Responding to Christ’s Prayer for Unity, Seventh Sunday of Easter (C), June 2, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year C
June 2, 2019
Acts 7:55-60, Ps 97, Rev 22:12-14.16-17.20; Jn 17:20-26

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, taken from Jesus’ prayer during the Last Supper, Jesus pours out his heart to his Father in prayer, praying first for his apostles and then praying for all of us, who would owe our faith in Christ to the preaching of the apostles and their collaborators and successors. “I pray not only on behalf of these [the apostles], but on behalf of all those who will believe in me through their word.” Jesus prayed for something specific and on-the-face-of-it mind-blowing: “that they may be all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” He was asking first that our unity among each other be as complete as the perfect unity that exists between the persons of the Blessed Trinity; and that we may “be in” the Trinity just as the Father and the Son abide in each other.
• We might be tempted to dismiss Jesus’ prayer as something that sounds beautiful, but which is obviously utopian and beyond our grasp. But Jesus would never have prayed for something impossible. He, through whom we and the whole world were created, never engaged in “wishful thinking.” He not only knew the Truth about us and God, but enfleshed that Truth, fully aware of what was possible and what was not. It is also true that the Father would never refuse the prayer of his Son. As Jesus prayed before the raising of Lazarus, “I thank you, Father, for having heard me. I know that you always hear me” (Jn 11:42). The Father always hears his prayer. Therefore, if Jesus were praying that we be one, that we be as united among ourselves as are the Persons in the Blessed Trinity and that we abide in them as they abide in each other, then that must mean it is possible and is what should be the reality among us. This dual communion is, in fact, what will happen in heaven. If by God’s mercy we follow Christ all the way to heaven, we will be in full communion with the Communion-of-Persons-in-Love who is the Holy Trinity and in that communion, we will be in full communion with everyone else in the communion of saints.
• Jesus was praying, however, that we would have this type of communion (“union with” God and with each other) in this world, not just in the next. He prayed to his Father during the same discourse, “I am not asking you to take them out of the world… As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (Jn 17:15,18 ). He wanted our unity in this world to be the greatest sign of all of who God is and how God loves us. “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” and “so that the world may know that you have loved them even as you have loved me.”
• What is obvious to us, though, is that we do nothave this union in this world. Take any three members of the this parish or even of the same Christian family and we would be hard-pressed to find an image of the communion of love that exists between Father, Son and Holy Spirit that Jesus wants to exist among his disciples throughout the world.So many families are in fact divided today. Countries, like our own, are polarized. Even the Church is fractured in so many camps. But this is not a new problem. In the early days of Christianity, there was the division between the Greeks and the Jews especially with regard to the care of widows. There were the numerous heresies that divided the Church: Gnosticism, Marcionism, Sabellianism, Donatism, Arianism, Nestorianism, Eutychism, Monophysitism, Monotheletism and the Iconoclasm controversy. Since 1054, the Church has been divided between Catholics and Orthodox. For the last 502 years, the Church in the West has been divided between Catholics and Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals and tens of thousands of other Protestant denominations. Outside observers studying the Church today will often notice far more easily what divides us than the unity that Christ prayed would exist. In the Church, the world, the family, even within the individual, these divisions always come from the work of the ancient serpent. Just like he divided Adam and Eve from God and each other, just as he introduced internal divisions in each of them between soul and body, divisions that led in the next generation to Cain’s killing Abel and so many other consequences, so the devil, the diabolos (or one who throws off course) is always at work seeking to separate. And we use our freedom to consent to these temptations. We give into pride, and envy, anger and greed, all of which clearly not only separate us from God but divide us from others. And others’ actions through consenting to the same temptations compounds the damage. All of this totally contrary to the communion based on the loving communion among Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Blessed Trinity.
• But it is not as if this type of unity has never been approximated. The first disciples approached it. The members of the Church in Jerusalem “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,” as we read in the Acts of the Apostles. “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.” And the impact of their loving union was dramatic, obtaining the results Jesus prayed such union would bring about: “Day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42-47).
• The chronicle of division that has happened in the Church since then is not a sign that Jesus’ prayer was ineffectual or had an expiration date. Jesus’ prayer was heard and God the Father will certainly not withhold the graces necessary for this communion. The reason for division rests in our not receiving those graces, in the actions various Christians have committed over the course of the centuries against communion, and in the various things we have failed to do in order to keep communion. Every sin ruptures communion. Every genuine act of Christian love begins to repair it. If this communion with God and with each other meant so much to the Lord that, on the night he was betrayed, he poured out his very soul praying for it to the Father, then each of us who loves him must make it our life’s mission to try to bring about that union of love. But the question is: how can this communion be brought about?
• The first thing we can say is that it will not be brought about by seeking a “lowest common denominator” version of the faith, removing from our interactions everything that is controversial. Some Christian denominations and even a few Catholic parishes have attempted this type of “Can’t-we-all-just-get-along?” type of Christianity, in which they just try to paper over the fractures that exist. But this doesn’t heal any divisions; it just ignores them. It doesn’t bring about real communion. The people are not in union with each other; they just “agree not to disagree” publicly or privately. Christ, in fact, came to bring such hidden disunity to the surface. Once he said, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Mt 10:34-36). Jesus was not coming, of course, to divide families, but was saying very clearly that some families would be divided by him. It’s not the faith that divides, but the lack of faith in others that divides. For there to be real unity in a family or in God’s family the Church, there must be not a “lowest common denominator” but a “highest,” in which everyone seeks to love God with their mind, heart, soul and strength. It’s the failure to do this that brings disunity. Paul pointed this truth out in his letter to the Ephesians, who were struggling to accept the Gospel fully on God’s terms and live in communion with God and with each other. He begged them first to adopt the virtues consistent with loving communion and then to realize the source of that communion: “I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:1-6). Each of us is called to “lead a life worthy of the calling to which we’ve received,” “making every effort” “to maintain the unity of the Spirit.” Our communion with each other will be based on our mutual communion with the one God, one Lord, one body of Christ, one faith, one baptism.
• Jesus left us two great means to help bring about this communion for which he prays. The first is the gift of the Holy Spirit. On Thursday, we celebrated the Ascension of the Lord into heaven. In his last words before ascending, he instructed the apostles to stay in Jerusalem until they were clothed with power from on high. The end of Jesus’ physical life on earth was meant to pass into the beginning of the Church when that power from on high, the Holy Spirit, came down on Pentecost, which we will mark next Sunday. The Holy Spirit is the personal loving communion between God the Father and God the Son. God the Father and the Son send us the Holy Spirit to help us enter into that communion, what St. Paul calls the “unity of the Spirit.” We pray at Mass that the Holy Spirit will make us “one body, one Spirit in Christ.” The Holy Spirit is the one who helped St. Stephen in today’s first reading not respond with hatred or curses but prayer when he was being stoned to death. “Filled with the Holy Spirit,” he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the Father’s right hand, and he imitated Christ on Calvary by praying for those who were stoning him and entrusting his spirit to God. The Holy Spirit is similarly central to today’s passage from the Book of Revelation when “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’” The Holy Spirit wants precisely to cooperate with the Bride — and the Bride symbolizes Christ’s bride the Church — to say to Jesus the Bridegroom, “Come! Come! Come!” Like a young woman who can’t wait until the day of her wedding, so the Holy Spirit wants to help all of us in the Church to say to Jesus with passion and enthusiasm, “Come!” Come, without delay!” He seeks to unite us in love for Jesus so that together with Jesus we might truly love each other.
• The second great means God gives us to bring about the answer to Jesus’ prayer is the Holy Eucharist. To make us one body with Him and with others, he commanded us to consume his body. It is not coincidental that since the beginning, we have called our reception of the Lord Jesus’s real presence “holy communion,” because by receiving God inside, we are supposed to be caught up into communion with God and with all of the other members of the Church, the “Body of Christ.” The reception of Holy Communion is supposed to be sign of a communion that already exists and a source of a deepening of that communion. Thomas Aquinas used to teach that the ultimate effect of the Sacrament of Holy Communion is not Jesus’ real presence on the altar. Jesus’ real presence is both an effect and a sacrament of something else: namely the communion that he seeks to bring about in us as we, in communion with him, enter into communion with each other. To the extent that we receive Jesus in Holy Communion and don’t seek communion with each other, we’re receiving poorly. That’s why Jesus told us in the Sermon of the Mount that if we come to the altar and recognize that our brother has something against us, that we should first reconcile and then come and bring our gift. We can’t have communion with Jesus but not ardently desire communion with each other. When we truly receive Jesus well, he is at work within us, helping us to become more like him, so that we might love others the way he does, and enter into a communion of love with him.
• As we get ready to receive His Son, who is the source of Communion between us and God and us and others, we ask him, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, to fill us with the courage to live this communion with Him, so that “the world may believe” in Christ and come to experience the fullness of the Father’s loving Communion, in this life and in the next.

The readings for today’s Mass were: