Lovingly Keeping God’s Word with the Help of the Holy Spirit, Fifth Monday of Easter, April 29, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church
April 29, 2024
Acts 14:5-18, Ps 115, Jn 14:21-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The fifth week of Easter is a time in which, through the readings, we enter much more deeply into Jesus’ words about the love of God. Pondering his words from Holy Thursday in the light of his resurrection, we will hear him speak to us about the motivation he has in laying down his life for us, about why he entered the world, about how we’re supposed to live with him in the world Risen from the dead. He will teach us about how to receive, remain in and pass on his love. It’s one of the most beautiful weeks of the liturgical year. But today Jesus says something to us very surprising. He almost seems to make God’s love for us conditioned on our loving him first. “Whoever loves me” by keeping my commandments, Jesus says, “will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.” Later, he reiterates, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.” Is God’s love for us conditional in this way? The answer to the question is an emphatic no. St. John tells us in his first letter, “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans that God showed how much he loved us when we were absolutely not keeping his commandments. “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). The Father never stops loving the loving his prodigal children. If Jesus called us to love our enemies, he was modeling this precisely on God’s love, who “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” (Mt 5:45).
• If God, however, loves us unconditionally, if God loves us even before we keep his commandments and his word, then how do we understand today’s Gospel? Jesus is saying that we will experience the love of God far more when we open ourselves up to it precisely through receiving and reciprocating it, through overcoming our own self-centeredness and freely, willingly, and wholeheartedly sacrificing ourselves out of love for God, through trusting in him to keep his commandments and acting on his word that together train us how to love like God loves and become more and more like him. Pope Francis likes to use the analogy of the human heart with its systolic and diastolic functions: if it’s not pumping out blood, it’s dead and incapable of receiving blood within. So if our heart is hardened toward the love of God and neighbor, which is the two-fold principle on the basis of which everything in the law and prophets depends (Mt 22:40), then we cannot receive the constant and unconditional love of God. Pope Benedict used to say, love is idem volle, idem nolle, wanting the same things and rejecting the same things. The more we want what God wants and reject what God rejects, the more we will open ourselves up to receive the full outpouring of his love.
• What do we need to grow in this capacity to love God and receive the love he has for us from before the foundation of the world? Today we can focus on three things.
• The first is the humility that makes us love God more than we love ourselves and seek God’s glory rather than our own. After the healing of the crippled man in Lystra, the people began to treat Paul and Barnabas as Hermes and Zeus respectively and wanted to sacrifice animals to them as if they were incarnate gods rather than emissaries of the Word-made-flesh. It would have been somewhat tempting for the two of them, after the sufferings of walking through the swamps of Perga and Pamphylia and ascending the dangerous cliff to Antioch in Pisidia, after they had been driven out of Antioch in Pisidia and Iconium, for them to have basked for a little while with people who were so grateful they were divinizing them. But Paul and Barnabas were coming not to get adulation but to help people love and adore the one true God. “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory!,” we prayed in the Psalm, and that’s what they lived. They immediately sought to help the people open themselves up to the greater love of God than they had experienced until then through “heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them,” through the “rains from heaven and fruitful seasons,” through the “nourishment and gladness for your hearts.” But as we’ll see tomorrow, most of the people of Lystra didn’t really want to keep the Lord’s commandments, to live by his word, and enter into the way he wanted to love them. They wanted to adore gods of their own making. And when Paul and Barnabas, despite the miracle they had just worked, insistently called them through that miracle to worship the God who had accomplished it through them, they would rise up and kill Paul, stoning him to death, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s first reading, until the first Christians through their prayer raised him from the dead. The Lystrians didn’t have the humility to worship God as God wanted to be adored, they didn’t want to enter into the love of the Covenant on God’s terms. Paul and Barnabas were humble enough to do so, however, because they didn’t want to be gods but to glorify the one and true God through their own decreasing so that He might increase.
• The second thing we need is suffering, which prunes us to love God more. Yesterday at Sunday Mass and again on Wednesday, we will hear Jesus give us the Parable of the Vine and the Branches. Jesus says about his Father, “He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit.” We see how God was pruning Saints Paul and Barnabas today. St. Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles, “There was an attempt in Iconium by both the Gentiles and the Jews, together with their leaders, to attack and stone Paul and Barnabas.” We see earlier in Acts that they were likewise run out of Antioch in Pisidia. Tomorrow we’ll see that the very same people who were trying to sacrifice oxen for them will stone Paul to death before the nascent Church there surrounded up and prayed for his resuscitation. In all of these sufferings and contradictions, God was helping them better to live in his love. Jesus tomorrow will describe even his own sufferings, his own pruning, that would happen to him on Good Friday as a means to show the world  that “I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me.” Our vicissitudes are an opportunity for us to live entirely on the love of God and for the love of God, by doing his will even when it’s hard and thereby giving a tremendous example of love for the world. We grow in love that way.
• The third means we have to grow is by cooperating with the gift of the Holy Spirit, God’s love poured into our heart (Rom 5:5). Jesus tells us at the end of today’s Gospel, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” The Holy Spirit will teach us how to receive God’s love by helping us to remember what Jesus taught and put it into practice with passion. He will help us to love God and our neighbor with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. He who was the great teacher of Saints Paul and Barnabas, who is the instructor of the martyrs, the guide of virgins, and the source of courage, love and peace in every age, opens us to receive the love of God and to reciprocate it as much loved sons and daughters. He helps us to remain in God’s love as Jesus will command us later in the week.
• Today the Church celebrates someone who, by the help of the Holy Spirit, with humility and through suffering, showed us how to unite the love of God to the doing of his will. Saint Catherine of Siena, even though she couldn’t read and write until late in her brief life, became a doctor of the Church because she was “docta” (or instructed by the Triune God personally). And she has become a great source of learning, helping us to embrace through her Christ and the Father who sent Christ. 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. As a sign of the Christian’s spiritual-ontological communion with Christ, 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. God told her one day, “I desire to become more closely united with you through charity toward your neighbor,” and so the Lord began to manifest himself to her in this way. She went out with courage to care for all the sick in hospitals or on the streets due to normal illness and the epidemic of the plague. She visited prisons and ministered in a special way to those who were on death row. She went to towns that had lost their faith to try to bring about religious revivals. 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 them to receive Christ as he desired and enter into the life of the Blessed Trinity. 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. Her love for and of Jesus in the Eucharist overflowed in her exercise of charity toward others, because she received Holy Communion with purpose: that in becoming one with Jesus in Holy Communion, because the Word became flesh and dwelled within her in the Eucharist, she became an extension of his charity. The same thing is meant to happen to each of us. She’s interceding with us for this to happen.
• In Lystra, the Lycaonians cried out, “The gods have come down to us in human form.” Here at Mass, we ought to cry out, not as the ancient pagans, but in the fullness of the Christian faith, “God has indeed come down to us.” The same Second Person of the Trinity who assumed our human form in the womb of the Blessed Virgin comes here under sacramental appearances in order to aid our sanctification. We don’t come here to sacrifice oxen, but ourselves, together with his sacrifice to the Father. He tells us that the one who loves him keeps his commandments and here we, with love, fulfill his command to do this in his memory. And we prepare ourselves now for the indescribable gift of having God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit come to make their dwelling within us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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