Responding to Christ’s Prayer for Unity, Seventh Sunday of Easter (C), May 29, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year C
May 29, 2022
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: 

• On Thursday we celebrated the Ascension of the Lord. I had the privilege to do so in Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, at the place where traditionally the Ascension is believed to have occurred. The Lord’s Ascension on the 40th Day after Easter is a time for us to stoke our desire for heaven, where he has gone to prepare a place for us. It is an occasion for us to pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which he instructed us to do before he was taken up, which the members of the early Church faithfully did around Mary in the Upper Room, and which the Church continues to do every year in the decenarium (ten days) of prayer for the gift of the Holy Spirit each year in anticipation of Pentecost. And it’s a chance for us to focus on the mission Jesus has given to us as he ascended, to be, together with the Holy Spirit, his witnesses to the end of the earth, proclaiming the Good News that the Son of God not only took on our humanity, entered our world, lived, worked, taught, healed, fed, forgave, suffered, died, rose and ascended, but is with us always until the end of time.
• These three main focuses of Ascension are reinforced by the Church on the Seventh Sunday of Easter. The first reading from the Acts of the Apostles has us ponder St. Stephen, who “filled with the Holy Spirit, looked up intently to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God [the Father],” and then, as the stones were raining down upon him, cried out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” The Holy Spirit helps us to look intently upon, to concentrate on, heaven and the glory of God and to get us to entrust ourselves into Jesus’ lovingly scarred hands. In the second reading from the Book of Revelation, the last chapter of the Bible, that sense of consecration to Jesus is strengthened. The ascended Jesus tells us, “Behold, I am coming soon,” and “the Spirit and the Bride,” the Holy Spirit guiding the Church, say in response, “Come! … Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!” Jesus’ ascension into heaven is not a time for us to say “goodbye!” and then move on to our own pursuits, like those referred to in Jesus’ parable who say to each other, “The Master is long delayed” and proceed to get drunk and take advantage of others (Mt 24:48). Rather it is a time for us to grow in longing for the Lord, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in saying, “Come!,” and to give witness to Jesus in words, in life, and even in death like St. Stephen.
• In the Gospel, taken from Jesus’ great, intimate priestly prayer on Holy Thursday, we see that Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, rather than focusing on his imminent suffering, was instead praying for us, praying for each of these three realities. He was praying that we would be united with him in heaven. “Father,” he implored, “they are your gift to me. I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see the glory that you gave me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” He prayed for that the witness that he was summoning us to give would be fruitful. “Holy Father,” he said, “I pray not only for them,” meaning the apostles, the first wave of those he would send out to continue his mission, “but also for those” — namely us — “who will believe in me through their word.” He had previously prayed to God the Father in this great Priestly Prayer, with words we heard last year and that come immediately before today’s passage, “I gave them your word. … Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them so that they also may be consecrated in truth.” Jesus has consecrated himself so that we might be consecrated by, in and for the truth, for God’s word, and he has sent us out just as the Father sent him. And he is praying not just for us missionaries, but for all those who will hear the word of God through us.
• Jesus does not speak explicitly about the Holy Spirit in this passage, but he does speak a great deal about the principal work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the eternal, personal communion, the love, between the God the Father and God the Son and his work within us is to accomplish what Jesus prayed for repeatedly in this passage: that all the members of the Church “may all be one, as you, Father are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us.” This communion is something that is meant to begin in this world and last forever as a communion of saints. The Holy Spirit seeks to bring us into communion with God and, in that communion, with each other, in a bond with God and each other that is supposed to last forever. It’s in that communion that we, as the Bride of Christ, cry out together with the Spirit, “Come, Lord Jesus.” It’s in that communion that we become what we proclaim on Mission. That’s why Jesus underlined with great emphasis the importance of our communion for the fruitfulness of our Mission. He prayed that we would be one so “that the world may believe that you send me and that you loved them even as you loved me.” The credibility of Jesus’ incarnation, teaching, passion, death and resurrection hinges, he himself says, on whether our communion resembles the loving communion of persons who is God. The believability of the message of God’s infinite love for us, that God who is love so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son so that we might not perish but might have eternal life, hangs on that same communion. If the love of God doesn’t radiate among believers, among those who proclaim God’s love and his command to love one another as he has loved us first, then it’s so much more difficult to believe in the truth and power of God’s love for any of us. When that love, spurred on by the Holy Spirit, was conspicuous among the first disciples of Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles, as they sold their property to care for each other, ate together, prayed together, made pilgrimages to the Temple together and had everything in common, so many came to believe, because they “saw” the truth even more powerfully than they they “heard” it, because the Christians were truly living the Word of God and the call to be one in the love God is and gives.
