Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, New York, NY
Fourth Sunday after the Easter Octave (Extraordinary Form)
May 19, 2019
James 1:17-21, Jn 16:5-14
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
Today in the Gospel Jesus says something that should never cease to astonish us: “I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” Jesus, Truth incarnate who cannot deceive, was indicating that it was better for us that he go and the Holy Spirit come than that he stay and the Holy Spirit not come. If given a choice, in other words, between Jesus and the Holy Spirit, Jesus is saying that we should choose the latter. The great joy we have is that we don’t have to choose between the second and third persons of the Holy Trinity. As Christians, when we remain in loving communion with God, we can and do have both indwelling within us together with God the Father who sends them to us in love. But by these words, Jesus is indicating to us the extraordinary importance of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life to complete Jesus’ mission in us and through us in the world.
The reality is, however, that many Christians do not recognize this truth. That’s been a problem for the Church since the beginning. There’s a scene in the Acts of the Apostles when St. Paul came to Ephesus and met some disciples. He asked, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They responded, “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Pope-emeritus Benedict, at World Youth Day in Australia in 2008, said, “The Holy Spirit has been in some ways the neglected person of the Blessed Trinity,” and confessed that it was only as a 37-year-old priest teaching theology that he began not only to grasp the importance that the Holy Spirit should play in his life as a priest and professor but that he came to know him intimately. He said, “It is not enough to know the Spirit; we must welcome Him as the guide of our souls, as the ‘Teacher of the interior life’ who introduces us to the Mystery of the Trinity, because He alone can open us up to faith and allow us to live it each day to the full.” And we don’t have to be a member of the Charismatic Renewal to allow the Holy Spirit to become that teacher and guide. If we wish to understand the faith, if we wish to live it, if we wish to pass it on, we must allow ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, even if we, like Joseph Ratzinger, are beginning as adults. For us, the “great unknown” must become the “great known,” the teacher, the leader, the consoler, the advocate. “The Holy Spirit,” Pope Benedict summarized, “is the highest gift of God to humankind.”
I am very pleased this year that I have been assigned to celebrate not only today’s Mass with you, but also the Sixth Sunday after the Easter Octave on June 2 and Pentecost on June 9. These are the three times in the Sunday readings of the Roman Missal when the Church ponders Jesus’ words from the Last Supper about the Holy Spirit. So we will have a chance to go deeper into the role this “greatest gift of God” is meant to play in your life and mine. How he wants to help us to pray better, because, as St. Paul says, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” and helps us to cry out “Abba, Father.” How he wants to help us give witness to the faith, giving us tongues of fire to spread God’s word, in season and out of season, like we see the apostles doing on Pentecost. How he wants to change the way that we live, so that we live literally by the Holy Spirit, putting to death in us the things that are earthly and with his help setting our heads and hearts on the things of God and live by the gifts of the Holy Spirit and experience the Spirit’s extraordinary fruits. As a sort of advanced preview, I look forward to examining how the Holy Spirit wants to grow in each of those fundamental aspects of our Christian life.
Today, however, I would like with you to meditate with you on what the Holy Spirit inspired the apostles John and James to write down for us in today’s Gospel and epistle, so that the “Spirit of Truth” whom Jesus says in today’s Gospel will “guide [us] to all truth” may help us not only understand, but cooperate with and implement what the Holy Spirit seeks to do in each believer.
Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit wants to do three things in us and in others: he “will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation.” The word for “convict” in Greek is elegchein, which basically conveys a lawyer’s cross-examining a person on trial so effectively that the defendant is led to see and admit his errors and confess the whole truth. The Holy Spirit will do this, Jesus says, with regard to three crucial spiritual realities.
The first is with regard to “sin,” Jesus says, “because they do not believe in me.” The work of God, Jesus describes elsewhere in St. John’s Gospel, is “to believe in the one he sent,” and the essential sin is opposition to this work, this failure to believe, this rejection of God, this killing of the message of the Gospel and the divine Messenger within the praetorium of our hearts. We know that at the time of Jesus many were unaware of just what was occurring at the Crucifixion. The people were not aware of the sin they were committing, prompting Jesus’ merciful cry, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Many thought they were putting to death a blasphemer and so they shouted for his death. But after Pentecost, when, moved and helped by the Holy Spirit, St. Peter preached to the crowds about how they had condemned a just man and crucified the Lord of glory, they were pierced to the heart. That was the first work of the Holy Spirit, to convict the world of sin. That work continues, helping us to see the many ways we don’t believe in God, the many contexts we don’t live by faith, the many settings in which we have not yet staked our entire existence on his word. He does this work in our conscience as he makes us aware of and sorrowful for the ways that our life has denied God and failed to love those in his image. He takes away our excuses. He helps us to see that we have greatly sinned by our own most grievous fault — and desperately need the mercy Jesus brought into the world.
The second work of the Spirit, Jesus says, is to convict the world in regard to righteousness, because, Jesus says, “I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me.” Righteousness means a right relationship between a person and God and between persons in God. It involves for vertical and horizontal justice. The foundation for justice is in Jesus’ triumph over sin and death, his Resurrection and Ascension into glory, when the order of the universe was turned right side up. The Holy Spirit helps us to see that Jesus is not to be understood as a crucified criminal, not just as a Nazarene carpenter, but as the Risen Lamb of God to whom wisdom and power, honor and glory and praise” (Rev 5:12) belong. The Holy Spirit helps us to perceive Jesus’ righteousness or holiness, his extraordinary love that led him to sacrifice his life for ours, and helps us to open ourselves to receive the gift of his salvation. That work leads us to make the exodus from being convicted of sin to receiving Jesus’ freely bestowed gift of righteousness. A priest prays in the formula of absolution of the Sacrament of Confession, “God the Father of Mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.”The Holy Spirit has been sent among us not merely to convict of us sin but to show us something far more powerful: that God’s mercy triumphs over our misery, that his justice has the last word over the injustice we’ve committed and suffered, that the path for us to become righteous is for us to receive the mercy of Jesus and enter into communion with him who is the Righteous One, Mercy incarnate.
The third work of the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, is with regard to judgment or “condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” The Holy Spirit helps us to see that the devil has been judged, evil has been condemned, and wickedness no longer has the last word. He helps us to see clearly the winning side and the losing side and he assists us to choose with clarity and courage the side we want to be on now and always. Each of us will be judged, but the Holy Spirit helps us to know exactly on what criteria we will be judged and to order our life to God’s word in such a way that we might go with humble, grateful confidence to meet Jesus as our Judge. The Holy Spirit guides us into all truth, helps us to believe in Jesus and all he taught and did, and assists us to choose him over the various sinful disguises Barabbas takes in our life. The Holy Spirit helps us to discern that in caring for the needy, hungry, thirsty, poor, naked, imprisoned, and unknown, we are caring for Christ and choosing to go to his eternal right. The Holy Spirit helps us to cross the road as Good Samaritans, to cross the aisle and enter the confessional, to cross ourselves and unite our joys and sufferings to Christ’s life, suffering, death and resurrection.
What a great and indispensable gift this three-fold conviction is! The fundamental work of the Holy Spirit, through leading us to all truth and helping us to live the truth, is to sculpt us into the divine likeness, to help us to become holy as God is holy, merciful as he is merciful, perfect as he is perfect. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, St. James tells us today that God “willed to give us birth by the word of truth that we may be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” The action of the Holy Spirit inside of us is to help us to become “first fruits” of all creation, and we know from the Old Testament that the first fruits were always given back to God. The Holy Spirit helps us to receive on good soil the seed of God’s word of truth so that we might give deeds of truth back to God together with our very being.
That helps to explain what St. James says immediately afterward in today’s epistle: “Know this, my dear brothers: everyone should be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of a man does not accomplish the righteousness of God.” The Holy Spirit wants to help us to be “quick to hear” both God’s word as well as the cries of our neighbor. He wants to help us to listen with ears on our hearts, like the contemplative heart of the Blessed Mother, who is the model of someone who cooperates fully with the Holy Spirit. He wants to help us to be “slow to speak and slow to anger,” much like God who revealed himself to Moses on Mt. Sinai, as the “The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity.” To be slow to anger means to be quick to mercy, and the Holy Spirit wants to help us to become merciful like the Father in this very way, because, as he tells us through St. James, “the wrath of a man does not accomplish the righteousness of God.”
We now live in an age that’s slow to hear the word of God and the cry of others and one that is rapidissimo in speaking and in expressing anger. Rather than imitating the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, many of us imitate bombastic talk show hosts, proffering our opinion unsolicited on every subject under the sun. We live in an age of gossip, of shaming, of slaying our brother like Cain did Abel with the sword of our tongue. There are several prominent figures, including Catholics, who have made detraction a sordid art form, caustically ripping other people apart, exposing their defects far more than the complimenting their strengths, all the while ignoring what Jesus said in the image of the plank and the speck and in his clear admonition, “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will render an account for every careless work they speak” (Mt 12:36). This is not the Christian way. This is not life according to the Spirit. And the Holy Spirit wants to convict us of this sin, remind us of righteousness, and help us learn how to communicate truly as Christians.
