Jesus’ Ecclesiology of Communion, Fifth Wednesday of Easter, May 22, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Rita of Cascia
May 22, 2019
Acts 15:1-6, Ps 122, Jn 15:1-8

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

• Today in the Acts of the Apostles, we come to one of the most pivotal events not only in the history of the early Church but the history of the Church, period. It’s the Council of Jerusalem, the first such Council in the history of the Church. It came about because “there arose no little dissension and debate” after some Christians coming from Judea were telling the Gentile Christians in Antioch, “Unless you are circumcised according to the Mosaic practice, you cannot be saved.” The question was far broader than merely of circumcision, but about the ground of salvation, the way we relate to God, the role of the Mosaic law in the faith and the manner in which Jewish and Gentile Christians were to behave with regard to each other. So Paul, Barnabas and others went up to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles and priests about it.
• St. Paul was once a Pharisee and believed that salvation happened through rigid observance of the Mosaic Law in all its details. But after he was converted on the road to Damascus, converted from a false notion of the holy life to a true one, he began to see that one is saved by Christ and not by our own actions obeying all 613 commands and all the other precepts of the Mosaic law. We’re saved by God’s mercy rather than by our merit. He would spend most of his apostolic life proclaiming this truth. He wrote two letters (one to the Romans and another to the Galatians) explaining in detail how Christ, rather than the law, is our Savior, and he spent parts of two other letters (Colossians and Philippians) talking about how baptism rather than circumcision enters us into the life of faith and the Covenant with God. He brought all of these inspirations to the Council in Jerusalem and we’ll see tomorrow and Friday how the Holy Spirit led the early Church to the solution with regard to the Gentiles.
• But what I want to focus on here are the three reasons why what they did was so important.
  • First, we, too, need to learn that we’re saved by God’s action to which we freely respond, not principally by our action. Many times we can still think that salvation depends on us, on how many prayers we say, on how many good deeds we can do to overcome our bad deeds. Salvation comes from God and we need to receive it as a grace, as a gift, and respond with all we have.
  • Second, we, too, need to grasp our relationship to the Mosaic Law. Many times Christians can be confused when it comes to Old Testament ceremonial and moral precepts and how the fit into our living of our faith. What about Jewish dietary restrictions? What about the law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? What about our reaction to the crimes to which God had attached capital punishment? Sometimes if we’re tempted simply to dismiss him, we’re dismissing God’s revelation. Others who are more fundamentalistic in their following of Sacred Scripture, are often left in a bind between Old Testament and New when they might seem to be in conflict. The key is for us to realize, as St. Paul would write to the Galatians, that the Law is a pedagogue, a tutor, bringing us to the Master who would fulfill the law by bringing it to its real meaning. Circumcision was crucial to establish Jewish identity, for example, but it wasn’t absolute, and it would be supplanted by a new means of belonging, namely the gift of Baptism and the life of faith that flows from Baptism. The Mosaic Law was crucial to forming Jews in morality, but Christ would come and teach by words and example a surpassing form of love.
  • The third thing we need to learn is how to relate to each other. One of the reasons why this dispute between Jews and Gentiles was such a big deal was not simply the question of whether Gentiles needed to be good Jews before they could be good Christians, but it was because stricter Jews, like the Pharisees, had no interaction with Gentiles. They avoided them as if they were lepers. They didn’t eat with them. They didn’t enter into their houses. That was the background as to why the Hellenist widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of the bread, because many of the Jewish Christians would just keep their cultural tradition of complete separation. That obviously couldn’t work in the communion of the Church. Still today there can be this separation in Church communities among those of different ethnic groups, young and old, men and women, “traditionals” and “Vatican II,” and so on. The Council of Jerusalem was important so that Christians would live in communion with each other, which is what Jesus intended from the beginning, that we would be one as he and the Father is one.
• And that brings us to the Gospel, where Jesus gives us the powerful and beautiful image of the Vine and the Branches, which is an image of the type of unity we’re all supposed to have in Jesus, an image of how our works are supposed to flow from our saving bond with him rather than detached from him and his redeeming grace, and an image of how we’re supposed to be in communion with the other Branches on the Vine. Over the course of Jesus’ Holy Thursday instructions to the disciples, he’s already called us to a union of love, telling us to remain in his love by keeping his commandments and remaining in his word. He’s told us our union with him should be so profound that who ever receives us receives him, because who ever receives us should be receiving us-in-communion-with-Christ-who-is-himself-in-communion-with-the-Father. Today Jesus points not just to a moral union but to a spiritually ontological union that precedes and is coupled to it. This union is the essence of the Christian life. We enter into an interpersonal communion with the Lord that flows out into deeds. How beautiful is this reality that Jesus wills!
• I’d like to ponder various elements of what Jesus says about our relationship with him and with the Church that are indicated by this image of the Vine and the Branches.
  • First, Jesus says, “My Father is the Vine Grower.” He is the one who has called us to communion with him through Jesus. What a tremendous grace!
  • Second, the Father is a pruner. “He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and everyone that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit.” Grapevines take three years to produce mature fruit, but if they’re going to produce juicy, tasty grapes, the vinegrower needs to work very hard at pruning the branches that are not fruit-bearing ones so that they don’t suck the juice and energy necessary to produce fruit after three years. The Father is a patient pruner. But he wants our cooperation. Do we allow him to prune us so that we might produce more fruit? Do we allow him to prune our time, our possessions and attachments, our false sense of autonomy, even our good things, so that we can bear more fruit? When he does take away something or someone from our life, do we see that in this the Father might be pruning us so that we might bear more fruit in him? Do we allow him to prune us of some old ideas and understandings, so that he may take us deeper in communions with him and others, like the Judaized Christians were resisting in Antioch?
  • Third, Jesus says that the Father prunes us “because of the word that I spoke to you.” Jesus’ word helps us to see what needs to be cut from our life so that we may be fruitful. We can’t remain in him unless we remain in that word.
  • Fourth, Jesus calls us to abide in him as he abides in us. This is both a passive and an active verb for us. First we need to allow the Lord to abide in us but then we need to respond and remain in him. Do we seek to abide in him in prayer? In work? In Mass? In our friendships? In our whole day? In communion with other believers, like the Council of Jerusalem will encourage? The essence of the Christian life is this mutual abiding.
  • Fifth, Jesus stresses that unless we’re abiding in him like branches on a vine, we won’t bear fruit because apart from him we can do nothing. That’s actually a shocking sentence, because we think we and others can do a lot without Jesus, that we’re really mostly self-sufficient, physically and spiritually. There are multiple levels in which we’re called to abide in Jesus, and he wants us to abide in him in all of them, but from our physical level to heavenly glory, we can do nothing unless we’re in relationship with him. If we’re not bearing any fruit because we have pruned ourselves off of the vine, because we’re not abiding in Jesus but remaining outside of communion with him, he tells us that we’ll be thrown out like a branch, wither and be gathered and thrown into the fire. This is not just an eschatological image about hell, but is also an image of the causality of spiritual lifelessness. If we seek to do things apart from God — and apart from his Mystical Body — even though we might seem to be “productive,” our life will be fruitless and vain.
  • Sixth, if we remain in him and his words resonate within us, then our prayer will totally change, because we will praying united with Jesus in his holy word. He makes an incredible promise, a guarantee beyond any infomercial, that whatever we ask will be given us. He tells us this because he wants us to pray in union with him. And we know that he in particular wants us to pray with others, promising that he’ll be with us whenever “two or more” gather in his name, and teaching us to pray, not “my Father,” but “our Father who art in heaven.”
  • Lastly, and perhaps most shockingly, Jesus says that by our remaining as branches on the Vine in all of these ways, the Father will be glorified and we will “become” Jesus’ disciples. We’re not disciples if we merely know what he’s taught or simply following him on the outside. We become disciples when we unite ourselves to him on the inside. If we become disciples in this way, united with Jesus and with other branches on the Vine, that is what will glorify the Father. All of us who together with Jesus love the Father must therefore want this type of mutual inter-abiding.
• One saint who lived this communion with Jesus, even in the midst of great difficulty, is the one we fête today, St. Rita of Cascia (1381-1457). From her earliest days she desired to become a nun, but her larger desire was to do God’s will in whatever circumstances she found herself, and she was given by her elderly parents in marriage at the age of 12 to a man, Paolo Mancini, who was cruel, harsh and immoral. She gave birth to her first child within a year. She endured 18 very difficult years of marriage — of verbal abuse, physical abuse and infidelity — until her husband was violently stabbed to death by a rival family. She had to work to prevent her sons from exacting revenge. Eventually they, too, died. She tried to enter the Augustinian Convent in Cascia, but they refused her because — having been a mother — she was not a physical virgin and they required that at the time (a sign that often man-made laws, contrary to God’s way of looking at things, can invade religious life, which is a type of pharisacalism that puts such things above doing God’s will). The Augustinians were also desirous of not being associated with the scandal of her husband’s death and the possibility that it might inflame the Chiqui family who had murdered him. She persisted, however, and the nuns gave her a condition for her acceptance: to reconcile and resolve the conflicts between the Mancinis and the rival Chiqui family. She prayed that her sons be taken by God before they had a chance to exact revenge and got her brother-in-law Bernardo to relinquish his desire to continue the feud. In 1417, at the age of 36, she was able to enter the monastery, where she became renowned for her charity, prayer, austerity and mortified life. Her ambition was whatever God wanted and she showed it in the way she loved her neighbor, loved God in prayer, and was able to make sure she didn’t have a passion for the things of this world, as St. James said. At the beginning of Mass we prayed to God to bestow on us “the wisdom and strength of the cross, with which [he was] pleased to endow Saint Rita, so that, suffering in every tribulation with Christ, we may participate ever more deeply in his Paschal Mystery.” Christ on the Cross is the true vine and we must unite everything to him there. St. Rita suffered everything with Christ and she shows us how to do the same, participating in his paschal mystery but uniting ourselves to him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in every circumstance. Because of the example of her faith in trial, she has become a patron saint of desperate causes.
• Jesus said all of these words about the Vine and the Branches on Holy Thursday and there’s a reason for that, because it’s on Holy Thursday as Jesus gave us his Body and Blood for the first time so that we could enter into the Holy Communion with him to which the image of the vine and branches points. When I was a seminarian at the North American College in Rome, the chapel had an interesting marble pattern on the floor. At first it seemed a little strange, but when you began to notice the intercalated dark and lighter marble, the pattern began to make sense. It was supposed to put into marble Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel. The marble in the sanctuary, all around the altar, was dark grape colored (I’m color blind so I won’t make a mistake by guessing what color it was!) and that dark grape color, after coming down the stairs, was interspersed with white marble, to show how all of us in the pews become branches on the Vine through the Mass. In the Mass we attached ourselves through the “transubstantiated fruit of the vine,” through Christ’s Body and Blood, and in that communion, enter into a bond with others far greater than blood. Jesus in Holy Communion is the source of our unity, for which the early Church worked so hard. This is the source of our salvation. This is the summit of the law, as we fulfill Jesus’ words to do this in his memory. And our praying this united with Jesus and truly united through, with, and in him to each other is the Father’s supreme glory! As we enter more deeply into this mystery of the Vine and the Branches, let us pray that we may abide in Christ so much that we might bear fruit always for the Father’s glory and come at last, together with each other and with all the saints, to abide in God forever.