Seeing, Hearing, and Praying to the Father in Jesus, Fourth Saturday of Easter, May 18, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Saturday of the Fourth Week of Easter
Beatification of Guadalupe Ortiz in Madrid
May 18, 2019
Acts 13:44-52, Ps 98, Jn 14:1-14

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, Jesus continues to speak about his relationship with the Father. On Thursday, he said that whoever accepts us, accepts the one who sent us (Christ) and the one who sent him (God the Father) and similarly the one who rejects us, implicitly rejects Christ and rejects the Father. This is because we’re in communion with Christ and Christ is in communion with the Father. Yesterday Jesus continued speaking about the reality, telling us that the only way to the Father’s house, to heaven, to being united with the Father forever is through him. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” he declared. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” To accept Jesus as the Way means that we will follow him. To accept him as the Truth means that we will believe Him and allow that truth to set us free from the lies on which we often comfortably base our existence. To accept him as the Life means that we will live off of him, deriving our very life from him not just theoretically but practically every day. The Christian life is a communion with God, a relationship, an intimate covenantal bond with Jesus through the Holy Spirit and in him with the Father. Jesus’ words, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life,” would have startled Jews, who always prayed in the Psalms for God to show them his paths so that they might know and walk in his truth, who begged him to show them the path of life. Jesus was saying, “I am that Path, I am that Truth, I am that Life.” Jesus was identifying himself to that degree with the Father.
• Today, when St. Philip asks Jesus to them them the Father, Jesus reveals that anyone who has seen him — the perfect image of the invisible God — has seen the Father because he abides in the Father and the Father in him, because the Father speaks through him and the Father dwells in him doing his works. Then he goes on to elaborate about our connection with him, saying that if we keep our communion with him, Jesus will be able to work in us and those works will be even greater than the works Jesus himself has done in life: “Amen, amen, I say to you,” he swore, “whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” It was one thing for the eternal Son of God to do the works of the Father in Palestine. It will be something even greater for us and the members of his Mystical Body to do works throughout the world. Jesus himself raised the dead, cured lepers, made the blind see, exorcised demons, fed multitudes with paltry starting material and rose from the dead. What we will be able to do in his name is bring him from heaven to earth under the appearance of bread and wine, forgive sins in God’s name, and love others far more quantitatively extensively than he has loved us. And in so doing, bring many others to the the life, the truth and the path who is Jesus and to which he calls us all. Jesus reminds us through Philip that to accept him means to see the Father in Him, to hear the Father speaking through Him, to observe the Father doing his works through Him. Accepting Jesus also means that others will be able to see the Father and the Son in us, to hear his words through us, to see his deeds of love done with our own hands and hearts. That’s why Jesus was able to say to us on Thursday that the one who receives us receives him and in receiving him-and-us, receives the Father. Because of this Communion we’re supposed to have with Jesus, our Way, Truth and Life, Jesus tells us not only that we will go “greater” works than he has done but wants us to do those greater works, so that God will be glorified when others see ultimately God working through us.
• We see throughout the Acts of the Apostles miracles done in Christ’s name. But there are so many other works of Christ we’re called to recapitulate: works of charity, of evangelization, of forgiveness. Over the course of the last two days, we’ve heard St. Paul’s homily in the Synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia in which he covered six points: the Jews’ longing for salvation; Jesus’ coming as Savior; their leaders’ rejection of that salvation through conspiring to have him crucified; God’s response in raising him from the dead; God’s desire to bring that salvation to all; and our choice to accept it or reject it today.  Today we see the response to that homily. Just as in Jesus’ earthly life, some joyfully accepted the salvation Jesus was offering through Saints Paul and Barnabas and others jealously rejected it. Through them, Jesus was coming to his own and his own was rejecting him, but to those who accepted him, he was giving power to become children of God. The setting is the same Synagogue on the following Sabbath. Since their initial “word of exhortation,” the buzz had spread. Now, a week later, “almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord,” a propitious occurrence at first sight. Jews and Gentiles had all come. The Jews had come because of what they had heard Paul and Barnabas say last week. They wanted to hear more. The Gentiles had come almost certainly because the “God-fearers,” the technical term for non-Jews who used to come to the Synagogue each Sabbath to hear the Word of God but who didn’t want to submit to circumcision or other aspects of the Jewish law, had doubtless spread word of the two men who had talked about salvation through the forgiveness of their sins being extended even to them. The Jews, however, were upset that so many Gentiles were there, hearing the Word of God as if it were meant for them. They could tolerate a few “God fearers,” attesting to the worth of what happens in their Synagogue. But to have the whole city there — in which there were far more Gentiles than Jews — risked watering everything down. And so, rather than continuing to listen to Paul as they did the previous week, they turned on him. St. Luke tells us, “When the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and with violent abuse contradicted what Paul said.” A short time later they “incited the women of prominence who were worshipers and the leading men of the city [and] stirred up a persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them from their territory.” Even though the prophets Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel had all prophesied that salvation would be extended to all the nations, these Jews wanted to maintain their privilege, and for that reason they, like many of the scribes, Pharisees, and chief priests in Jerusalem, refused to allow the fulfillment of those words. When Paul and Barnabas said, “The Lord has commanded us, ‘I have made you a light to the Gentiles, that you may be an instrument of salvation to the ends of the earth,’” many of the Jews in Antioch of Pisidia tried to extinguish that light. But the Gentiles there rejoiced in that light. Paul and Barnabas said to the Jews, “It was necessary that the word of God be spoken to you first, but since you reject it and condemn yourselves as unworthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles.” Acts tell us that the Gentiles “delighted when they hear this and glorified the word of the Lord.” They “came to believe” and to help spread the word of the Lord to the whole region. Even after Paul and Barnabas were expelled, “the disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit,” because they had received the Lord and were now walking in his light. In such a short period of time they had become disciples, learning to follow Christ through learning to follow Paul and Barnabas. What an extraordinary work of God carried out through Jesus’ prayer before the Father.
