well as those of others who have come across the centuries and simply said to the Father, “Let me stay. It’s too big a risk. If they don’t fulfill their task and spread the faith, some may not be saved.” But he didn’t. He trusted us enough, he trusted our cooperation with the Holy Spirit enough, that he left and together with the Father sent the Holy Spirit.
In these days after Jesus’ Ascension, we act on Jesus’ words to pray “for the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak,” namely, the “power you will receive when the Holy Spirit comes upon you” so that we might be Jesus’ witnesses to the ends of the earth. In today’s passage from the Holy Gospel, taken from Jesus’ Last Supper discourse 43 days before he said those words before ascending to heaven, Jesus speaks about the Holy Spirit as the promise of the Father and what he seeks to do in us. “When the Advocate comes,” Jesus says, “whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me. And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.”
The Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles, Mary and the other members of the Church as tongues of fire — rather than ice-cold, quivering lips! —for a reason. It was a quasi-sacramental sign meant to effect what it signified: that those who receive the Holy Spirit are equipped and emboldened to proclaim the Gospel with ardor. We see what the immediate impact of his power was: he transformed frightened fishermen who fled the Upper Room on Holy Thursday to deny the Lord to leave this time emboldened courageously to proclaim him, even though they were still in the eyes of the crowd “uneducated and ordinary men” (Acts 4:3). He changed those who were known for thick Galilean accents into those who message was powerfully heard in many different languages at the same time. He impelled them so that they couldn’t but give witness to what they had seen and heard.
This is what happens when one gives witness together with the Holy Spirit, when one allows the Holy Spirit to speak through, with and in us. And the Holy Spirit seeks to do this not only on sunny days but even on the most stormy ones. Right after promising the gift of the Spirit, Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “I have told you this so that you may not fall away. They will expel you from the synagogues; in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God. They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me. I have told you this so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you.” Jesus was telling us that we would have to suffer, but he was also saying not to worry because that would be used as a means of proclamation. He had said earlier in the Gospel, “When they lead you away and hand you over, do not worry beforehand aboutwhat you are to say. But say whatever will be given to you at that hour. For it will not be you who are speaking but the Holy Spirit” (Mt 13:11).
And this is what we see in the pulpit of the martyrs. Their cooperation with the Holy Spirit in that moment brought so many of their contemporaries to conversion and so many in generations afterward. The Holy Spirit taught them what to say and especially filled them with the capacity to pray for the persecutors, love their enemies, and do good to those who were doing evil to them in such a way that it brought them to conversion, like Jesus’ prayer on Calvary that brought not just the Good Thief and the Centurion to conversion but multitudes throughout the centuries; like St. Stephen’s prayer at his stoning that brought Saul to conversion; like Bishop Saint John Gabriel Taurin Dufresse in 1815 whose magnanimity led to the conversion of the Chinese soldier St. Augustine Zhao Rong and so inspired him that he was baptized, ordained, and martyred all within nine months.
The Holy Spirit will witness together with us in all of these desperate circumstances. But he also wants to help us in ordinary circumstances, when we’re at home, at work, at school, in the store, walking on the streets, even in Church. The Holy Spirit wants to help us give witness.
The Holy Spirit does this first by illuminating our minds. Jesus had promised that the Holy Spirit would teach us all things, lead us to all truth, remind us of everything he had taught them, and prove the world wrong about sin, holiness and judgment. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians about the knowledge that the Holy Spirit imparts. “God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit” (1 Cor 2:10-14). He says here four things: the Spirit helps us to understand better God, to understand better the gifts he has given us, to speak not with human words but with words he inspires and to help others understand them.
The Holy Spirit also does this by changing our whole being so that we might proclaim with body language the reality of Christ’s presence with us until the end of time, the fruits of his triumph over sin and death, the joy that comes from living according to the Spirit with his gifts and fruits. The Holy Spirit helps us to enflesh what St. Peter, inspired by the Spirit, wrote in today’s epistle, so that our “love for one another be intense,” so that we may “be hospitable to one another without complaining,” so that each of us may use the gifts God has given “to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace,” so that “whoever preaches [will preach] with the words of God; whoever serves [will] be with the strength that God supplies, so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.”
In short, the Holy Spirit gives us a new spirituality. He renews us from within.
St. Paul VI, whose first feast day after his canonization was this past Wednesday, wrote about the spirituality of Mission that the Holy Spirit seeks to ignite in us, so that not only our tongues will be on fire but our whole being. He said in his 1975 exhortation on proclaiming the Gospel, Evangelii Nuntiandi,
“Evangelization will never be possible without the action of the Holy Spirit, …[who] is the soul of the Church. It is the Holy Spirit who, today just as at the beginning of the Church, acts in every evangelizer who allows himself to be possessed and led by Him. The Holy Spirit places on his lips the words which he could not find by himself, and at the same time the Holy Spirit predisposes the soul of the hearer to be open and receptive to the Good News and to the kingdom being proclaimed. Techniques of evangelization are good, but even the most advanced ones could not replace the gentle action of the Spirit. The most perfect preparation of the evangelizer has no effect without the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit the most convincing dialectic has no power over the heart of man. Without Him the most highly developed schemas resting on a sociological or psychological basis are quickly seen to be quite valueless. … But it can equally be said that [the Spirit] is the goal of evangelization: He alone stirs up the new creation, the new humanity of which evangelization is to be the result, with that unity in variety which evangelization wishes to achieve within the Christian community. Through the Holy Spirit the Gospel penetrates to the heart of the world.”
