Seventh Sunday of Easter and Ascension (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, May 11, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter and the Ascension, Vigils
May 11, 2024

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 us this Sunday. I should probably say “conversations” in the plural, since, depending upon where you live in the United States, you will have one of two Gospels. Those in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nebraska will hear the Gospel of the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Those everywhere else will have the Gospel of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus, since the bishops in those ecclesiastical provinces decided in 1998 and 1999 to transfer the Ascension from the 40th day after Easter to the Seventh Sunday. They did so because they recognized that if they didn’t, Catholics who do not attend on Holy Days of Obligation would always miss this celebrating liturgically this very important event in the Lord’s life. Ironically, however, in making that decision to move the Ascension to the 43rd  day after Easter, the bishops in those provinces were eliminating that Catholics would hear Jesus’ words on the importance of Christian unity from the 17th Chapter of St. John’s Gospel, a third of which is proclaimed on the Seventh Sunday each year. That Catholics in the US do not have unity with regard to the celebration of the Solemnity of the Ascension is unfortunate and I would like to make what is now an annual appeal: that just as the Church is praying for unity to be restored to the celebration of Easter between Catholics and Orthodox Christians, so we might pray and speak to the Catholic bishops in our land about restoring unity to the celebration of the Ascension on the 40th.  Since, however, we are still in a situation where there is not unity, please permit me to say something about both Gospels, conscious of the fact that, since Jesus is our interlocutor in every prayerful and consequential liturgical conversation, 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 extraordinarily rich interpersonal dialogue Jesus had with God the Father the night he was betrayed but to enter into that conversation.
• In the section of John 17 we have this year, Jesus mentions five things:
  • First, Jesus prays that God the Father will protect us, that we may be one in communion just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one. A little later he asks the Father specifically to keep us from the evil one. The point is that the devil constantly seeks to divide us, whereas God wants to bring us into true communion with Him and each other. Any of us who really believe in Jesus, who love him, must pray and work for unity. The fact that Christians as a whole have been divided by so many schisms across the centuries, the fact that even Catholics are often divided into ideological camps, is a great scandal, one that Jesus wants you and me to help remedy.
  • Second, Jesus prays that we may “share [his] joy completely.” As he told us last Sunday, he came so that his joy might be in us and our joy be made complete. The Easter Season is meant to help us to focus precisely on that joy, the joy that flows from God’s love, from his continuous presence, and from his triumph over sin and death. If we don’t live the Christian faith with joy, we risk making the Good News seem like a lie.
  • Third, Jesus mentions that the world will hate us, just like it hated Jesus, because we do not belong to the world any more than Jesus does but belong to God. Jesus many times in the Gospel promised us that we would be hated by those who don’t want to believe, love and follow God, that what they did to him, they would try to do to us. He said God the Father would permit this, just like he permitted it to happen to Jesus, so that we would be able to give more effective witness. At the end of the Beatitudes Jesus would say, “Blessed are you when people hate you, revile you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me” for “your reward will be great in heaven.” This hatred we suffer from others is not strong enough to take away our unity, or negate the Father’s protection, or rob us of our joy. It only will if we fear that hatred from others more than we trust in the love of God.
  • Fourth, Jesus asks the Father to consecrate us in the truth, adding that he has consecrated himself for us so that we can be consecrated in truth. To be consecrated literally means to be cut off (sacer) to be with (con) some other reality. In consecrating us, God sets us apart, he cuts us from worldliness, from the profane, so that we can be with him. Consecration is a sacred dedication in which we transfer our belonging, the title of the ownership of our life, totally to God. It’s like the Covenants of the Old Testament in which he becomes our God and we become his people, the sheep of his flock. He does this first in baptism, in which we’re marked by a special seal. He does so also, as Jesus says, by his Word, which is meant, like a double-edged sword, to prune us of anything that doesn’t belong to God. Do we live this sense of belonging? That we belong to God, for example, more than the most loving husbands and wives belong to each other?
  • All four of these points culminate in mission. Jesus says, “As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.” Being set apart to belong to God, we now share Christ’s mission. Just as the Father sent Jesus, so Jesus sends us. He sends us consecrated in the Truth that sets us free, as messengers of the Words of Eternal Life. He prepares us for the opposition we will receive from some, just like the apostles and missionaries in every age have endured, but likewise he promises us the Holy Spirit who will help us in trial to give effective spiritual witness. And he sends us out united, seeking to bring them into community. Jesus says in next year’s portion of John 17, that he wants us to be one “so that the world may believe that you, Father, sent me and love them just as much as you love me.” To help others believe in Jesus and in the love that God has for them, we must evince that love with each other.
  • That’s what the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter is all about.
• If we turn to the Gospel that the Church proclaims this year on the Ascension, which took place over six weeks after Jesus’ words in the Upper Room, we see how Jesus essentially reiterates what he said in John 17. He tells us, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized,” whoever in other words, accepts the gift of consecration, “will be saved.” He mentions the opposition we will get from demons, serpents, even others who seek to poison us, so that we won’t be afraid of “any deadly thing.” And we see how the apostles respond to Jesus’ valedictory as he ascends to heaven by going forth and preaching everywhere, while, St. Mark tells us, “The Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.” Those signs were not just physical healings and other powerful miracles. They were the compelling signs of Christian joy, unity, and courage in the face of threats. They were the witness of their belonging to God and their consecration within Christ’s consecration, a testimony that no intimidation, not even torture, could sever. And we’re Christians today because of the way they faithfully responded to Jesus’ words in the Upper Room and Jesus’ words before he was taken to heaven.
• What Jesus tells us in both of these Gospels can be applied to the truth about what he seeks to do in us through our communion with Him in the Holy Eucharist. This week the Church in the United States will begin a four-part, 65-day National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, with routes leaving from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Canadian and Mexican borders, all converging in Indianapolis on July 16, the day before the first National Eucharistic Congress in 83 years. I am privileged to be able to carry Jesus for these nine-plus weeks on the eastern route, starting in New Haven, Connecticut, as we ask him to bless our Land. It is in the Eucharist that Jesus seeks to fulfill the prayer he made on Holy Thursday that we be one as he and the Father are one. The same Holy Spirit who is the loving union between the Father and the Son comes down upon us every Mass not just to change bread and wine into Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity, but to make us “one body, one spirit in Christ.” The sacrifice of the Mass helps us to enter into the consecration of Christ, to fill us with joy, to protect us from the devil’s division by our clinging to our Eucharistic Lord, and to prepare us to be sent out on mission not just with the words of truth but with the word-made-flesh, truth incarnate within. The greatest accompanying sign that accompanies the Church’s witness is meant to be, first, the Risen Christ himself made truly present on our altars and in our tabernacles, and then the union through communion the Holy Spirit makes, which is what helps convince the world that God the Father sent the Son and truly loves us as he loves the Son. That’s why the Eucharistic Revival is so important for the revival and flourishing of the Church. That’s what the Eucharistic Pilgrimage beginning this week is so important because the journey of the pilgrim Church on earth is ultimately a Eucharistic procession with the Risen Jesus all the way to the heavenly Jerusalem where God’s desire for us to be one in the communion of saints within the communion of persons who is our Triune God will be fulfilled.
• As we prepare for the gift of Sunday Mass, no matter what Gospel we’ll hear, we give God thanks that his prayer during that first Mass on Holy Thursday and his Great Commission have no expiration date. And we ask the Holy Spirit whom Jesus ascended to heaven to send down to us will help us to respond to Jesus’ words as faithfully as his first followers, so that great multitudes after us may hear and live Jesus’ life saving, joy-filling words, and come to faith and, through the Mass, communion with God and us.

The Gospels on which this homily was preached were: 

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