• These truths pondered by the Church on the Ascension and deepened on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, are so important in every age, but they are particularly urgent today, at a time when the need for God is so obvious. The terrible massacre in Uvalde, Texas, five days ago, the ongoing evil of the war in Ukraine, the destruction of the innocent in the womb, the ongoing daily illustration of the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man (Lk 16:19-31) as so many languish destitute and starving as societies prioritize the billionaires, are all signs that our culture is sick and needs help.
• Those of us who live consciously in the real, real world — the world God created, redeemed and dwells in — know that all of these preventable tragedies flow ultimately from the absence of God. Hence we fix our gaze intently on heaven and cry out, “Come, Lord Jesus!” We beg him to unleash the power of his Holy Spirit anew and make us effective instruments to renew the face of the earth. We recognize that he is praying for us and that gives us confidence to go out into the world to preach, even should we be opposed like Jesus himself, and later St. Stephen, were opposed by many. And we recognize that people are longing for God and for access to God. They are longing for real love, the love that lasts, the greater love that Jesus showed on Calvary and told us to imitate, the love that sacrifices for others and seeks always to bring into communion. These young male shooters — Salvador Ramos in Uvalde, Payton Gendron in Buffalo, Nikolas Cruz in Parkland, Florida, Adam Lanza in Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut — were all loners, who were cut off from communion, from the incubator of love that teaches us how to love our neighbor rather than mow our neighbors down. How much they need God. Similarly, we see the lack of loving communion in Ukraine: even though Russia claims that Ukraine belongs to the Russian mir, or greater Russian community, even though the Russian Orthodox asserts that the Ukrainian Orthodox are part of its family, they attack, bomb, terrorize and massacre. With abortion, rather than welcome and love children growing in the womb, rather than recognize them as members of the human community, they are dehumanized, excluded, unwanted, and ultimately terminated. And rather than seeing those in need as spiritual siblings, rather than treating them as members of the human family, we label, ignore, refuse and let suffer and even die.
• The culture of indifference, as Pope Francis calls it, is part of the culture of death, as Pope John Paul II coined it. It is the exact opposite of the culture of loving communion for which Jesus prayed and for which we’re made. The Missionaries of Charity were founded by God through Saint Teresa of Calcutta to put love into this culture of difference and death, to try to ensure that no one died excluded, unloved and without dignity and to strive to ensure that no one has to live that way either. And the whole Church is called to this mission of charity, because Christ prayed that we would be one as he and the Father are one in the unity of the Holy Spirit, and we have all been sent out by and with the Holy Spirit to gather all Christ’s abandoned and mangled sheep into the fold, to love them, to care for them, and to help them learn with us the meaning, origin, destiny and dignity of human life, so loved by God.
• The great means by which God immerses in these mysteries we live with greater intensity during these days is the Holy Eucharist. In the Mass, we, like St. Stephen, fix our eyes intently on heaven, we lift up our hearts, and behold Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father. We entrust ourselves to him and pray that, like Stephen, that he may not hold the sins of the world, including the atrocities we have witnessed this last week, against the perpetrators and all of us. We cry out as one, “Come, Lord Jesus!” We enter into that prayer that Jesus prayed that first Holy Thursday and commit to cooperating with the Holy Spirit to live in communion with each other and with our fellow Catholics and Christians, as salt, light and leaven for a fractured world. We thank God for the gift of Jesus in the Holy Spirit, who through this holy communion with him brings us into holy communion with all those in communion with him. We pray with Jesus that through this communion strengthened here, the world may believe that God the Father so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son, and that God the Father loves them just as he loves Jesus. Finally we ask that through this communion we may come to experience the joy of the eternal communion of saints within the communion of persons who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as we see the glory God the Father gave Jesus before the foundation of the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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