Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (A), Vigil
May 23, 2020
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.
- This Sunday is frankly one of the more difficult ones for me to prepare a homily for a national and international broadcast because it’s different depending upon where you live. Some countries and dioceses have transferred the Solemnity of the Ascension from the 40th day after Easter, which was Thursday, until Sunday. Others have retained the Ascension on the 40th So we have two conversations we need to consider and connect today. Let’s try to do our best. Insofar as Jesus is our interlocutor in every prayerful conversation with the Gospel, everything is intrinsically coherent.
- We’ll take the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter first, since it happened first in time. In it we have the awesome privilege not only to eavesdrop on the prayer Jesus made to God the Father the night he was betrayed but to enter into Jesus’ conversation with the Father. Jesus begins by asking the Father to glorify him so that he could by glorify the Father. That mutual glory would happen, he says, through his giving eternal life to us and he defines eternal life as knowing God, knowing not in the sense of acquaintances or even great friends but Biblically, knowing someone in a totally committed spousal form. That mutual glory would happen, Jesus continued, by Jesus’ accomplishing the word the Father had given him to do, which was to save the human race through his passion, death and resurrection. That glory would also happen, Jesus says, by his being glorified in us, the Church, through our continuation of his mission. Jesus tells God the Father that while he is coming to the Father, we will remain in the world, and so he prays for us. He prays, as we see later in John 17, for three things.
- First, that we may be one, just as Jesus and the Father are one. That way, he says, everyone will know that the Father sent the Son and loves us just like he loves the Son. That’s an incredible prayer, that our communion with each other would resemble the communion in the Blessed Trinity. That’s why prayer and work for Church unity are so important for any true disciple of Jesus.
- Second, that God the Father protect us from the evil one. This is what we pray at the end of the Our Father, that we may not be led into temptation but delivered from evil. God the Father does protect us, while leaving us free, meaning we must choose to entrust ourselves to him rather than presumptuously thinking we can cavort with evil with no consequences.
- Third, that God the Father make us saints. Jesus asks that God the Father will consecrate us in the truth of God’s word. That word consecrate means to sanctify.
- The fourth flows from the first three: that the love with which the Father loves the Son may be in us and Jesus be in us. This is what happens when we truly united with God and each other, when we’re free of the evil one, when we become holy as God is holy.
- That conversation between Jesus and the Father is ultimately one of the most consequential conversations that has ever occurred. Jesus wants us to cooperate with that prayer for unity, for protection, for sanctity and for love. But we see in Jn 17 that he prays not only for us, but for “those who will believe in me through the word” of the apostles and their successors, that they, too, might receive that great gift. And that takes us to the Gospel of the Ascension.
- In that Gospel we hear what is called Jesus’ great commission, the words he gave to the eleven apostles right before he was taken to heaven. Jesus praised the Father in John 17 for having given him “authority over all people,” now he turned 43 days later, and said to the apostles, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold I am with you always until the end of time.” Jesus was saying that his power and authority in heaven and earth would be exercised through the Church, through the sacraments, beginning with baptism, through the Word of God as his teaching was brought to all nations, through the moral life, through observing all that Christ commanded, and through a full-time communion of life and love with God-with-us, who promised to be with us until the end of time. Jesus was sending out the Church, he was sending out us, to continue his preaching, to continue his sanctifying through the sacraments, to continue his charity, loving others as he has loved us, and to continue his communion, remaining with God and he is with us until the end of time. This is the way in which Jesus’ prayer for union, protection, sanctification and love will be brought to fulfillment. The Solemnity of the Ascension is an opportunity for us to examine how seriously we take the Mission Jesus gave us of trying to bring him to everyone we know.
- The last thing I want to mention is what Jesus said about the Holy Spirit as he was preparing to ascend. He told the apostles not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the “promise of the Father” when “in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” The work of proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, of entering into the life of God through the Sacraments and moral life, of growing in holiness, love and union is not a work we can accomplish on our own. But the Holy Spirit is sent to us to bring about that moral miracle. We are now within the Church’s annual decenarium or ten days of prayer in anticipation of the feast of Pentecost, which we will celebrate next week. I would urge everyone listening to be praying each day like the apostles did, around Mary, waiting for the outpouring of this divine gift, who will help us glorify God the Father and God the Son and help us, with tongues of fire, proclaim with ardent love that God is with us, saving us, not only during the time of the pandemic but in the face of every challenge. And so we finish together by praying, “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.”
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