The Boldness That’s Meant to Flow from Baptism, Second Monday of Easter, April 17, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the Second Week of Easter
April 17, 2023
Acts 4:23-31, Ps 2, Jn 3:1-8

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today there’s a huge contrast between the spiritual timidity of Nicodemus, a powerful member of the Sanhedrin, in the Gospel and the spiritual audacity of the humanly powerless apostles and members of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles. These readings are given to us as we begin, with this second Monday of Easter, the period of mystagogy in the Church, helping all of the newly baptized, along with all baptized members of the Church, to appreciate the change that has occurred in us through baptism, the change that’s supposed to take place from an unbaptized Nicodemus to a Christian like Peter and John and the other first disciples.
• Let’s begin with Nicodemus. He comes to Jesus at night. He’s too afraid to come to Jesus by day because Jesus was a controversial figure and he didn’t want publicly to be associated with him. We’ll see the same thing when Jesus is being tried. He’ll ask a question to try to slow down the proceedings, but he doesn’t defend Jesus publicly, even though he knows Jesus is innocent of the charges being made against him. He’s obviously struggling with understanding the full import of Jesus’ miracles. He admits, “No one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him,” and it seems he wants to believe, but his main problem — like we were analyzing with the apostles after the resurrection last week — is not of his mind but of his heart: he doesn’t yet have the courage to become a disciple in the light. Jesus points to the reason why: “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless one is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” He needs God’s help. He can’t process what’s happening by former categories. He needs new wine skins. Nicodemus seeks to ask a question about entering anew into a mother’s womb — which was not a question of curiosity or modality, as if that were possible, but one in which he seemed to be suspending disbelief to engage in silly talk —  but Jesus was describing the rebirth God needs to give us, so that one may live by the Spirit rather than by the flesh. This is what happens to us when we are reborn by water and the Holy Spirit in baptism. As St. Paul told us during the Easter Vigil, “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.” That’s our rebirth. And it’s carried out by the work of the Holy Spirit, the “pneuma” (Greek) or “ruah” (Hebrew) — words meaning both “spirit” and “wind” — who “blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” To be a disciple of Christ is to put up our sails to allow the Holy Spirit to blow us where he wishes us to go. It’s a docility, confidence and boldness that comes from life according to the Spirit. It’s something that the future Pope Francis, in a 2006 retreat to Spanish Bishops, said in very strong language that Nicodemus, “the reluctant disciple,” did not have. Baptism is supposed to make us bold, because, by the power of the Spirit, we’ve entered in Christ’s death — and therefore death has lost its sting and fearsomeness! — and into his triumphal new life.
• We see that type of Spirit-led boldness in the members of the early Church. In today’s first reading we see how the first Christians relied on and responded to the Holy Spirit at a time of persecution. Peter and John had just been released from prison after having been sternly warned not to speak in Jesus’ name. They had previously been filled by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, which had changed them from being cowardly to courageous men, from apostates to apostles, from men too much like Nicodemus when the going got tough to men much more like Jesus. It really wasn’t even an option for them to obey the Sanhedrin’s warning rather than God. They got together and didn’t strategize about how to avoid punishment, but rather prayed, and prayed “all together,” in unison, Christ’s body praying as one. They didn’t pray that God would remove all persecution from their midst but that they might preach the Gospel all the more boldly in words and in deeds. Their prayer is the Church’s longest in the New Testament. After recalling what Christ himself underwent and how God brought the greatest good from his persecution, they asked, “And now, Lord, take note of their threats, and enable your servants to speak your word with all boldness, as you stretch forth your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are done through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” Jesus had promised that whenever we ask the Father for bread, he won’t give us stones but rather send “the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Lk 11:13), so God the Father powerfully poured out the Holy Spirit upon them in what has been called the Church’s “little Pentecost”: “As they prayed, the place where they were gathered shook, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.” That word for “boldness” in the original Greek is parrhesia, a word Pope Francis loves to use a lot. There is no easy translation for it in English. It’s a Spirit-led boldness, the expression of the Gift of Courage of the Holy Spirit. It’s supposed to be a characteristic of each of the baptized.
• Today as we pray the Mass, we seek to do so like the first Christians prayed in the upper room in such a way that we may experience a similar “little Pentecost” to what they received when the Holy Spirit shook the place where they were praying, revivifying and completing the graces of our baptism. We prayed during the Exultet at the Easter Vigil, “Let this holy building shake with joy,” and that’s the prayer we bring to every Mass where we encounter the Risen Lord Jesus. Today as we prepare to receive him, we ask him for the grace that like the first Christians we will “be filled with the Holy Spirit and become one body, one spirit in Christ” (Eucharistic Prayer III), be docile to the work of the Holy Spirit and correspond more to the holy parrhesia with which he wishes to endow us and through us fill the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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