The witness to which Jesus calls us is not to make slick new videos or podcasts or whole primetime television series, although there is certainly not anything wrong, and much good, with using those means. The fundamental witness we’re being called to give is that of new men and new women. For the Gospel to penetrate the heart of the world, it must first fully penetrate our heart to make us a new man or a new woman, to make of us together, the “one body, one Spirit” in Christ that will convince the world that God the Father really sent the Son and loves us all just as much as he loves the Son (Jn 17).
St. John Paul II developed St. Paul VI’s words on missionary spirituality in his powerful 1990 exhortation on the Mission of the Redeemer that that Redeemer calls us to share.
“Missionary activity,” John Paul said, “demands a specific spirituality, which applies in particular to all those whom God has called to be missionaries. This spirituality is expressed first of all by a life of complete docility to the Spirit. It commits us to being molded from within by the Spirit, so that we may become ever more like Christ. It is not possible to bear witness to Christ without reflecting his image, which is made alive in us by grace and the power of the Spirit. This docility then commits us to receive the gifts of fortitude and discernment, which are essential elements of missionary spirituality. An example of this is found with the apostles during the Master’s public life. Despite their love for him and their generous response to his call, they proved to be incapable of understanding his words and reluctant to follow him along the path of suffering and humiliation. The Spirit transformed them into courageous witnesses to Christ and enlightened heralds of his word. It was the Spirit himself who guided them along the difficult and new paths of mission.”
Then he says words that have not lost any relevance in the intervening 29 years: “Today, as in the past, that mission is difficult and complex, and demands the courage and light of the Spirit. We often experience the dramatic situation of the first Christian community, which witnessed unbelieving and hostile forces ‘gathered together against the Lord and his Anointed’ (Acts 4:26). Now, as then, we must pray that God will grant us boldness in preaching the Gospel; we must ponder the mysterious ways of the Spirit and allow ourselves to be led by him into all the truth (cf. Jn 16:13).
The Holy Spirit molds us from within with his gifts and fruit so that we, too, might be courageous witnesses and enlightened heralds. It’s not an easy time to be a Catholic today when the Church has suffered so many self-inflicted wounds because of our immersing ourselves in sin rather than in God. Bishops and priests have done it, but so have lay people, in which we have lived far more according to spiritual worldliness than the Holy Spirit. But God hasn’t given up on us. The same Holy Spirit who is helping the Christians in Sri Lanka, northern Nigeria, China, Iraq and Syria and so many other places to give witness in the midst of their sufferings is here to help us use our freedom to proclaim it all the more. It’s not easy, but Jesus never promised it would be. He promised, however, that he would be with us until the end of time and that he would send the Holy Spirit to transform us not only with words but by incorporating us into the Word. And that’s what makes this time a great time to be Catholic, to give witness to the fact that Jesus is worth living for and dying for, even if we should have to suffer for it. Fulton J. Sheen used to say, in this very pulpit, that he was grateful he got to live in times when the Church was struggling and suffering, when the Church had to go against the culture. It was a time for real men and real women to stand up and be counted. “Even dead bodies can float downstream,” he used to say, pointing that many people can coast when the Church is respected, “but it takes a real man, a real woman, to swim against the current!” It takes real men and real women, men and women of the Spirit, to stand up now and swim against the current that is flowing against the Church. This is one of those times. It’s a great time to be a Christian. Despite the challenges, the Holy Spirit is so much stronger. And he wants to transform you and me to be up for that challenge.
One of the most important places in which the Holy Spirit carries out this transformative work is here at Mass. It’s here that the Word of God is proclaimed and we’re given the opportunity, by the Holy Spirit, to be led more deeply into all the truth so that we may be witnesses of it to others. “The Eucharist is a ‘perpetual Pentecost,’” Pope Benedict said 11 years ago in Australia, “since every time we celebrate Mass we receive the Holy Spirit who unites us more deeply with Christ and transforms us into Him.” This is where the Spirit carries out the work of making our spirituality his, so that we can, together with him, become a joint witness, starting here and going even to the ends of the earth.
Today, conscious of the perpetual Pentecost the Holy Spirit constantly seeks to provoke, we turn to him and ask, “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, kindle in us the fire of your love, and send us forth to witness with you to the everlasting triumph of love of Jesus!” Amen!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading from the First Epistle of St. Peter
The end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be serious and sober for prayers. Above all, let your love for one another be intense, because love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without complaining. As each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace. Whoever preaches, let it be with the words of God; whoever serves, let it be with the strength that God supplies, so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
The Continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. John
Jesus said to his apostles, “When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me. And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning. I have told you this so that you may not fall away. They will expel you from the synagogues; in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God. They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me. I have told you this so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you.”
