Sixth Sunday of Easter (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, May 21, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, C, Vigil
May 21, 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.
• Throughout the Sundays of the Easter Season, the Church has us focus on how Jesus intends us to share in the newness of life that comes from our communion with Him risen from the dead. In today’s Gospel, Jesus talks to us about two things he died and rose from the dead to give us: love and peace. Our hearts were made for love and for peace — and will remain restless until we have them. But love and peace are not things that we can just wish into existence. No matter how many songs and poems we write about them, or talk and dream about them, they are realities that cannot be conjured or fabricated. We will not truly experience them until we follow the means Jesus describes in the Gospel. He who is the Prince of Peace and who is Love personified describes for us this Sunday the path to obtain both.
• But before we examine what Jesus says, it’s important to focus on the stakes. We live in a world that is torn by the lack of peace. It’s easy to point to the Russian atrocities taking place in Ukraine, but there are also horrible conflicts taking place in Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Northern Nigeria and even the West Bank in the Holy Land. In several communist countries — China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea — the people live oppressed and in fear of imprisonment and death and even Cardinals are arrested on trumped up charges. Even in the United States, there’s a lack of peace, as 18-year-olds murder innocent people in Buffalo supermarkets, those clamoring for social change torch cars and businesses, pro-life offices are burned down by Molotov cocktails, Churches suffer vandalism, and hundreds of thousands of our littlest brothers and sisters in the womb have their lives gruesomely terminated in the womb. This lack of peace is one of the most obvious manifestations of a lack of love, in which we objectify, label, dehumanize and oppose others rather than will their good.
• But it’s not the only sign of a crisis of love. So many people do not feel they’re loved. St. John Paul II famously said at the beginning of his pontificate, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” People suffer when they don’t experience the love of a mom and dad, especially when they’re young. They suffer when they experience rejection from those on whom they have a crush as young people. They suffer when relationships, engagements, even marriages break up. They suffer when they have only utilitarian friendships and contacts. They suffer when they’re alone. Some out of suffering the lack of love try to distract themselves through addictions to booze and drugs, others to porn and fantasy, others to promiscuity. Others, tired of living without love, thinking that others won’t care or trying to draw attention to their pain and loneliness, take their lives. The crisis of love is real and enormously costly to individuals and all of society.
• In response to the yearnings for peace and love, Jesus speaks to us today in the Gospel. He describes the path to find love and make peace. It’s important that we listen to him with fresh ears.
• About love, he tells us that love isn’t something that just happens to us, but is the result of a choice, a choice first on God’s part and then a choice on ours. St. John had said elsewhere, “In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that God has loved us first and sent his Son as an expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10). But for us to receive that love, we can’t be passive: we open ourselves up to receiving it by giving it. Jesus tells us in the Gospel this week, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.” Love is not a feeling, Jesus says, but an action: to keep his word in faithful communion with the one who gives it. He expanded upon this thought later in the same Last Supper discourse when he said, “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). This link between love and the commandments is something that many in the world — even in the Church — have forgotten, because so often we look at the commandments as burdens, as onerous duties, rather than as a tremendous divine gift to help us grow in love.
• There is a similar link between keeping the Lord’s commandments and genuine peace, in our hearts or in the world. Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.” The peace Jesus came from heaven to earth to give us and leave with us is peace with God through the forgiveness of our sins. To experience that peace, we have to keep God’s commandments, because breaking the commandments is what alienates us from that peace, something about which a well-trained conscience will always alert us. Peace in the world, moreover, will only come about if we have this type of peace in our hearts through keeping the commandments. This is a point that is less obvious than it should be, but just think what our world would be like if we all just minimally kept the Ten Commandments. Everyone would center his or her life on God, rather than on selfish pursuits. People would come together to pray and to worship God. There would be no swearing. Parents and children would honor each other. There would be no hatred or murder. No broken families. No cheating. No robbery. No lying. No personal or class envy. We know that that would be a world far more peaceful than the world we have.
• Why, then, do so many in the world and even in the Church fail to see this clear connection between love, peace, and keeping God’s commandments? I think it’s because we have a false notion of freedom, one that makes us look at the commandments as something that enslaves us rather than liberates us. Many of us think that to be free means to do whatever we want, to be able to call the shots, to be in control, to be totally unrestrained by anything outside of us, even the truth, even God. We view the commandments and the God who gives them to us as limits to our freedom, impelling us to do things that perhaps we might not want to do. But this type of freedom is an idolatry of the self. It’s based on pretending that we’re God, that we’re the ones in charge, that we’re the ones who know what is best for us. The real notion of freedom is not to do whatever we want to do, but to do what we ought to do, to do what we’ve been created to do, namely to love God and love others without shackles. Jesus pointed to this when he linked freedom to the truth: “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The only way to be free is to live in the truth of how God made us, which he indicates to us by the commandments. The Ten Commandments are like God’s instruction manual on the path to perfection as a human being, to achieve the purpose for which he created us. To find love, peace and happiness, we need to acknowledge and follow what God has “programmed” into our hearts, the code he has placed into the DNA of a properly-formed conscience, and reiterated in the clearest way possible in giving us the commandments.
• At the Mass we’re preparing to attend this Sunday, we will receive within the Prince of Peace. We will consume the summit of God’s love, Christ’s body given and blood shed for us. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit will come to make their dwelling place with us. As we faithfully follow the Lord Jesus’ command to do this in memory of him, we ask him to send the Holy Spirit upon us anew, that we may be strengthened to keep all of his commandments in genuine freedom and thereby experience in this world and the next the peace and the love He died to give us. God bless you all.

The Gospel on which this week’s homily was based was: 

Gospel JN 14:23-29

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