Rejoicing to Suffer on Account of the Name, 2nd Friday of Easter, April 13, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Second Week of Easter
Memorial of Pope Saint Martin I
April 13, 2018
Acts 5:34-42, Ps 27, Jn 6:1-15

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted: 

• The readings of the Easter Season are an annual mystagogical catechesis of the way in which we live together with the Risen Jesus. In this second week, we begin with Nicodemus, which allows us to ponder Jesus’ words about the meaning of Baptism, the rebirth from above God gives us by the Holy Spirit so that we may go wherever the Spirit blows us, so that we might think as God thinks, so that we might live the truth not as a reluctant disciple but as a fervent, courageous disciple.
• In today’s Gospel, we shift from a focus on Baptism to a focus on the Eucharist and begin what I like to call the “Second Octave of Easter,” dedicated to eight different sections of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of St. John, which focuses on how Jesus’ gift of himself in the Eucharist is not only prophesied by the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish but also prophesies the eternal wedding banquet. Jesus worked this miracle and gave us the words we’ll be hearing between now and Saturday of the third week of Easter knowing that we would be focusing on them in the Church after his Resurrection. He gave them to the Church so that we would know how to grow in the power of his resurrection, that, as we’ll hear in upcoming days, if we enter into communion with him through eating his flesh and drinking his blood, we will have eternal life and he will raise us on the last day.
• Today we ponder the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, which has various Eucharistic resonances. The first is Jesus’ compassion on the crowds. They were hungry and he was going to feed them. In the Eucharist, he feeds our souls with the only nourishment he considers worthy of them, himself. Then we see the collaboration of the apostles and the young boy. Jesus through whom all the plants, fish and animals in the world were made, could have easily created food out of nothing to feed the multitudes, but he wanted to involve his followers. All the apostles could find in a crowd of 5,000 was what a boy had carried, doubtless only for himself: five small buns and two sardines. But Jesus took them, gave thanks to God (the Greek work is eucaristein) and gave them to the crowds. Likewise in the Eucharist Jesus begins with what we give him — the bread and wine that are not only God’s gifts but the “work of human hands” — and multiplies those efforts in an even greater miracle. Finally we see the “leftovers.” Clearly Jesus could have worked the miracle without leftovers, but there were twelve wicker baskets left, one for each apostle, to remind each of them in a sense of what we’re supposed to do with the Eucharistic food we’ve received, to go and give our own bodies and blood, our own love to the extreme, our own compassion for others’ deepest hungers to those in need. There’s no need for us to “horde” the Eucharist, to keep our relationship to ourselves; rather Jesus fills our baskets to overflowing so that we may lavishly share his gifts with others.
• This gift of risen life through communion with the Risen Jesus is what makes us strong. And it’s what in turn makes us a sign. Today we see those consequences in the apostles brought before the Sanhedrin. The Rabbi Gamaliel, St. Pauls’ teacher, talked the members of the Sanhedrin out of their desire to do to the apostles what they had conspired to do to Jesus. This was a totally different theology than that which Caiphas had enunciated weeks earlier; Caiphas said that it was better for one to die than the whole people; Gamaliel said that if we oppose the apostles we might be opposing God, thoughts that should have been expressed in the illegal trial of Jesus early on Good Friday!  But there’s something very powerful in his change and in the Sanhedrin’s decision. While the words of Jesus had not sufficed to soften their hardened hearts to the possibility that he might be doing all he did by the finger and power of God, what the apostles were accomplishing did at least get him and them to wonder. These were simple men who had, it seemed, healed the cripple at the Beautiful Gate, were fearlessly and seemingly sanely proclaiming the crucified Jesus as risen, and were willing to suffer and die in testimony of that claim. The presence of the Risen Lord Jesus in them were making them, in some sense, an even more powerful sign than he had been, at least to the members of the Sanhedrin. St. Thomas Aquinas once said that if the apostles succeeded in convincing the ancient world, which was very down to earth, that a crucified carpenter had risen from the dead when he hadn’t risen, if they were willing to live and die for this lie and hallucination, then that would be a greater miracle than the resurrection itself. The “miracle” of what was happening in them by the power of Jesus abiding in them was an even greater sign that what had been given prior to his resurrection. And that sign value grew as they suffered for Christ. St. Luke tells us that the Sanhedrin had the disciples “flogged, ordered them to stop speaking in the name of Jesus, and dismissed them.” They had the disciples scourged, just as Jesus had been scourged. It shows just how messed up the Sanhedrin was that they responded to Gamaliel’s assertion by scourging men whom they thought could have been sent by God!  Peter’s and John’s reaction, however, was “rejoicing that they had been found worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name.” That’s the power of their communion with the Risen Jesus. They rejoiced over being scourged, because they knew that it was allowing them to enter into an even greater participation in Jesus’ resurrection through sharing in his sufferings and given greater witness. They grasped that if Jesus was raised from the dead 40 hours after having been crucified, that there was nothing for them to be afraid of — not flaggelations, not crownings with thorns, not sham trials, not even crucifixions. God would have the final word. Their Easter joy could not be suppressed and so St. Luke tells us, “all day long, both at the temple and in their homes, they did not stop teaching and proclaiming the Christ, Jesus.”
• Today we have a great witness of this type of communion, of the willingness to suffer dishonor on account of the name of Jesus, of this desire to teach and proclaim Jesus Christ not just all day long but all life long. Pope Saint Martin was Pope from 649 to 655. He led the Church’s efforts against the Monothelitist Heresy, which claimed that Jesus had only one will, not a divine and human will. He wouldn’t have been fully human if he didn’t have a human will and he wouldn’t have been a divine person without a divine will. The Garden of Gethsemane wouldn’t have made sense either, when he prayed that he would do not his will but the Father’s. Because of his defense of the proper understanding of Christ against those in the East, including the emperor Constans in Byzantium, he was arrest, dragged to the capital of the empire, placed on a stage upon arrival practically naked so that people could mock and humiliate him, sent into exile to Crimea where there was a great famine, thrown into a cold, filthy prison where he had dysentery and was fed basically poisonous food until his death. It would have been easy for him to complain — and complain he did about how Christians seemed to have abandoned him — but he didn’t complain against God, because he accounted himself worthy to suffer in union with the one whose vicar on earth he was. Often the greatest problem have in aligning our human will to God’s divine will as Christ teaches us is in the same circumstances in which we see Jesus endure in the Garden: precisely in suffering. But it was in suffering that St. Martin gave the greatest homilies on how human beings, like Jesus, are helped to align our will with God’s, and rather than resisting suffering on account of Christ’s name, rejoicing in it.
• Reflecting on the courage of Saints Peter, John and the Apostles, and on Pope Saint Martin, we can examine ourselves as to the holy boldness with which we live our faith and to whether we are effective signs of the Risen Christ. Jesus comes to strengthen us by his Risen Life in this great miracle of the multiplication of his body and blood from the Last Supper, so that we may bear our own hardships on account of the faith, our own physical ailments, even our own death with joy and trust on account of the power of the Resurrection and come through that communion a wonder for the world. The Lord whom we’re about to receive is our “light and salvation,” and so we respond with the words of Psalm 27: “Whom should I fear? The Lord is my life’s refuge; of whom should I be afraid? One thing I ask of the Lord this I seek: To dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” Jesus gives us an anticipation of that eternal entrance into his temple by coming to dwell within our own house in Holy Communion. The more we receive our Light and Salvation within us, the more we recognize that we are indeed seeing “the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living” and the more we will recognize the grace we need from on high, like the Apostles  to “be stouthearted” and “wait for the Lord with courage!” in this world, give witness to him before the Gamaliels and Sanhedrins and those of good will, and rejoice forever with him in the next!

The readings for today’s Mass were: