5th Sunday of Easter A

See Commentary on John 14:1-12 in John 14:1-15


Homily 1 – 2005 

There seems to be such a wealth of promising themes worth reflecting on in this week’s readings that I found it hard to decide what to settle on.  Perhaps it was because of the Retreat in Daily Life (that has been going on this past week and will be continuing over the next two) that made the comment of Philip in today’s gospel stand out more than anything else.  Philip said to Jesus: Lord, let us see the Father and we shall be satisfied.  I relate to that, and I imagine that the parishioners who chose to do the Retreat equally resonate with it.

I am reminded of the story told of St Teresa of Avila as a young girl.  Apparently she and her brother went off from home one day, creating a degree of consternation in the family.  When she was eventually found not too far from home heading south, she was asked where did she think she was going and why.  Her answer was supposed to have been: "I want to see God".   I remember listening to the distress felt by a parishioner some years ago, who said: "I want so much to feel Jesus’ love for me, but can’t".  Her longing echoed the familiar prayer made by St Richard of Chichester: O dear Lord, three things I pray: to see thee more clearly; to love thee more dearly; to follow thee more nearly day by day.  The Hebrew psalmist said so beautifully, before all of these: Like the deer that longs for running waters, my soul longs for you, my God.  My soul thirsts for God, the God of my life...

Their longings may resonate in the hearts of many of you.  Is there any hope of such longings being answered? and if so, what do you need to do?  There is a rich tradition in the Church that addresses these longings.  The answer begins as a journey inwards, to the source of the thirst, the longing.  On the way, there takes place a thorough sorting out: a process of  identifying, and then gradually letting go of,  every other longing.  Jesus called it a death to the self.  But that sitting lightly with every other longing is not a disengagement from people, a withdrawal of love from others.  Rather it is an intensifying and a touching in to the source: In loving maturely we learn not to seek from but to give to.

In fact for us disciples of Jesus, our journey into God is a journey into Jesus.  As the Lord says in the gospel today: Philip, to see me is to see the Father.  Yet, since our situation is different from that of Philip, the Christ we see is no longer physically attainable.  He has moved beyond the physicality of life that we are familiar with and now is alive with risen life – whatever that means.  Our journey towards him can be felt as a journey into darkness, into the desert.  Yet Philip is right: we will be satisfied.  St Teresa speaks of a wonderful experience of oneness with Christ (she was a very passionate, sensate, Spanish woman).  Most don’t arrive at that depth of love.  Yet the journey itself, the travelling the way, is immensely rewarding.  Jesus himself speaks of the possibility of deep friendship: I do not call you servants but friends.  

But there is only one way to be nourished by that friendship, to take hold of it and to be convinced of it: And that is to set out on the journey.  The starting point, and the energy source along the way, is precisely the sense of emptiness, the thirst, the longing for more, that so often comes across as a growing dissatisfaction with what is.  We want to break free from and get rid of the clutter in our lives, the hidden addictions, the fruitless striving for substitutes and distraction.  We eventually face the fact that they don’t satisfy us.

More than 1500 years ago, St Augustine diagnosed his own, and our, condition well.  He wrote: Our hearts are made for thee, O God, and they will not rest until they rest in thee.


Homily 2 – 2011 

The first Letter of Peter, today’s Second Reading, calls us all priests.  Firstly, it says we are a holy priesthood; then, later, it says we’re a royal priesthood  - so not just priests but kings, too.

In the ancient world, priests offered sacrifice, but the victim they killed was always someone, or, later, something else - animals, usually, but also the first and best fruits of the harvest.  Jesus turned all that sacrificial stuff upside down.  He allowed sinful humanity to make him victim, and sinful humanity did the killing, thinking in the process that they were doing the sensible thing and even pleasing God - as if God were into violence, too, like themselves.

In fact, Jesus was offering himself to the God who is all love.  As priest, he offered himself as the victim.  He was offering himself because he, like God, was all love.  He accepted his death, or, to say the same thing positively, he offered his life as the price of his loving a world of violent people.  In full freedom, fully deliberately, he accepted being murdered.  He wasn’t helpless.  He could have backed off, but he wouldn’t.  He entrusted the outcome to God.  He offered himself to God in trust, trusting that God somehow makes sense of vulnerable love.  Any true love, love at its best, love at its fiercest, is always necessarily vulnerable - because it is unconditional and because it excludes no one - not even those who choose to hurt us somehow.

Jesus has united us in his priesthood [for better or for worse] - that is how we are all now a holy priesthood, a royal priesthood.  He calls us to be priests like him.  As tonight’s Gospel had Jesus say: I am the Way.  The Epistle of Peter, too, said much the same thing: Set yourselves close to him.  Sharing his priesthood, following him as the Way, setting ourselves close to him, means that we allow ourselves to be victimised like he was, paying the price involved in every choice to love, especially to love those who oppose us or exploit our love, but even the price of the mini-deaths to self involved in loving those who love us and who appreciate our love.  

