The Courage that Comes from Accepting Christ’s Testimony and Not Rationing the Spirit, 2nd Thursday of Easter, May 2, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Second Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Athanasius, Bishop and Doctor
May 2, 2019
Acts 5:27-33, Ps 34, Jn 3:31-36

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The Easter Season is meant to be a post-baptismal mystagogy, the period in which the Church helps the newly baptized — and those baptized many years before — enter into the reality of the mystery of Christ’s risen life received in the Sacraments, pondering his words, and living the truth so that all our works may be seen as done in God, as we heard earlier this week. Throughout this Second Week of Easter, we have been pondering the mystery of our baptismal sharing in Christ’s risen life through Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus about spiritual rebirth. Tomorrow we will begin eight days of focus on the Eucharistic reality of the Christian life, our ability to receive Jesus’ risen Body and Blood each day. And all of these truths we’re able to see enfleshed by the members of the early Church in the readings from the Acts of the Apostles.
• Today we get the concluding words of the chapter of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in which Jesus — or St. John, the text is a little ambiguous and scholars go back and forth about whether St. John is quoting Jesus or whether he is giving his own theological reflections on why Jesus said what he said — describes his own mission and the life of anyone born anew from above. St. Paul told us on Easter Sunday morning, as he told the Colossians, “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Today Jesus describes this difference between living with Him risen from the dead or living according to the old Adam: “The one who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of earthly things,” Jesus says, “but the one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard.” Jesus testifies to what he has seen and heard and a Christian must be a witness to what he has seen and heard in his encounters with Christ in person, in prayer, in the Sacraments. Jesus describes that he came as light into the world but many preferred the darkness. “No one accepts his testimony,” Jesus says, referring in general to the fact that most don’t seek the things that are above, most don’t leave the darkness to enter the light, most don’t allow Jesus to change their fundamental orientation at the root, most don’t really convert and continue to lift up their hearts to God. But, Jesus adds, “Whoever does accept his testimony certifies that God is trustworthy for the one whom God sent speaks the words of God. He does not ration his gift of the Spirit.” We believe what Jesus says on the basis of our faith in God. Because we trust in God we trust in what he says and gives witness to. The one born from above allows the Holy Spirit to give witness within him not, putting up any resistance to what God is doing. The Holy Spirit is a witness just as much as the apostles to Jesus’ risen life and when we are reborn from him, we give witness together with him. We don’t ration the Holy Spirit’s work, and he helps us, as St. Paul described to the Galatians and the Romans, to “live by the Spirit,” which allows us to be “concerned with the things of the Spirit.”  And for that reason, Jesus says, such a person living by the Spirit is already living eternally because he is through the Spirit in union with Christ’s risen life: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.” That’s the life that begins when we’re baptized with water, the Spirit and fire. And that eternal life always experienced makes us courageous in the face of all challenges and vicissitudes, something that, as we saw earlier this week, Nicodemus, the reluctant disciples, desperately needed in order to leave the darkness and come to live with Jesus in the light.
• We see life according to these principles in the apostles in the first reading. They accepted Jesus’ testimony, they didn’t ration the gift of the Spirit, but with all boldness were giving witness with the Holy Spirit to what they had seen and heard. After the same members of the Sanhedrin who had had Jesus publicly tortured and executed were threatening them with the same fate had given them strict orders to stop teaching in Jesus’ name only to be met by their “fill[ing] Jerusalem with your teaching,” St. Peter and the Apostles said, “We must obey God rather than men.” They kept giving witness, undaunted because they knew that they were already experiencing eternal life and even should they be martyred, that wouldn’t be the end of their life but the passage to life with Jesus. That was the source of their boldness. They sought the things above, they spoke of heavenly things, they grasped that, just like Jesus’ testimony, not everyone would receive theirs, but to everyone who did, they testified that God is trustworthy and would have eternal life. They appeal to us to accept that testimony coming from God the Holy Spirit, to order our life to the things that are above and to fill New York and beyond with this teaching. That’s what Jesus, whose Risen Life we’re about to receive within in Holy Communion, wants to strengthen us, like he strengthened his first followers, to do.
• Someone who lived accepting Jesus’ full testimony, who unleashed the gift of the Spirit, and whose life was a witness to the courage that comes from God, is St. Athanasius, the great and intrepid saintly doctor of the Church we celebrate today. As a young boy born during the time of ferocious anti-Christian persecutions, he learned the Gospel of the Lord from heroic, confessor priests. He went as a young deacon to assist the Patriarch of Alexandria (Egypt) at the Council of Nicaea in 325. This was the first Ecumenical Council, called 12 years after the legalization of Christianity, to deal with the teachings of an Egyptian priest Arius who was claiming that Jesus wasn’t God, that he wasn’t eternal, that he was just figuratively the Son of God and just a man, albeit the holiest man who had ever lived. The brilliant deacon Athanasius helped lead the charge against Arius’ teaching, which he persuaded the Council to condemn, and it was largely out of his work that we have the Nicene Creed we proclaim every Sunday. But even though the Arians lost, their false theological ideas were not extinguished. Over the course of time, Arians, those who didn’t believe Jesus was 100 percent God and 100 percent man, gained the upper hand in civil and Church politics. Various bishops and priests were Arians as were some emperors. For that reason, St. Athanasius was persecuted, multiply exiled, and had to suffer a great deal. Five different times he was banished from his see by command of the emperor. 17 of his 45 years as Patriarch of Alexandria he spent in exile. But the incarnation he taught he also lived and he knew that Jesus was with him in his risen and transfigured Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. He accepted Jesus’ testimony that he would be with him until the end of the earth. He accepted Jesus’ testimony that if they hated him, we would also be hated, and persecuted, and dragged before civil and ecclesiastical authorities. He accepted Jesus’ testimony that those who are persecuted for the sake of his name are blessed. And he never rationed the work that the Holy Spirit was seeking to do in him. And even in his suffering, he filled not just Egypt but the Christian world with Christ’s teaching.
• Today we’re experiencing some analogous forms of Arianism, which refuses to accept the reality of the ongoing incarnation, of the eternal Word entering the world. Many refuse to accept it, despite Christ’s testimony and the guidance of the Church by the Holy Spirit, in the Sacraments. Baptism is just a welcoming ceremony, Confirmation a Christian bar mitzvah, Confession a counseling session, the Eucharist just an assembly, marriage just a civil reality defined by courts and legislatures, Holy Orders just a job, the Anointing of the Sick just a psychological salve for those suffering. There’s not really anything divine, anything that really substantially changes, in any of them. Likewise with God’s word. People don’t treat it as God’s testimony, as words inspired by the Holy Spirit, with the power to save. Likewise with the moral life. People seek to be “good” rather than “saints,” because they do not practically accept that God wants to divinize us and make us fully his image and likeness. These modern day forms of Arian logic don’t come from atheists, but from Christians who shudder before the awesome mystery of God’s presence, raising us up, helping us to seek the things above, to speak of them, to seek them, to help others to embrace them.
• The same Jesus who spoke to Nicodemus comes to speak to us today and to feed us, helping us from the inside to live as those born anew from above, to help us not ration the Spirit but put up the sails to the Spirit who blows where he wills, strengthening us boldly to fill New York and beyond with his teachings. We ask God through the intercession of St. Athanasius to help us to marvel and base our lives on the reality of the ongoing incarnation that the great doctor of the Church proclaimed, suffered for, and now beholds eternally.

The readings for today’s Mass were: