The Rebirth That Leads to Christian Boldness, Second Monday of Easter, April 13, 2015

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Monday of the Second Week of Easter
Commemorations of Pope St. Martin I
April 13, 2015
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 in the Gospel Nicodemus, a powerful member of the Sanhedrin, 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 whom he knows is innocent of the charges being made against him. He’s obviously struggling with understanding the full import of Jesus’ miracles. “No one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him,” but he doesn’t 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.” Nicodemus seeks to ask a question about entering anew into a mother’s womb — which was not a question of curiosity or modality, because he well knew that was impossible, but one in which he seemed to be engaging in foolish 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, which is meant to be the reality of Christians. 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 Nicodemus, “the reluctant disciple,” did not have.
• We see that type of Spirit-led life in the members of the early Church as well as in the saint that the Church celebrates today. We see in today’s first reading 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 a 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.” And just as Jesus promised that whenever we ask the Father for bread, he won’t give us stones, but rather give “the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Lk 11:13), so God the Father powerfully sent 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, which is a word we should know. 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. Today we have a great example of it in the life of Pope St. Martin I, who was martyred essentially for boldly defending the Church’s teaching about Jesus’ being fully divine and fully human. In the 6th and 7th centuries, there was the heresy of monothelitism, which taught that Jesus only had one will, divine, rather than a human will and a divine will. They thought that that would be more consistent with saying that Jesus was a divine person with a human nature, rather than two persons, as was condemned in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon in the 5th century. How could a person have more than one will? But Jesus, through the hypostatic union, is obviously exceptional. If he didn’t have a human will, he wouldn’t be fully human. Nor would his words in the Garden of Gethsemane make sense, when he was saying, “Not my will, but yours, Father, be done.” The emperor in Constantinople was basically a monothelite and sent his troops to arrest the pope, who was boldly defending and proposing the truth, and they manhandled him, brought him to the capital and eventually exiled him to the Crimea where he died for the faith. He’s an example for us not of praying to be freed of difficulty, but of asking God for the grace boldly to announce his word.
• Today as we come forward to pray the Mass, we seek to do so like the first Christians prayed in the upper room in such a way that we might experience a similar “little Pentecost” to what they received when the Holy Spirit shook the place where they were praying. And we ask through the intercession of Saint Martin that we may be as docile to the work of the Holy Spirit as they were and correspond to the holy parrhesia with which he wishes to endow us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel
JN 3:1-8

There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.
He came to Jesus at night and said to him,
“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God,
for no one can do these signs that you are doing
unless God is with him.”
Jesus answered and said to him,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless one is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
Nicodemus said to him,
“How can a man once grown old be born again?
Surely he cannot reenter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?”
Jesus answered,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless one is born of water and Spirit
he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.
What is born of flesh is flesh
and what is born of spirit is spirit.
Do not be amazed that I told you,
‘You must be born from above.’
The wind 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.”