Sent into the World By and Like Jesus as a Agents and Signs of Communion, Seventh Sunday (B), May 12, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year B
May 12, 2024
Acts 1:15-17.20-26, Ps 103, 1 John 4:11-16, Jn 17:11-19

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• We are now within the novena between the Lord’s Ascension and Pentecost Sunday. On Ascension Thursday we saw that as the Lord was ascending to heaven, he left his disciples with a mission, specifically his mission. He himself had come from heaven to earth in order to bring the entire human race into a communion of love, a family. He prays in today’s Gospel that we may be one, as He and the Father are one. While he could have chosen to remain on earth to fulfill this mission of loving communion himself, he loved us so much, and trusted us so much, that he put this mission into our hands. And he told us how we would accomplish this mission of bringing about real unity, genuine communion with God and with each other in his last words: he said “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature… , baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to carry out everything I have commanded you” (Mk 16:15-18; Mt 28:18-20). There were three things he said that needed to be done to bring about this communion:
  • Proclaiming the Gospel — In order to come into communion, we must first realize that and why we need it, and be invited into it. This communion is based on the truth about God, about us made in his image, about the destiny God wishes to give us, and that is what makes this preaching such Good News and so necessary. We cannot possibly have the type of communion that exists in God if we are still in ignorance.
  • Baptizing in the name of the Blessed Trinity — This communion toward which we’re called is something beyond our own abilities. We need God’s help for it to be achieved and he gives us that help through baptism and the sacraments to which baptism leads.
  • Teaching others to carry out everything Christ has commanded us — To remain in communion, we must live the Christian moral life, doing what Christ told us we would need to do to keep our union with him in all our choices. The Christian moral life is summarized in the dual commandment of love of God and love of neighbor. As Jesus said to us in last Sunday’s Gospel, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love” (Jn 15:10).
• The Church was founded by Christ at the end of the end of the first decenarium between his Ascension and Pentecost in order to be what the fathers of the Second Vatican Council called a “sacrament of communion” (LG 1), an external sign of communion with God and with each other that brings about what it signifies. The Church is meant to be a visible witness of communion with God and with each other and is the means God has chosen to achieve that communion. Pope Benedict, in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, shows that the essence of the Church involves the three elements Christ described right before his Ascension. He referred to them by the Greek terms used by St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles: kerygma/martyria, leitourgia, and
  • The Church first must be distinguished by kerygma, which is the Greek word for the proclamation of Christ’s saving work. This is the first step in the building of communion, because no one can come to faith in Christ unless others proclaim the Gospel. St. Paul asks the early Christians in Rome, “How are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?” (Rom 10:14). For others to come into this communion, the Gospel must be preached. We wouldn’t be here today in this chapel unless the first Christians took up this mission, unless the second generation was faithful to it, unless the third did their part, unless our parents did their part, and unless so many priests, religious and catechists did their part during our lifetime. And others, in our own generation and succeeding generations, will not come to this communion for which Jesus died unless we do our part. This proclamation to which Jesus calls us is not done exclusively with words. This is what the second word Benedict gives us signifies — martyria, which literally means “witness.” The Gospel is proclaimed not just by our lips but by our body language. Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s message would likely have been just as strong even if she had had laryngitis her entire life, because, as a Missionary of Charity, she proclaimed the Gospel to people’s eyes before their ears, giving a tangible witness to the Gospel by teaching others how lovable they are in God’s eyes. But this word martyria also refers to martyrdom, when we proclaim by the witness of our choices that Jesus is someone worth living for and worth dying for, the pearl of great price (Mt 13:46) worth giving up everything else we have, including earthly life itself, in order to obtain.
  • The second thing which the Church must do to symbolize and effectuate communion with God and each other is leitourgia, the worship of God through the sacraments. We get our word “liturgy” from this Greek root. Liturgy refers to all the public prayer of the Church, but particularly the most important public prayer, the celebration of the sacraments, which bring us into communion with God, restore us to that communion, or intensify it. Baptism, for example, wipes away sin and brings us, as God’s beloved sons and daughters, into his family. Holy Communion brings us into communion with God, through the reception of Jesus’ body and blood, and into communion with each other as members of that same body. To have true communion with Christ we need to have communion with each other.
  • The third and final essential aspect of the Church’s nature is diakonia, the Greek word for loving service. We get our word “diaconate” from this service, because deacons are supposed to carry out the charity of Christ in service to the needy. If we recognize the communion that God wills to exist, we realize that everyone is called to be our brother or sister and we’re called to love them as we would a brother or a sister in need.
• Pope Benedict taught that for the Church to be true to her mission, she had to be marked at every level of the Church — individual faithful, religious community, parish, diocese and the Church as a whole — by all three of these activities Christ gave us as he ascended to heaven. Christ calls us to excel in each of them.
• The readings given to us today help us to focus on all three of these aspects. Christ says at the end of today’s Gospel in prayer to his Father, “Just as you have sent me into the world, so I send them.” The Father sent Jesus into the world to found a family in loving communion, and before he ever commissioned them to do it in the three ways he described, he modeled for them what needed to be done.
  • Jesus himself sought to bring about communion by preaching the truth. It’s hard to read the Gospel without seeing Jesus’ great compassion on the crowds shown first and above all by his teaching them about the truths that are in the final analysis the most important of all. In his interrogation by Pontius Pilate on Good Friday, he summarized his whole life saying, “I came to give witness to the truth” (Jn 18:37). In his three years of preaching and teaching, he showed the criteria about how to be his “mother, brother or sister” by “doing the will of my Father in heaven” (Mt 12:47).
  • Jesus likewise came to establish the sacraments as the means by which that communion would be symbolized and effectuated. He sent the Twelve out to baptize. He ordained them priests on Holy Thursday and sent them out to continue the celebration of the Mass, telling them to “do this in memory of me.” On Easter Sunday evening, he said to the apostles, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you,” breathed on them, gave them the Holy Spirit, and empowered them with the ability to forgive and retain sins in God’s name (Jn 20:21-23).
  • Finally, Jesus came not just to teach us about how we should behave but to lead us by example, telling us that our charity is supposed to be modeled on his own: “love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12). He symbolically did the work of a slave on Holy Thursday and washed his disciples’ feet, telling them, “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (Jn 13:15).
• The Lord who gave us this great commission to carry on his saving work in these three areas also taught us by word and example that this mission of bringing the world into communion with God and with each other would not be easy. He told us there would be opposition. He died for it after all. He told us that we would suffer for it as well. In today’s Gospel, he prayed to his Father that he might “protect us … from the evil one” — so that we may be one as He and the Father are one. The evil one, of course, is the devil. The word for the devil in Greek is diabolos, and it means literally the one who “throws us off course.” If God’s plan is to unite us in an eternal communion with him and with each other, then the devil’s goal is to thwart that communion. And if God’s means to bring about that vertical and horizontal communion is through preaching, the sacraments, and works of charity, then the devil is going to try to steer us off course in all three of those ways.
  • If Jesus prayed in today’s Gospel that we be “consecrated in the truth,” which is the word of God, the devil, whom Jesus called “a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44), is going to try to get us not to take the word of God seriously. For some people, he has been successful in getting them to ignore the word of God altogether. They never read the Bible, they never come to Mass, they never watch the many programs on television, etc. For others, he tries to convince them that they should show no initiative with becoming one with the word of truth that will sanctify us. They may hear the word of God at Mass, but they’ll never really water the seeds of the word, or pick up the Bible on their own and allow God to make them holy through it. With others, he tries to poison the seeds of the word with weeds, with lies, by, for example, reducing love to sentimentality or by trying to substitute human wisdom for divine. One way or the other, he tries to take our attention off the word of God, which is the means by which God has given us to “sanctify us in the truth.”
  • The second means the devil employs to steer us off path is through trying to separate us from the sacraments. He tries to get some to think that baptism isn’t really necessary for salvation, but just a beautiful ceremony to celebrate the birth of a baby. He gets many to think Sunday Mass is optional and that we’ve got so many more pressing things to do. He tries to separate us from Christ in the Sacrament of Penance, so that we may never receive the forgiveness without which we cannot be saved. He tries to separate couples who have been joined by God in the Sacrament of Marriage, driving wedges between them. He tries to separate priests and faithful from their bishop and the faithful from the Holy Father.
  • Third, the devil tries to steer us off course with respect to works of charity. Real charity is shown in forgiveness and in sacrificing ourselves for others, especially for those for whom we would not normally make sacrifices — like our enemies, or strangers, or those whom we find on a human level difficult to love. The evil one can try to lie to us to convince us that “justice” says not to forgive, or that we shouldn’t help them so that they can learn to help themselves, etc. He can convince us that we are loving and good people, because we love those who love us, those who are good, those who are faithful, etc. But God calls us to love everyone, including those we find hard to like. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” (Mt 5:43-46). So we, too, must make our sun rise on the evil and the good, on those whom we think deserve our love and those who we think do not, on those who have forgiven us and on those who have not yet forgiven us. The only way to real communion is merciful love, and God wants us to be loving and merciful. The devil wants us to maintain grudges.
• All three of these aspects are essential, but if there’s one that’s particularly necessary today, it’s the first. Jesus prayed to his Father in the Gospel than we might be “consecrated in the truth,” the truth of his word. He said that he made himself holy so that we might be likewise made holy through that word. By our baptism and particularly by our confirmation, we were consecrated by God and to God for this verbal witness. In the first reading today, we see what happened in the early Church. After Judas’ betrayal, the early Church convened to see who would take his place. They prayed to God saying, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen.” The lot fell to Matthias, and he began with them to preach the Gospel until he was eventually martyred for the faith. Likewise, today, after so many Christians have been unfaithful to God — lay people, religious, priests, even some bishops — we turn to God, who knows every heart, and pray, “Show us whom you have chosen,” and he responds by choosing us. You and me. The Second Vatican Council said that all of us through baptism share in Christ’s three-fold mission as prophet, priest and shepherd, to proclaim the word of God, to participate in the sacraments and to lay down our lives for others out of love. The Lord has chosen us to give this witness. If we love God and love others, we will proclaim the Gospel. St. John says in the second reading that God’s love “abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God.” If we know God and love God, how could we not talk about him?
• To help us overcome the devil as well as our own weaknesses, Christ promised a great gift. As he was ascending to heaven, he told the disciples to return to the Upper Room and pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Not only would the Holy Spirit work in all the sacraments to bring us into communion with God, not only would he fill our hearts with love and help us to serve others with genuine Christian charity, but he would help us to proclaim the Gospel as we should. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth (Jn 16:13) so that we might consecrated in the truth. He would teach us everything and remind us of everything Christ has said to us (Jn 14:26), so that we could put it into practice and pass it on to others. Against all opposition, Jesus said, “Do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit” (Mk 13:11).
• The Holy Spirit has been given to the Church to help us to accomplish the very mission for loving unity that Jesus entrusted to us. As we get ready to celebrate next week the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the first generation of disciples, we ask Him to come and fill the hearts of us, his faithful, and enkindle in us the fire of his love, so that we may always remain in that love of God and love of others which is the whole mission of the Church.
• We have no greater teacher of what this means than she who is the model of the Church, Mary. She meditated on the word of God so much that the word actually took on her flesh. She was so docile to the Holy Spirit that the Holy Spirit overshadowed her not just at Jesus’ conception but throughout Mary’s whole life. And after Jesus’ Ascension, so that they might be made ready to be consecrated by God’s word and strengthened for the mission of love he gave them, the apostles huddled around Mary to learn from her these lessons. Today, as we celebrate Mother’s Day during this month dedicated to her, we huddle around her, too, with love and trust. The same Holy Spirit who overshadowed her is about to overshadow this altar and all of us. The same Word that took her flesh is about to enter us. It is through our Holy Communion with Christ, made possible by the action of the Holy Spirit in the Mass, that we become united with others. Hence it is fitting that it was on the day of the first Mass that Jesus prayed the words of today’s Gospel that we, all his disciples, may be one, just as the persons of the Blessed Trinity are one. Through this communion, may the Lord bring about that communion, and help us to be his instruments to bring everyone else into it as well.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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