The Sometimes Surprising Guidance of the Holy Spirit, Fifth Saturday of Easter, May 4, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today in the first reading we come to one of the truly pivotal events in the history of the spread of the Gospel, but it’s something that may initially surprise us. St. Luke tells us in Acts that Paul, Silas and Timothy traveled through Phrygia and Galatia wanting to go spread the Gospel in the “province of Asia” around Ephesus, but they were “prevented by the Holy Spirit.”  A little later they tried to go into Bithynia, a north central province of present-day Turkey around Ankara, “but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.”
• They were trying to spread the Gospel, to plant the seeds of faith, something that they and we both should anticipate that the Holy Spirit would have facilitated and blessed. But he did the exact opposite. He closed the doors. Why he did this appears a little later. After they have arrived in Troas, Paul had a dream of a Macedonian standing before him imploring, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” The following morning the three sought passage there at once, concluding that God had called them to proclaim the Gospel to them as well. Macedonia was in Europe, at the very north of Greece. The Holy Spirit shut the doors to Ephesus and to Bithynia precisely so that they could take the Gospel sooner to Europe, where the seeds of the Gospel would flourish. (Other Christians would continue the expansion into the province of Asia and into Bithynia, and Paul himself would eventually get to Ephesus).
• There’s a very important spiritual lesson here for all of us. Often when we’re doing good things for the Lord, we can presume that God wants what we want, and when he seems to slam a door in our face, we wonder why he treats us that way. But often he forcefully closes one door so that we will notice that he wants us to walk through another. Docility to the Holy Spirit means that we’re docile even when he prevents us from doing something good for God so that he can have us do something else that will advance his kingdom in the way he knows is more needed. We lose a job in which we were doing a lot of good and can’t figure out why, until much later we see with God’s help that he wanted us to transfer to something else to build his kingdom. One young woman says no to an smitten young man’s advances, and he can’t see why, until God later introduces him later to the woman he wanted to be the man’s wife and only then does it make sense. In my own life, I had tried to apply to become a seminarian for my home Archdiocese of Boston, but the vocation director wouldn’t even give me an application. It seemed like such a contradiction to a clear sense of priestly calling, but if I had been accepted to the Archdiocese, then I would have never come to the Diocese of Fall River, likely never have received the type of excellent seminary formation with which I was blessed in Rome, never had a chance to be able to help the Archdiocese as an outsider during the priestly sexual abuse scandals and so many other things. Likewise over the course of my priesthood, there have been many times that the Holy Spirit said no to various assignments that I had been asked for from seminaries, universities, and other apostolates, but if any one of those had happened, I would almost certainly not have been asked to go to New York to serve at the United Nations with the privilege to participate in many life-giving apostolates, or to become a university chaplain at Columbia, which would have made impossible my participation in the Eucharistic pilgrimages that will begin two weeks from today. Often, it’s through the seeming contradictions and even through the sufferings we experience, rather than foreseeable and obvious apostolic opportunities, that God can reach people he never otherwise would have reached. We just never know what the Holy Spirit has in mind. Our task is to accept everything, whether seemingly adverse or propitious, with docility and faithfully allow him who blows where he wills to move us wherever he wants us.
• We see a tremendous illustration of this in Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel, taken from the end of the 15th chapter of St. John, which we’ve been pondering all week at daily Mass. It seems at first glance a very surprising conclusion. Jesus began the chapter with the image of the Vine and the Branches, promising that if we abide in him and he in us we will bear much fruit. Then he goes on to tell us how much he loves us — just as much as the Father loves him. He commands us to remain in that love by keeping his commandments, especially his command to love others in the same self-sacrificial way he has loved us. He calls us friends and informs us that he has revealed to us everything he heard from the Father. He discloses that he has chosen us — out of all the rest — and appointed us together with him to bear fruit. He tells uss that whatever we ask the Father in his name the Father will hear. And he states that he has told us all of this so that his own joy — the joy of the happiest person who has ever lived — will be in us and our joy fulfilled.
• Yet, after all of these tremendously consoling revelations focused on abiding in God and his love, he begins to speak extensively about hatred. He tells us today that the world will hate us and persecute us just like it hated and persecuted him. This seems like such a non-sequitur, but it’s not. Jesus revealed everything ahead of time so that even when we suffer on account of his name, when we experience the ferocity of others’ opposition to him, to his word, to the Father, we should never forget that we’re still attached to him on the Vine, that he’s still abiding in us, that he still loves us as the Father loves him, that we’re still his friends, that we’re still chosen, and that we’re abiding in his love as we lay down our lives in love and prayer for those who are persecuting and hating us and making us their enemies. It’s obviously tempting for us to think the opposite. When we’re doing the Lord’s work, we can sometimes figure that God’s going to make everything turn to gold. But that gold comes only after the crucible. And the Holy Spirit sometimes allows us to suffer, as he did the martyrs, because he knows that the way we’ll proclaim the Gospel in suffering may bring far more people to Christ and his love, far more people to attach themselves as branches to the Vine, far more people chosen and appointed by God to bear fruit, than if we proclaimed the Gospel normally without suffering and persecution.
• This all comes to the head in the Eucharistic Revival we are now living. It’s a shame that we need a Eucharistic Revival. We could wish that people would be faithful, that 100 percent of people prioritized the Lord, believed in his Real Presence, came to Mass, participated regularly in adoration, vigorously promoted priestly vocations to give us Jesus, and lived Eucharistic charity and apostolate. But if all of that were true, then we would not be in a situation now in which each of us would have to step up to the plate. We would lack the opportunity to give testimony. We perhaps might not grow anywhere as much in faith if others were all doing their jobs than we will if we respond to the graces of the moment. But the Holy Spirit has permitted it so that he would be able to renew us in tongues of fire, in hearts of fire, and send us out.
• On this Saturday, as we celebrate the special votive Mass of Our Lady of the Cenacle, we see the way the Holy Spirit worked in her life. After the Annunciation, after by the power of the Holy Spirit she had conceived the Son of the Most High and son of David within, she might have anticipated that her life ahead would be one full of obvious blessings. But she soon recognized that her Son would be a sign of contradiction. God himself came to his own and his own did not accept him. There was no room for him in the inn. Simeon said Mary’s own heart would be pierced. The Holy Family had to flee to Egypt when Herod was trying to assassinate Jesus. Those of Nazareth would rise up to try to murder him by throwing him off a precipice after an amazing homily to which they nevertheless took offense. Other relatives would think Jesus out of his mind. The mobs would choose Barabbas over him. The King would be murdered by his subjects, the Savior by those he was rescuing, the Good Shepherd torn to death by his sheep. But she never ran away from the Holy Spirit’s shadow. She kept saying a fiat to whatever the Holy Spirit asked. And she taught the Church in the Cenacle to learn how to do the same as they prayed for the Holy Spirit’s outpouring on Pentecost. Today she praying for us and with us to do the same. To see all of the seeming contradictions and struggles we are having in living and sharing the faith as an opportunity to open ourselves up to how the Holy Spirit wants us to be ready for another mission, for people who will say, “Come over here and help us.” On a retreat, we get ready to respond promptly and wholeheartedly to that mission.
• We recall that Jesus said the words of today’s Gospel on Holy Thursday as he was preparing to receive on Calvary all the hatred and persecution that the world could muster, so that when it happened, our hearts wouldn’t be troubled or afraid. It’s from the same Upper Room where he gave us his Body and Blood, the same Upper Room where Mary prepared Jesus’ first disciples for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that Jesus sends the Holy Spirit upon us in the Perpetual Pentecost that is the Mass. It’s here that the Holy Spirit constantly comes to help us open the door to Christ and then follow Christ the way out to wherever the Holy Spirit leads, even into hatred and persecution and suffering, conscious that even in the midst of that we can be glorifying the Lord with our life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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