Again, as the Epistle of Peter put it: we offer ourselves as spiritual sacrifices that Jesus makes acceptable to God.  That is, we choose to love, and we accept the price of our choice; we are open willingly to be victimised.  Since we share now the priesthood of Jesus, every act of love, every act of service, in the home, at work, wherever, is an expression of that priesthood.

Over the years, we have tended to look at priests like me, ordained priests, as the only priests, or at least on our priesthood as the more important priesthood.  But the only effective priest is Jesus.  And we all share in his priesthood  through our baptism.  Have you noticed how, after people have been baptised, the priest anoints them on the head with the Oil of Chrism and declares them to be priests, prophets and kings with Jesus?

In a few  moments, I shall say: Pray, everyone, that our sacrifice may be acceptable to God, our almighty Father.  Our sacrifice -- yours and mine, and Christ’s, too.  Ours - because we offer it as priests; ours - because we are the victims, too; ours - because we join our loves with Jesus.


Homily 3 - 2014

Trust in God still and trust in me. Easier said than done? Trust does not come easily. Can you really trust someone unless you are quite sure that they love you? unconditionally? And even then? I suspect that for most of us, the ones who have come closest to loving us without conditions are our mothers. Over the years, memories can mix with projections of the ideal feminine that arise from the unconscious, and can help to confirm the conviction.

We are in the month of May; and traditionally May is the month of Mary. Here in Mildura today, Filipino parishioners are celebrating the "Flores de Mayo".

Some of us find it easier to trust Mary than to trust God. Yet it need not be that way. Mary could trust God. She had no problem with embracing anything and everything that God asked of her – not just because of the kind of person she had become, but also because of what she knew God to be. Luke paints Mary at her Annunciation peacefully saying, Let it be done to me according to your word. She trusted easily because she knew that God loved her. She knew that all that God could ever wish of her would be that she become more fully alive, more fully human, more loving and irrepressibly hoping.

Jesus said of her, Blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it. He saw that as the source of her greatness. Mary heard the Word of God. That is how she knew he loved her. She really heard. She took time to listen. She did not just listen to God’s Word but learnt to tune in particularly to the tone of God’s voice. She learnt to distinguish it from all the voices that assail us daily – the voices around us and the voices within – the urges, the accusations, the spontaneous judgments we deliver, etc.

She let life in all its complexity touch her. And she searched there for signs of the presence of God and for whatever God might be saying. As Luke again said of her, She treasured these things and pondered them in her heart. She discovered the God who loves - who so loved the world that he sent the Son he loved to save the world from itself, its endless violence and its fear of love. She learnt to trust that God of love: My soul proclaims the greatness of God and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.

To the waiters at the Wedding Feast of Cana she said, Do whatever he tells you. She says the same to us. But for us to have any chance of taking that seriously, we need to learn to trust. And to trust we need to discover his love.

Nothing will change… We will not change… Our world will not change… until we learn to hear the tone of his voice, and know his love – not in theory, not on the word of someone else, but from up close. Like Mary, we need to learn to become contemplatives, living life richly with its joys and heartaches, its pleasures and pains, its promises and its threats; pondering it, and finding God there – calling us, empowering us always to choose life, to choose love.

It takes time. We need to choose deliberately, and to persevere. If we do not, we will never truly change, never grow - business as usual, forever. Yet it need not be so. However, a guide can help because, surprisingly, God is regularly present in seeming absence and can communicate through silence.

One way or the other, the world needs contemplatives – people like yourselves who are in touch with life, people who give life, people who, with Mary, can enthusiastically declare, My soul proclaims the glory of God and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.


 

Homily 4 - 2017

Today’s First Reading from the Acts of the Apostles dealt with an important “break-through” moment in the life of the early Church. Up until now, the story had focused mainly on the activities of a few Apostles – Peter and John, specifically, though the apostles acting as a group had also been briefly mentioned. Only one layman had really figured in the story. That was Barnabas; and he was mentioned, perhaps not too surprisingly, because he had donated all he owned to the support of the developing Christian movement.

The background to today’s incident was provided by the fact that the number of disciples had been steadily increasing. It seems that there were two noticeable groups among them. There were Jews who had grown up in Jerusalem and knew nothing other than Judaism; they were called the Hebrews. But there was another sizeable group of disciples, Jews who had been born and brought up in the surrounding Greek culture, who had come to Jerusalem from overseas. While in Jerusalem, they remained Jews, but had become converted to the Christian movement. Their first language was Greek, not Hebrew, and they came to be called the Hellenists.

Not surprisingly, with different backgrounds and different first languages, misunderstandings arose and tensions sharpened between them. The specific complaint was that the Hellenist widows, women without male support and therefore apparently voiceless and poor, were not being looked after well enough by the Apostles [who would probably all have been regarded as Hebrews]. So the Twelve called an Assembly to address the issue. After discussion it was decided by common consent that the situation had developed to such an extent that the Apostles could no longer run everything. So they would withdraw from the practical day-by-day running of the community to devote themselves “to prayer and the service of the word”. Another group of disciples would be chosen to take care of the practical organization of the community. Seven of them were elected by the community.

More significantly, the seven were all what we today would call lay-people. They were authorized by the apostles, but chosen by the people from the community to look to the practical running of the show.

Luke, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, made the relevant observation that, once the underlying tensions were faced and resolved, and unity re-established, “the number of disciples was greatly increased, and a large group of [Jewish] priests made their submission to the faith”.

Today’s Second Reading from a letter of Peter also contained a highly relevant comment. Peter was writing to ordinary disciples, that is, to everyone, including especially lay people, and he repeated to them what God had instructed Moses to say to the escaping Hebrew slaves in the Sinai desert, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood …”

You are a royal priesthood; and that came about through your baptism. You share in that royal priesthood; I share in that royal priesthood. I also share in the ministerial priesthood [but that would be pretty useless for me unless I also share in the royal priesthood with you].

What does our baptismal priesthood mean? It means that we can all directly offer to God our daily lives and all we do, as expressions of our love. Because of the ordained priesthood, that offering of our lives can be united with the offering that Christ made of his love during his life and especially through his death on the cross.

So the lives of everyone in the community and all that you do can be directed to God, and are meant to be. As disciples, no one is simply a consumer. You are all called to pull your weight – in the world around you, and within the faith community of which each of you is a vital member.

All of which are interesting, indeed encouraging, issues as you face the reality of being a parish without a resident priest.


 

Homily 5 - 2023

I find today’s Gospel passage quite wonderful. Familiarity can always deaden us, however, to the riches it contains.

It starts with a short reflection on faith — faith as personal, as relational. John is not writing about what is spelt out objectively in the Creed, for example, or in the catechism. What John is thinking about here is trusting. Trust is relational. Essentially it involves entrusting ourselves to another. Indeed, to be able fully to entrust ourselves to another, we need not just to know but especially to love that other. Jesus wants our trusting/our believing to be a genuine, joyful encounter.

Jesus himself saw it that way in today’s Gospel passage where he spoke about his longing to take us with him, so that, as John quoted him: “Where I am, you may be too”. Do we really hear that? Jesus really want us! When he referred also to his own sense of God. He spoke of his “Father”, not simply of his God. And he talked about “My Father’s house” — where, in the culture, people felt instinctively safe, at home, truly themselves.

True faith in God and in Jesus can be fragile. Our world puts pressure on us to no longer trust confidently. The agnosticism of our present world can rattle us as well — as it has rattled so many of our friends and family. Jesus challenged us not “to let [our] hearts be troubled”. He assumed that our “hearts” were the inner repository of our trust — not our minds. He also seemed to assume that that negative pressure would be our constant experience. Trusting would be an on-going challenge, as would loving. It would involve a constant journey — just as growing involves constant changing. Whether we are explicitly aware of it or not, I think we all seek the particular meaning of our individual lives. We feel on a journey, seeking something “more” in life, something more fulfilling. Some of us may even see life as a pilgrimage.

In replying to Thomas’s question where Jesus was going, Jesus gave Thomas the wonderful assurance that: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”. On the journey of life, Jesus insisted that he knew more than just the way he was heading — he lived the Way to get there. As they would witness in a few hours, his Way would take him in the direction of suffering!

Jesus claimed also to be the Truth — not just to know the Truth [truth is essentially what is real]. Faith will mean our willingness to take Jesus at his word; but fruitfulness will be a factor of how we have learnt to know ourselves as we really are — not what we would like to be, or what we think we should be, but what we are. God, who is sheer Reality, loves and wants us just as we are.

And then Jesus stated that he was the source of true Life — indeed its embodiment, something we all yearn for. Life is not static. We are meant to grow ever more alive as we faithfully follow the Way of Jesus across the years — allowing ourselves to keep on changing as we see more, as we appreciate more, as we grow in love and in humble, loving service of each other.

I sometimes ask myself if some Catholics, possibly even ourselves still in the Church, have simply carved out for ourselves a familiar, comfortable, predictable, static and arbitrary collection of practices and beliefs; and stubbornly resisted any call to change and to grow in any truly personal, fulfilling, even exciting, exploration of who Jesus really is.

I also find myself wondering if some who have left the Church were following what they took to be a call to greater honesty and personal integrity. We are not expert in judging ourselves. We are even less competent when we presume to judge others.