Seventh Sunday of Easter and Ascension (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, May 28, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, C, and for the Ascension, C, (Vigil)
May 28, 2022

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.
• Depending upon where you live, that conversation may be different this Sunday, because those in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nebraska will hear the Gospel of the Seventh Sunday of Easter, while those everywhere else will hear what those in the states I just mentioned heard on Thursday, the Gospel of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus. The reason for the confusion is in 1998 and 1999, bishops in most regions of the United States decided to transfer the Ascension from the 40^th day after Easter to the Seventh Sunday, believing that if they didn’t, Catholics who seldom attend on Holy Days of Obligation would always miss celebrating liturgically this very important event in the Lord’s life. Ironically, however, in making that decision to move the Ascension to the 43^rd day after Easter, the bishops in those provinces were preventing Catholics from hearing Jesus’ words on the importance of Christian unity from the 17^th Chapter of St. John’s Gospel, a third of which is proclaimed on the Seventh Sunday each year. Catholics in the US unfortunately do not have unity with regard to the celebration of the Solemnity of the Ascension and I would urge that just as the Church is praying for unity to be restored to the celebration of Easter between Catholics and Orthodox, so we might pray and speak to our bishops about restoring unity on the celebration of the Ascension on the 40^th
• Since there is not unity, however, 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.
• In the Gospel for the Ascension this year, taken from St. Luke’s, Jesus tells his apostles and first disciples, “You are witnesses,” and instructs them in his name to preach “repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, … to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” This is the good news that in St. Mark’s version of the Ascension Jesus said they would “go into the whole world … to … proclaim to every creature.” This is the way that, according to St. Matthew, they would “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them” in the name of the Trinity and “teaching them to carry out all” that Jesus commanded. Jesus could have stayed on earth until the end of time crisscrossing the globe after every lost sheep, but as he ascended, he placed his own mission in our hands. He took the training wheels off our discipleship and removed any excuses we might have to pass the buck of sharing and spreading the faith. His confidence and trust in us, despite our weaknesses, is astonishing. He wanted to incorporate us into — and actually entrust to us — his mission of the redemption of the world. But he didn’t leave us orphans (Jn 14:18). St. Luke gives us a beautiful image and detail in this Sunday’s Gospel passage, that Jesus “led them out as far as Bethany, raised his hands, and blessed them. As he was blessing them, he parted from them and was taken up to heaven” (Lk 24:50-51). Jesus departed in the very act of blessing us. And he’s seeking to transform us into his incarnate benediction of the world through how we become his witnesses and proclaim his Gospel to every creature. The great manifestation of that blessing is the descent of the Holy Spirit, for whose renewed coming we pray in the annual novena — or more accurately decenarium or ten days of prayer — between Ascension Thursday and Pentecost. Jesus speaks about the Holy Spirit in this Sunday’s Gospel when he says, “Behold I am sending the promise of my Father upon you,” and instructs the disciples to “stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” That’s the power, the blessing, that came down upon the Church on Pentecost, which we will celebrate next Sunday. Jesus seeks to send the same Holy Spirit down upon us to help us fulfill the mission he entrusts to us and to become that blessing.
• This is what happens in the consequential conversation Jesus seeks to have with us on the Ascension. He wants essentially to transform our life-encompassing dialogue with him into one that will invite others into that conversation, into the communion of the Church, into the divine life flowing from baptism and the sacraments, into the moral life that flows from observing what Christ commands, into the evangelical life as we seek to share with every creature the treasure of our faith.
• In the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, we see one of the most important elements Jesus identifies for our being able to fulfill the Mission Jesus gives us on the Ascension, both individually and as his mystical body. It’s an amazing Gospel, taken from what Jesus said on Holy Thursday 43 days before, but which the Church reads with far greater understanding in the light of the Resurrection, Ascension, and Descent of the Holy Spirit. In it, we have the awesome privilege to eavesdrop and enter into the extraordinarily deep interpersonal dialogue Jesus had with God the Father the night he was betrayed. In the passage we have this Sunday, Jesus tells the Father that he was praying not only for the apostles who would remember and write down what he said, but for all those who would believe in him through their word, meaning us. What did he pray for? He astonishingly prayed that we would be one, just as he and the Father are one in the person of the Holy Spirit. And why did he pray for that unity among us resembling the Trinitarian communion? He told us: so “that the world may believe that you sent me and that you loved them even as you loved me.” The credibility of Jesus’ whole mission — his incarnation, hidden life, preaching, miracle working, passion, death and resurrection — hinges, he was saying, on the unity among his followers. If we have real communion, if we really love each other as Jesus has loved us first, if we truly live as a loving family lives — patiently sacrificing for each other, being there for each other in good times and bad, trying to grow in love of God together — it will amaze the world. This is what happened because of the communion among the first disciples, when they sacrificed everything to live in common as a family, they prayed together, they went to the Temple together, they ate together. Their mutual love was so extraordinary that people recognized how much they were made for it and sought baptism trying to make up for lost time. That’s why Jesus would say that people would know that they’re ultimately loved by God by the way Christians express that love for each other and for them in true communion. People would learn the truth of Jesus’ mission — how God who is love so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that the world might be saved through him — by the loving communion that would exist among those who accepted that gift, lived according to what he commanded (namely, to love one another as he has first loved us), and remained with him who promised at his Ascension to remain with us until the end of time.
• So Jesus upon ascending into heaven left us both the content and the means by which we would proclaim, teach, baptize and witness: it would be fundamentally the love of God existing within the loving communion of the Church. People seeing the way we treat each other are meant to see God through witnessing the loving bonds that only God can bring about. That’s why the scandal of division is so destructive to the mission of the Church — schism between Catholics and the Orthodox or later the Protestants, the division among Catholics, some of whom for example live and teach by Church teaching and others who flaunt their failure to do so, the fissures within parishes because of ethnicity, or over priest favorites, or over little fiefdoms; the lack of unity now of some bishops and priests giving, and others refusing to give, Holy Communion to those who think they can reconcile “Thou shalt not kill!” with celebrating and funding a so-called right to kill our littlest brothers and sisters in the womb. The Holy Spirit for which we pray during these days in a particular way, the Spirit who is the loving, interpersonal, eternal communion between the Father and the Son, wants to help us to overcome these divisions and become one as the Father and Son are one. For the Church to fulfill the Mission we received from Jesus as he ascended, we need to cooperate with that work of the Holy Spirit and become signs and instruments of unity in the Church.
• The great place where, and the great means whereby, that communion is brought about is the Holy Eucharist. By the power of the Holy Spirit, not only are bread and wine changed into Jesus’ Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, but he also changes different men and women, boys and girls, into “one body, one spirit in Christ,” as we pray in the third Eucharistic Prayer. By our receiving Holy Communion, we enter into communion with Jesus and into communion with all those in communion we Jesus. Through the Mass, God seeks indeed to make us one so that the world may know that the Father sent the Son and loves us just as he loves the son. This is the truth to which Jesus, as he blesses us in the Holy Eucharist, summons us to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.

The two Gospels on which this Sunday’s homily was based were: 

Seventh Sunday of Easter

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