What’s the way Christians are meant to communicate as sons and daughters of God? At the end of today’s Gospel, we get a glimpse. Speaking about the Holy Spirit, Jesus tells us, “He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears” and “take from what is mine and declare it to you.” Earlier in Jesus’ Last Supper discourse as recorded for us by St. John, Jesus says something similar: “I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and speak. … What I say, I say as the Father has told me” (Jn 12:49-50). Neither Jesus nor the Holy Spirit is winging it. Both of them speak what they hear: Jesus passes on the Father’s words and the Holy Spirit echoes Jesus’. The truly Christian form of communication that the Holy Spirit wants to help us to bring about is that our words will become more and more the echo of God’s words, that whether we’re silent contemplatively listening or whether we’re speaking, we’re hearing God’s voice or speaking God’s saving word. The more we cooperate with the Holy Spirit the more we will be able to make our whole life like a Magnificat, which is a synthesis in her own voice of what she had heard God speak through the heroic women of the Old Testament. The Holy Spirit wants to overshadow us like he overshadowed her so that we will always listen to God’s word so prayerfully, attentively and quickly, that we will hear it always as a word to be done and to be shared, a word that will teach us how to love each other in the same way God has shown us how to love, a word that will implant itself within us and help us to bear abundant fruit.
The life of the saints is really the manifestation of the triumph of the Spirit’s work in human beings. The saints are the ones who show us how to live according to the Spirit in everything. Yesterday in Madrid, the Church beatified Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri, the first woman and the third member of Opus Dei to be raised to the altars after St. Josemaria and Blessed Alvaro del Portillo. In this parish run so competently by Fathers Barrett and Brisson who are priests of Opus Dei, we should all give thanks together with them for this example of feminine holiness in the midst of ordinary life. Blessed Guadalupe was a Spanish chemist who helped start Opus Dei for women in Mexico. There is much to learn from the extraordinary way she lived ordinary life, which you can find on the Opus Dei website. The only thing I’d like to say here is what the postulator of her cause described about her personality. St. Paul had said that the fruits of the Spirit are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-mastery,” and Fr. Antonio Rodriguez said about her, “Many people who knew her underline her overflowing cheerfulness, her habitual smile. She was welcoming to everybody. She transmitted peace and confidence to countrywomen and university students, to women of any social standing. Her joy was not the result of some human effort, but rather the consequence of her knowing that she was a daughter of God, of her closeness to Christ; that is, a gift of the Holy Spirit. As a consequence she was constant and serene. This helped her a lot in her apostolate and her service to the Church and to society.”
The Holy Spirit wants to help us all in similar ways.
One of the most important places in which the Holy Spirit carries out this transformative work is here at Mass. It’s here that the Word of God is proclaimed and we’re given the opportunity, by the Holy Spirit, to be led into more and more into all the truth. It’s here that in response to that we’re we are trained to be quick to hear and quick to extend the message and reality of God’s love. It’s here that just as he overshadowed Mary at the Annunciation, he overshadows the altar and the priest at the consecration to transform bread and wine into the eternal Son of God incarnate and to transform men and women into one body, one Spirit in Christ. “The Eucharist is a ‘perpetual Pentecost,’” Pope Benedict said 11 years ago in Australia, “since every time we celebrate Mass we receive the Holy Spirit who unites us more deeply with Christ and transforms us into Him.”
Today we turn to the Holy Spirit, the “greatest gift of God to mankind,” who seeks to transform us more and more into the divine image and pray: “Come, Holy Spirit, convict us of sin, rightenousness and judgment! Come, Holy Spirit, and lead us to all truth! Come, Holy Spirit, help us to become quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger! Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, kindle in us the fire of your love, and send us forth to light the world ablaze!” Amen!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading for the Epistle of St. James
All good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no alteration or shadow caused by change. He willed to give us birth by the word of truth that we may be a kind of first fruits of his creatures. Know this, my dear brothers: everyone should be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of a man does not accomplish the righteousness of God. Therefore, put away all filth and evil excess and humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls.
The Continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. John
I did not tell you this from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going to the one who sent me, and not one of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I told you this, grief has filled your hearts. But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes he will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation: sin, because they do not believe in me; righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.
