Show Us Whom You Have Chosen, Seventh Sunday of Easter (B), May 12, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
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 this homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• It’s normal at the end of an academic year, as students prepare for the summer, and especially for those graduating as they get ready for life after Columbia, to ask about what’s next and to wonder about the future. A similar, more intense, thing was happening among the members of the early Church in the days immediately after Jesus’ Ascension into heaven. Before returning to the right hand of the Father, Jesus told his students or disciples, “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, and teaching them to carry out everything I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the world” (Mt 28:18-20). To help us fulfill that Mission, Jesus instructed them “not to depart Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak, [for] in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit … [and] receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:4-8). Every year, during these ten days between Jesus’ Ascension into heaven and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the Church imitates the first disciples, huddling around Mary in prayer, imploring the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so that we, strengthened by the Holy Spirit, may faithfully and fruitfully continue Jesus’ mission. As we will celebrate next Sunday, the Holy Spirit comes upon the Church as “tongues of fire” so that we might proclaim Jesus with ardent love and as a “strong driving wind” pushing us beyond our comfort zones and familiar places, so that, in tandem with the Holy Spirit, we might fulfill the trust Jesus has placed in us and the mission in which Jesus has lovingly given us a share. The same Holy Spirit who took Jesus’ first followers, almost all of whom had abandoned him on Holy Thursday, and made them intrepid witnesses, wants to work a similar moral miracle in us. That’s what we pray for in these days. That’s what we prepare for. That’s what we are helped to yearn for.
• The readings the Church gives us for the Seventh Sunday of Easter are meant to be read in this light of preparing us to give this testimony. Praying to God the Father aloud in today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “As you sent me into the world, so I sent them.” Just as Jesus has a divine mission, so do we. But we need to be ready and willing to assume that mission.
• That’s what today’s first reading is all about. This event happened in the Upper Room when the early Church got together to pray in anticipation of Pentecost. Saint Peter stood up among the 120 disciples and said that they had to replace Judas, who had betrayed the Lord Jesus. “It is necessary,” he said, “that one of the men who accompanied us the whole time the Lord Jesus came and went among us… become with us a witness to his resurrection.” The qualifications were, first, someone who been with Jesus and the apostles, someone who knew Jesus personally and not just about him second-hand; and second, someone who would become with them a witness to the resurrection, a testifier that Jesus wasn’t dead but was very much alive. Those remain the vocational criteria and missionary task of every Christian in every age. We need to be people who know Jesus through prayer, the sacraments and the moral life, who hear Jesus, who see Jesus, who touch Jesus, who follow Jesus, who are friends with Jesus, and not just people who can explain his biographical info or his doctrine. Likewise, we need to be people who are able not just to tell others that he is alive, but show people he is alive by the way he vivifies us, raising us from sin and the various necroses sin assumes in human life, and filling us with the joy he entered the world to give and perfect in us.
• We see that when it came time for the election of the new apostle, they nominated two candidates and allowed God to choose by lot. This was a familiar practice for the Jews because it was the way priests were chosen for service in the temple. The 800-1000 priests who were assembled at a given time for a week’s service in the Temple all wrote their name on rocks and the rocks were put into a big container and shaken until one came out. The name on the rock would be the one chosen to preside over the morning or evening sacrifice or to serve at the altar of incense. In this case, they put the names of Matthias and someone named Joseph, who was also called Barsabbas (Son of the Sabbath) or Justus (the Just One), on rocks and shook them out. The lot fell to Matthias and he was constituted among the apostles. On paper, if one were choosing by human criteria, it would have seemed likely that the one selected would have been the one who had already earned two nicknames because of the way he lived the faith as a just man distinguished by his love of the Sabbath day. But God’s ways are not our ways, and Matthias was the one chosen. He said yes to the call, became a witness to the Risen Jesus, and ended up giving his life in testimony not only of Jesus’ resurrection but of his faith that even after being martyred, he, too, would rise.
• This scene is so important in the history of the Church not just because of what it teaches about what we call apostolic succession. It’s key so that every Christian can learn how to cultivate a spirituality of Saint Matthias, whose feast day the Church will celebrate on Tuesday, not uncoincidentally the day on which many of those graduating will receive their diplomas. Many Catholics can treat Joseph-Justus-Barsabbas as if he were their patron saint! We can say, “Whew! Thanks be to God that he chose someone else to spread the faith so that I can just remain quietly on the sidelines!” Many don’t believe that they’ve been chosen to spread the faith and they’re happy about being supposedly overlooked. Not everyone, of course, is chosen to be a successor of the apostles, or a priest, or a religious, or even a catechist, but every Christian has been chosen by the Lord’s lot, like Matthias, to know Jesus personally, to experience his risen life, and to spread knowledge and love of him. God doesn’t always choose the people who would seem most likely. It made no sense by human logic that among the apostles there would be — instead of rabbis and scribes and Pharisees — fishermen, tax collectors and relative nobodies. On paper it likewise made little sense that Matthias would have been chosen above Joseph-Justus-Barsabbas. But God’s ways are not ours. Out of all the people on earth, we are among the 2.5 of eight to have been mysteriously allotted to be aware of God’s love incarnate in Christ and 1.4 of eight to have been chosen to receive the plenitude of love through the Sacraments and fullness of revelation in the Catholic Church. It’s not that we’re better than others, or loved more by God than others, just like God didn’t love Matthias more than Joseph-Justus-Barsabbas. But we were allotted to become more aware of that love of God and to have the chance to live in it through Christ’s Mystical Body. But with that gift comes a task: it’s to pass the knowledge of that treasure on. To whom more is given, more is to be expected. Just like God chose the Jews as the people to receive his revelation so that one day that light could be brought to all nations, so God has allotted each of us to receive the gift of himself, his words, his presence, his love, so that we may bring those gifts to others and others to God. Our names have been written on him who is the “stone rejected by the builders who has become the cornerstone.” Our names have been inscribed on the rock on whom Jesus built his Church and are united in communion with Peter and his successors. Each of us is called, from one generation to the next, to pass on to others as of first importance the faith we ourselves have received (1 Cor 15:3). We are called to take the place not only of those, like Judas, who betrayed the Lord and the Gospel, but also of the other 11 who remained faithful to the end. When we pray, as the first members of the Church did, “Show us whom you have chosen!,” God has us look in the mirror of his eyes of love and discover our deepest identity.
• So each of us has been chosen. Each of us has been given the office to take the place of those before us who were selected to transmit the Gospel. But the question is, how we can pass on that treasure effectively? How do we give that joint witness with the Holy Spirit, like St. Matthias, the other apostles, and faithful Christians throughout the centuries? We learn several lessons from the other readings today.
• The first lesson is about unity. The Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter each year is taken from the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, Jesus’ great priestly prayer on Holy Thursday, in which three times he prays to God the Father out loud that we — his followers, the members of his Mystical Body — might be one just as he and God the Father are one. In next year’s passage he will tell us why this is so important: because through the disciples’ unity, he says to the Father, “The world may know that you sent me and that you loved them even as you loved me” (Jn 17:23). The whole credibility of Jesus’ saving mission, and our continuation of it, will hinge, Jesus says, on our communion. If we’re fractured or fighting, we proclaim a counter-Gospel. That’s why the devil, the “diabolos” in Greek, the one who throws us off course, always tries to defeat Christ’s mission by dividing the Church. He’s been rather successful, when you look at the great schism of 1054 between East and West, the Protestant Reformation of 1517, and so many subsequent divisions since. But Jesus’ prayer has no expiration date. And the Holy Spirit whom he sends, the personal union between God the Father and God the Son, is more powerful than the devil, and wills to reunite us, if only we cooperate, if only we choose it with perseverance. Over the last two Sundays, we have focused on that unity. Jesus reminded us two weeks ago that, sacramentally and ontologically, he is the Vine and we are the Branches, and, if we’re united with him and in him with all of the other branches, then we will bear fruit that will perdure. Last Sunday, Jesus spoke to us of the moral communion he seeks, reminding us that he loves us just as much and as perfectly as the Father loves him, and commands us first to remain in his love and then to love others as he has loved us. St. John, in today’s second reading, doubles down on the lesson. He reminds the first Christians and all of us, “We have come to know and believe in the love God has for us,” and adds, “If God so loved us, we must also love one another.” We have been made in the image and likeness of God who is love, and if we are going to give effective witness to him, we must show by our love for each other a glimpse of the love of God for us and for them. The credibility of the Gospel, the success of our Christian mission, begins and depends on this loving communion that the Holy Spirit wants to effectuate. Today with Jesus we pray for that unity.
• The second lesson is about consecration. Jesus asks the Father to consecrate us so that we might belong not to the world but to the Father just like he belongs to the Father. 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. Jesus stresses twice that he doesn’t belong to the world and we shouldn’t belong to the world, emphasizing that we do not belong to the world “any more” than he does. Those are extraordinary words. He says that we’re supposed to have the same relationship to the world that he does and that we shouldn’t belong to the world any more than he. He says in the Gospel that he doesn’t want God the Father to take us out of the world, but to protect us from the evil one. He wants us in the world, but not of the world. He wants us to belong not to the world, or worse, to the evil one, but to Him. We’re never going to fulfill our mission as his disciples if we’re only part-time followers or half-hearted believers. He wants us to be consecrated. We were, in fact, consecrated to him in Baptism, but we need to live out that baptismal consecration, rejecting Satan, his evil works and empty promises, and staking our whole life on our faith in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in the holy Catholic Church Christ has founded, in the communion of saints here and in heaven, in the forgiveness of sins through baptism and penance, in the resurrection of the body, and in eternal life. The Holy Spirit helps us to live out this consecration faithfully.
• The third lesson is about how God will consecrate us and help us to live out our consecration: through the truth. After Jesus prays that the Father consecrate us in truth, he says, “Your word is truth.” Jesus is the truth incarnate, the Word-made-flesh. To be consecrated in the truth means that we remain in him, in his Word, in his teaching. It means that we listen to his words as words to be done. It means that we are seeking always to “live the truth” and sever any disordered attachment to the world and to the prince of this world, whom Jesus calls the father of lies. On Holy Thursday, Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth and to remind us of everything Jesus, the truth, taught us. We ask the Holy Spirit for that gift that will enable us to live out the reality of our consecration.
• The fourth lesson is to be prepared to suffer as Jesus did out of love for God and for the truth. Jesus mentions that the world will hate us, just like it hated him, because we belong to God and do not belong to the world. Jesus many times in the Gospel straightforwardly told 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, so that we could show that we believe in the love that God has for us and that we are willing to die out of love for him as he did out of love for us, conscious that if we live and die with him, we will live forever. At the end of the Beatitudes, Jesus’ moral Magna Carta, Jesus declared, “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.” The animosity we suffer from others is not strong enough to take away our unity, or annul our consecration, or change the truth, or negate the Father’s protection. And the Holy Spirit has been sent to infuse us with the gift of courage so that when we are dragged before those who hate us, we will not have to worry about what we are to say, because, Jesus promises, we will be given in that moment what we are to say, for it will not be us speaking but the Spirit of our Father speaking through us (Mt 10:19-20).
• The fifth thing we see in today’s Gospel is the necessity of joy to proclaim the Gospel effectively, even in the midst of the hatred we sometimes have to endure. 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 (Jn 15:11). The Easter Season is meant to help us to focus on that joy, the joy that flows from God’s love, from his triumph over sin and death, and from his continuous risen presence. If we don’t live the Christian faith with joy, we risk making the Good News seem like a lie. But if we do live with true joy, then people will eventually be busting down the doors of our Catholic Churches to discover our secret. Each day God announces to us “good news of great joy for all the people,” and, like the angels on Christmas morning, we’re called to share that good news of great joy with the whole world. And one of the principal fruits of the Holy Spirit in us, along with love, peace, patience, kindness and self-mastery, is joy.
• When we think about living out our mission as faithful disciples of the Lord Jesus and seeking to bring Jesus to others, we have no greater teacher than the one who is the model of the Church, Mary. She meditated on the word of God so much that the word literally 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 her whole life. As soon as she had received the incarnate love of God within her, she went with haste to share it with her cousin Elizabeth and with St. John the Baptist. After her Son’s Ascension, so that the disciples and apostles might be made ready to be consecrated by God’s word and strengthened for the mission of love he gave them, she became their great teacher, as she got the whole Church ready to receive the Holy Spirit and respond. Today, as we celebrate Mother’s Day during this month dedicated to her, we huddle around her like the first disciples, 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. And it is from the Mass that Jesus, who was sent by the Father, sends us out with him within, ignited by the Holy Spirit, and blessed in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit to announce the Gospel. Today as the Church prays for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and for an answer to the prayer, “Lord, you who know the hearts of all, show us [whom] you have chosen,” we, led by the Spirit, grasp that our vocation is not to be the Joseph-Justus-Barsabbases of our own day but the new St. Matthiases, receiving the torch from those who have gone before us and passing on as of the first importance what we ourselves received. This is the way we will set the world ablaze. With all the graces that God has bestowed on us during the last year and, for graduates, during their blessed time at Columbia, let’s joyfully get down to life-saving work.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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