• Today the Church celebrates the beatification of Guadalupe Ortiz, the third member of Opus Dei to be raised to the altars and the first woman. She was a young woman in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, ministering to her father before he was executed by a firing squad. She became a great chemist, met St. Josemaria, ran some houses for women, and then was asked to begin Opus Dei for women in Mexico, where she continued the work of Barnabas and Paul from 1950-1956. She was brought to Rome to help lead the care for women in Opus Dei until a medical diagnosis of a serious heart condition brought her home to Spain. Not prone not to work, she slowed down by getting her doctorate in chemistry and helping to found a research institute. In her life, and after her death, many asked her to pray for them and their needs in Jesus’ name. And she did. Like with all of those beatified and canonized, we see Jesus’ continuous miracles at work. Antonio Sedano was 76 years old in 2002 when he was diagnosed with a basal cell carcinoma near his eye and was scheduled for emergency surgery. He didn’t want it or the risk. He found a prayer card to Guadalupe and prayed it, repeatedly, for his cure and gave out copies to his family members. I take the following from the beatification site: “Before knowing the date of his operation, Antonio was discouraged and frightened – also because of other health problems he suffered – and, upon receiving news of the exact date of his surgery, his fear only increased. One night when he felt especially nervous he held Guadalupe’s prayer card in his hands and prayed to her spontaneously, with a lot of faith: ‘You can do it: make it so that I don’t need to be operated. It’s nothing for you.’ After invoking Guadalupe, Antonio calmed down, slept without interruptions, and the next morning he woke up calm and rested. Upon seeing himself in the mirror, he discovered that the wound had disappeared. He couldn’t believe it; he thought these things could happen to other people, but not to him. His mood changed completely and that morning he even joked when giving the news to his daughter, who was amazed. The same thing happened to his other daughter when she realized that the tumor had disappeared from one day to the next, not even leaving a mark. Antonio called his son to give him the news, and he also communicated it to other friends. In addition, he called the secretary of the plastic surgeon to cancel the date of his surgery, since there was no longer any need for it. When the plastic surgeon examined the patient, he confirmed that the cancer had completely disappeared, due to unknown causes. His initial reaction was fright. His first question was, “Where did they operate you?” Antonio replied by describing his cure in detail and the intercession of Guadalupe Ortiz. The cure, which had happened overnight, was inexplicable. In the clinical history, on this date, it reads: “The lesion disappeared after praying to the Servant of God, Guadalupe Ortiz.” In subsequent examinations the cure was confirmed. Antonio Jesús Sedano Madrid died twelve years later, in 2014, due to heart disease. He was 88 years old. The skin cancer, of which he was cured through the intercession of Guadalupe Ortiz, never came back again.”
• As we prepare to receive Jesus today, we ask him for the grace to pray this Mass to the Father like Blessed Guadalupe Ortiz. We seek to pray it in Jesus’ name and to be so united with him as a result that we will give him true witness,  accept him to so great a degree that we will unite ourselves wholeheartedly to his saving will and go out to announce him to those here in New York with the same boldness with which Paul and Barnabas did in Galatia and beyond and Blessed Guadalupe did in Madrid, Rome and Mexico. This is the means by which we may recapitulate in our own time what happened in ancient Antioch in Pisidia: the “disciples [will be] filled with joy and the Holy Spirit!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: