God’s Rescue Mission and Our Saving Response through Living the Truth and Coming to the Light, Second Wednesday of Easter, April 19, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Second Week of Easter
April 19, 2023
Acts 5:17-26, Ps 34, Jn 3:16-21

To listen to today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Today in the readings we see illustrated for us in words and deeds the great Christian paradoxes between love and rejection, salvation and judgment, light and darkness. We see the full meaning of Jesus’ resurrection but at the same time we witness how some people prefer to continue to live as spiritual cadavers rather than experience the risen life Jesus has come to give us. This is the essential drama of human life.
• St. John begins today by giving us the most beautiful — and probably famous — synthesis of the Gospel: “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God loves us so much that he himself died so that we would live forever. He didn’t want to lose any one of us. The incarnation, life, preaching, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus were all one big rescue mission. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,” St. John continues, “but that the world might be saved through him.” That salvation comes ultimately through our participation in his life through the Sacrament of Baptism, about which Jesus has been speaking to Nicodemus this week. It’s a theme particularly relevant for me today on the anniverary of my baptism.
• Despite Jesus’ not coming into the world to condemn it, there is still a condemnation, however, there’s still a judgment. It’s the condemnation and judgment that happens when we refuse to accept Jesus’ rescue. St. John describes it in these terms: “Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.” We see so much here. Everything begins with faith but faith must become operative, it must be faith working through love (Gal 5:6). The work of the evil one is often the reverse: he starts with getting us to do deeds contrary to our faith — with “works” that are “evil” — and then to have the shame over such Christian misbehavior start to lead our whole life into darkness. We do one deed of darkness and prefer to keep it hidden. That leads us more and more into a life of darkness such that we begin to hate the light.
• Later Jesus would add, in an excised passage, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God remains upon him.” Judgment, condemnation and the wrath of God sadly remain on the one who does not respond with faith to Jesus and enter into his light and life, not because that’s what God wants — he wants all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth — but because in freedom someone chooses to reject God’s work of salvation. The “wrath” of God basically means a state of alienation from God, brought about not by the act of divine punishment but by the choice of people to live and walk in darkness out of a self-love so strong that it turns on God and “hates” his light. Those who live in the peace of God, on the other hand, believe in Jesus, believe in what he says, choose to align their life to the truth he reveals and come to see and experience all things in his holy light. St. John says, “Whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.” The aim of the Christian life, the aim of faith, is to live in communion with Christ who is the truth, to believe in him is to believe in what he says and try with all our might to put what he says into practice. And when we live the truth, we want to live in the light not so that we can show off — Jesus warns us against that every Ash Wednesday when he tells us to pray, fast and give alms in secret — but so that the Father may be glorified, so that our deeds may be seen as done in God, so that God may get the credit, so that our life may give him witness and glory. God so loved us as to make that possible.
• We see this paradox between darkness and light, the lie and the truth, condemnation and salvation illustrated in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles. The Sanhedrin, the chief priests, Sadducees, many of the Scribes and Pharisees and Sanhedrin in large part preferred the darkness and rejected Christ’s rescue work. They did it before they conspired to have him executed and during the events of his public execution. Even after word of his resurrection started to spread and his simple followers started to work incredible miracles in his name as they testified that he was alive, they continued to prefer the darkness. They warned Peter and John not to say anything ever again about Jesus, but the two apostles courageously kept speaking out, saying that it was impossible to keep their mouths shut about what they had seen and heard and that their primary obedience was to God, who sent them out as his witnesses. At the beginning of today’s reading, they were arrested a second time for preaching openly, preaching in the light of Solomon’s Portico in the temple, about Jesus and his call to conversion and salvation. After they were imprisoned, however, an angel rescued them, opening the doors of the prison just like he opened Jesus’ sealed tomb, telling them, “Go and take your place in the temple area, and tell the people everything about this life.” They were arrested again but surreptitiously, in darkness we could say, because the leaders feared the people. St. Luke tells us that they were “filled with jealousy.” They resorted once again to threats. “We gave you strict orders did we not, to stop teaching in that name. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and want to bring this man’s blood upon us.” These were the same people who had clamored in Pontius Pilate’s praetorium, when Pilate washed his hands of the blood of Jesus whom he called an “innocent man,” “his blood be upon us and on our children.” Yet St. Peter wasn’t trying to condemn them for shedding Jesus’ blood but to have them saved by that blood. He was trying to convert them through repentance and forgiveness. Peter said, “The God of our ancestors raised Jesus, though you had him killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as leader and savior to grant Israel repentance and forgiveness of sins.” But they didn’t want to repent and have their sins forgiven. They didn’t want to acknowledge that they had sinned at all. And so after Peter had said, “We are witnesses of these things, as is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him,” St. Luke tells us, “They became infuriated and wanted to put them to death.” It wasn’t enough for one man to die for the people, as Caiaphas had said about Jesus. Now they wanted to kill his disciples, too. They hated the light of Christ’s resurrection radiating through his disciples and they wanted to extinguish that light. They who had condemned Jesus to death were condemning themselves for not believing in him. They who pronounced verdicts supposedly on behalf of God were in fact pronouncing a verdict against themselves. This is a dynamic that all of us have to grasp, because many times Christians act like the apostles and live in the light and bring Jesus’ salvation to others, and at other times, we prefer to live by our “own light,” which is fact a darkness, and behave like members of the Sanhedrin, pronouncing judgment on others and their actions without recognizing that we’re just condemning ourselves to living apart from Jesus and his light partially or fully.
• As we prepare to encounter in the Holy Eucharist Jesus the Light of the World, who wants to make us children of the Light, we rejoice that God the Father so loved the world — so loves us — that he gives us his own Son here that we might not perish but enter into communion with Jesus’ eternal life. Jesus promised that whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life and he will raise him on the last day. It’s here that we ask for Jesus’ blood to be on us and on our children, not the unrepented guilt for his martyrdom but the healing blood of his risen life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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