God’s Making Himself Accessible, Third Saturday of Easter, May 2, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the Third Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Athanasius, Bishop and Doctor
May 4, 2020
Acts 9:31-42, Ps 116, Jn 6:60-69

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we are very grateful to God to be able to have Mass again in the convents of the Archdiocese of New York and have access to the source and summit, the starting point and goal of the Christian life. We make our own the question of the Psalm, “What return shall I make to the Lord for all the good he has done for me,” and we reply, “The cup of salvation I will raise and call upon the name of the Lord!” This is the “sacrifice of Thanksgiving” to which the Psalm alludes, literally the “Eucharistic sacrifice.” The Eucharist is what the Church has been pondering the last week in the Gospel each day. Jesus insists that to have life — to share in his risen life — we must gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood. He compared himself to the manna God gave the Israelites and said that he was the true manna, prompting those present to respond, “Lord, give us this Bread always.” He instituted the Holy Eucharist as well as the Sacrament of Holy Orders to make this celestial nutrition, this participation in his own life and triumph over death, accessible to us.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. Athanasius, the great and intrepid saintly fourth-century doctor of the Church. In a 2007 catechesis, Pope Benedict summarized his life by saying, “The fundamental idea of Athanasius’ [life] was precisely that God is accessible. … It is through our communion with Christ that we can truly be united to God. He has really become ‘God-with-us.'” We might take that thought for granted today, but during his life it was not universally acknowledged. As a young boy born during the time of ferocious anti-Christian persecutions, he learned the Gospel of the Lord from heroic, confessor priests. He went as a young deacon to assist the Patriarch of Alexandria (Egypt) at the Council of Nicaea in 325. This was the first Ecumenical Council, called 12 years after the legalization of Christianity, to deal with the teachings of an Egyptian priest Arius who was claiming that Jesus, as Pope Benedict summarized the position, “was not a true God but a created God, a creature ‘halfway’ between God and man who hence remained for ever inaccessible to us.” God had not really become man in the Incarnation. The brilliant deacon Athanasius helped lead the charge against Arius’ teaching, which he persuaded the Council to condemn, and it was largely out of his work that we have the Nicene Creed we proclaim every Sunday. But even though the Arians lost, their false theological ideas were not extinguished. Over the course of time, Arians, those who didn’t believe Jesus was 100 percent God and 100 percent man, gained the upper hand in civil and Church politics. Various bishops and priests were Arians as were some emperors. For that reason, St. Athanasius was persecuted, multiply exiled, and had to suffer a great deal. Five different times he was banished from his see by command of the emperor. 17 of his 45 years as Patriarch of Alexandria he spent in exile. But the incarnation he taught he also lived and he knew that Jesus was with him in his risen and transfigured Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Athanasius taught that the Word of God “was made man so that we might be made God,” and he sought through all of his priestly work to bring about that sanctification.
• The greatest means of all we have in the Holy Eucharist, which is why it is so important that access to Mass has been restored for religious today and will be, we pray, for all people urgently. In the Eucharist, that process by which Jesus assumed our humanity so that we might assume his divinity, is brought to its earthly zenith, as we humbly receive Jesus’ risen Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. We not only hear at Mass Jesus’ “words of eternal life,” but, like the prophet Ezekiel and the apostle John in Revelation, are able to consume that Word and allow it to take on our flesh in Holy Communion. Peter’s question, “Lord, to whom shall we go?,” is likewise our question, as we come to him at long last really present for us in the Blessed Sacrament.
• The transformation that is meant to take place in us as we enter into communion with Jesus risen from the dead as his Mystical Body is to share and communicate his triumph over death. We see that in the two miracles in today’s first reading. Peter says to Aeneas, who had been confined to bed for eight years, “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed.” Get up! Arise! That is the word for Resurrection. Jesus wanted Aeneas to arise and he wants similarly to lift us up. Aeneas received a foretaste of the resurrection in which Jesus will tell those whose bodies have been confined to the tomb for many years, “Get up!” Similarly, when Peter went to raise Tabitha who had just died, he first prayed to Jesus before saying, “Tabitha, rise up!” And she again received life from Jesus through his Church.
• The Lord Jesus wants us all to participate in that gift of his risen life. To help us to rise with him and seek the things that are above. As we prepare to take up the cup of salvation and call upon his name in this much-awaited sacrifice of thanksgiving, we ask through the intercession of St. Athanasius for us always to be grateful for how in the incarnation in Mary’s womb, and in the continuous sacramental incarnation on the altar, God has made himself accessible to us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: