The Communion of the Holy Spirit, Seventh Thursday of Easter, June 6, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Norbert
June 6, 2019
Acts 22:30.23:6-11, Ps 16, Jn 17:20-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today as we continue our preparations for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we are provoked by today’s readings to examine the Holy Spirit’s work of unity. He is the personified loving union between the Father and the Son and he has been sent by the Father and the Son so that we might enter into that communion with God and with others, so that we might become one Body, one Spirit, in Christ. The ultimate, eschatological battle in which all of creation is engaged is one of communion versus disunity. Jesus came to reconcile all things in himself, to draw all things to himself on the Cross, to make us one flock with one Shepherd. This will culminate in heaven, when we hope to enter into the communion of saints within the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But it is opposed by the work of the devil, who is always seeking to isolate us, divide us, and permanently alienate us from God and from others. The most accurate image of Hell is not one full of flames; it’s one in which everyone is as far as possible away from others… The choices we make here on earth are ultimately able to be understood as choices for or against communion with God and others.
• Jesus prays in the Gospel that we might be as united with each other as Father and Son are united, something that’s impossible for us but not impossible for God. This communion of saints among the communion who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the Spirit’s principal work. Everything else is an explicitation of that mission. Jesus prays for the success of that Mission in today’s Gospel with insistence, begging him that we might be one so that the world might know that he was sent by the Father and that the Father loves us just as he loves him. That’s an extraordinary prayer that points to the Holy Spirit’s mission. The world will be convinced of Jesus’ presence and mission by the way we’re united with each other. The world will be convinced of God’s personal love for each of us by the way love each other. Our union, our Christian communion brought about by the Holy Spirit, is the most important element of the new evangelization. That’s why we pray for that unity at every Mass as well, uniting ourselves as Bride to Bridegroom, as Body to Head, praying for that gift.
• We might be tempted to dismiss Jesus’ prayer as something that sounds beautiful, but which is obviously utopian and beyond our grasp. But Jesus would never have prayed for something impossible. He, through whom we and the whole world were created, never engaged in “wishful thinking.” He not only knew the Truth about us and God, but enfleshed that Truth, fully aware of what was possible and what was not. It is also true that the Father would never refuse the prayer of his Son. As Jesus prayed before the raising of Lazarus, “I thank you, Father, for having heard me. I know that you always hear me” (Jn 11:42). The Father always hears his prayer. Therefore, if Jesus were praying that we be one, that we be as united among ourselves as are the Persons in the Blessed Trinity and that we abide in them as they abide in each other, then that must mean it is possible and is what should be the reality among us. This dual communion is, in fact, what will happen in heaven. If by God’s mercy we follow Christ all the way to heaven, we will be in full communion with the Communion-of-Persons-in-Love who is the Holy Trinity and in that communion, we will be in full communion with everyone else in the communion of saints.
• What is obvious to us, though, is that we do not have this union in this world. We see the ugliness of disunity, of the lack of the Holy Spirit, in today’s first reading in the dispute between the Pharisees and Sadducees about the Resurrection, and about the way so many of the Sadducees and Pharisees were not only fighting each other but against Paul and the proclamation of the Gospel. But we see such seemingly intractable divisions often. So many families are in fact divided today. Countries, like our own, are polarized. Even the Church is fractured in so many camps. This is not a new problem. In the early days of Christianity, there was the division between the Greeks and the Jews especially with regard to the care of widows. There were the numerous heresies that divided the Church: Gnosticism, Marcionism, Sabellianism, Donatism, Arianism, Nestorianism, Eutychism, Monophysitism, Monotheletism and the Iconoclasm controversy. Since 1054, the Church has been divided between Catholics and Orthodox. For the last 502 years, the Church in the West has been divided between Catholics and Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals and tens of thousands of other Protestant denominations. Outside observers studying the Church today will often notice far more easily what divides us than the unity that Christ prayed would exist. In the Church, the world, the family, even within the individual, these divisions always come from the work of the ancient serpent. Just like he divided Adam and Eve from God and each other, just as he introduced internal divisions in each of them between soul and body, divisions that led in the next generation to Cain’s killing Abel and so many other consequences, so the devil, the diabolos (or one who throws off course) is always at work seeking to separate. And we use our freedom to consent to these temptations. We give into pride, and envy, anger and greed, all of which clearly not only separate us from God but divide us from others. And others’ actions through consenting to the same temptations compounds the damage. All of this totally contrary to the communion based on the loving communion among Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Blessed Trinity.
• But it is not as if this type of unity has never been approximated. The first disciples approached it. The members of the Church in Jerusalem “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,” as we read in the Acts of the Apostles. “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.” And the impact of their loving union was dramatic, obtaining the results Jesus prayed such union would bring about: “Day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42-47).
• The chronicle of division that has happened in the Church since then is not a sign that Jesus’ prayer was ineffectual or had an expiration date. Jesus’ prayer was heard and God the Father will certainly not withhold the graces necessary for this communion. The reason for division rests in our not receiving those graces, in the actions various Christians have committed over the course of the centuries against communion, and in the various things we have failed to do in order to keep communion. Every sin ruptures communion. Every genuine act of Christian love begins to repair it. If this communion with God and with each other meant so much to the Lord that, on the night he was betrayed, he poured out his very soul praying for it to the Father, then each of us who loves him must make it our life’s mission to try to bring about that union of love. But the question is: how can this communion be brought about?
• The first thing we can say is that it will not be brought about by seeking a “lowest common denominator” version of the faith, removing from our interactions everything that is controversial. Some Christian denominations and even a few Catholic parishes have attempted this type of “Can’t-we-all-just-get-along?” type of Christianity, in which they just try to paper over the fractures that exist. But this doesn’t heal any divisions; it just ignores them. It doesn’t bring about real communion. The people are not in union with each other; they just “agree not to disagree” publicly or privately. Christ, in fact, came to bring such hidden disunity to the surface. Once he said, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Mt 10:34-36). Jesus was not coming, of course, to divide families, but was saying very clearly that some families would be divided by him. It’s not the faith that divides, but the lack of faith in others that divides. For there to be real unity in a family or in God’s family the Church, there must be not a “lowest common denominator” but a “highest,” in which everyone seeks to love God with their mind, heart, soul and strength. It’s the failure to do this that brings disunity.
• Jesus sends the gift of the Holy Spiri to bring this communion about. Last Thursday, we celebrated the Ascension of the Lord into heaven. In his last words before ascending, he instructed the apostles to stay in Jerusalem until they were clothed with power from on high. The end of Jesus’ physical life on earth was meant to pass into the beginning of the Church when that power from on high, the Holy Spirit, came down on Pentecost, which we will mark next Sunday. The Holy Spirit is the personal loving communion between God the Father and God the Son. God the Father and the Son send us the Holy Spirit to help us enter into that communion, what St. Paul calls the “unity of the Spirit.”
• Today the Church celebrates a saint of communion. St. Norbert (1080-1134) became a cleric originally out of an impure desire to get ahead in the German court, to get benefices and live well without commitment (remaining as a subdeacon to keep all of his options open). But he was injured in a terrible fall from a horse during a storm — his conversion, unlike St. Paul’s, actually involved a horse! — the Lord spoke to him saying “Turn from evil and do good. Seek peace and pursue it.” That’s what he did. After his conversion, and precisely learning from his formerly worldly ways, he would call others to “live according to the norms of the Scriptures with Christ as their model.” He did this as a priest, the founder of a reformed group of secular priests called the Premonstratensians (Norbertines), and eventually as a bishop. He was a specialist in the union of priests. So many secular priests were isolated and easy pray for the devil. He wanted to bring priests together so that they could worship God together, grow in holiness together, and work together to spread word of God and love for God. The Canons Regular of Prémontré tried to do just that. There’s much for the Church to learn from them about the importance of unity in the presbyterate. Similarly there’s much that all religious can learn from them. Often I’ve observed in communities that there’s a superficial union of polite gestures, occasionally heroic smiles, and mortifying one’s frustrations at others’ idiosyncrasies or defects. But they don’t really have a deep union because many are insecure, they don’t trust that if they share their vulnerabilities the others won’t hurt them, they don’t feel loved by the others sufficiently to be truly themselves, and they often just keep the temperature of the community comfortable rather than ardent. The Holy Spirit wants to bring them to true vibrancy and communion. Communities of priests and religious are meant ultimately to be images of the Church of a whole, which is meant to be a quasi-sacrament of divine communion. We are all called to cooperate in this as we pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost and the union in diversity the Spirit always brings.
• We pray at Mass that the Holy Spirit will make us “one body, one Spirit in Christ.”  The second great means God gives us to bring about the answer to Jesus’ prayer is the Holy Eucharist. To make us one body with Him and with others, he commanded us to consume his body. It is not coincidental that since the beginning, we have called our reception of the Lord Jesus’s real presence “holy communion,” because by receiving God inside, we are supposed to be caught up into communion with God and with all of the other members of the Church, the “Body of Christ.” The reception of Holy Communion is supposed to be sign of a communion that already exists and a source of a deepening of that communion. Thomas Aquinas used to teach that the ultimate effect of the Sacrament of Holy Communion is not Jesus’ real presence on the altar. Jesus’ real presence is both an effect and a sacrament of something else: namely the communion that he seeks to bring about in us as we, in communion with him, enter into communion with each other. To the extent that we receive Jesus in Holy Communion and don’t seek communion with each other, we’re receiving poorly. That’s why Jesus told us in the Sermon of the Mount that if we come to the altar and recognize that our brother has something against us, that we should first reconcile and then come and bring our gift. We can’t have communion with Jesus but not ardently desire communion with each other. When we truly receive Jesus well, he is at work within us, helping us to become more like him, so that we might love others the way he does, and enter into a communion of love with him. Let us pray this Mass and receive Holy Communion today earnestly desiring that unity that Jesus prayed for in the first Mass!

The readings for today’s Mass were: