5th Sunday of Easter C - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2016

During the week, I was up country for the funeral of the sister of a good friend of mine. With all the travel involved, and with driving becoming an increasing chore as I grow older, I decided to stay on for a few extra days with a family whom I have come to know well and enjoy over the years. One evening, the three 20+ year-old children came over for a meal together with mum and dad and a lucky little girl whom the family recently adopted as their child. It was a wonderful experience. Everyone in the family was so much at home with each other, enjoying each other’s presence. They filled the house with warmth, mutual respect and sheer joy. For me it was sacramental; it was Eucharistic. 

What is Eucharist about, after all? It is the celebration of unity and harmony, achieved once and for all by the crucified and risen Jesus. That is what he wanted our Eucharists to lead to. That is what he wanted them to start with. It disappoints me that we have allowed ourselves to lose touch with the experience-dimension of all sacraments and have settled instead on heady definitions and explanations – most of them disappointingly out of touch. As a consequence, I believe, our religion as a whole has moved further and further away from its proper community focus and become concerned with individual salvation, exclusively "me-God" rather than inclusively "we-God" – as though salvation could be experienced in isolation.

Why did Jesus insist so clearly on the importance of loving each other? And why was it particularly on his mind as he celebrated his Last Supper? Why did he insist so much: I give you a new commandment. Love one another! Just as I have loved you, you also must love one another. By this love you have for one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples. He called it a new commandment, because it is now a possibility And that is the wonderful thing. The experience of loving and being loved is not simply the way to salvation. It is the very experience of salvation. What is more - it is the joyful illustration of Jesus’ defeat of sin. After all, the destructive sin of the world consists precisely in our innate tendency to mutual hostility, to competitiveness, to power and ultimately to violence of some kind or other – and so to joylessness. Just watch the nightly news to see sin at its destructive worst! We need more family celebrations; more encounters with true friends. And we need time to savour them, and to let them be genuinely sacramental for us: samples sharpening our appetites for the God who is the mystery behind our life, our loves and our joys.

Once we get our heads away from the self-centred, individualistic sense of heaven as something earned and merited, we can come to terms with the fact that heaven is essentially the experience of people enjoying relating to everyone in love. Then we can begin to appreciate what the author of the Book of the Apocalypse was up to with his riot of images in today’s Second Reading. He saw our future destiny as a holy city. Cities are people in relationships, dependent on each other, but not like the impersonal cities to which we are accustomed. In this city people will relate inter-dependently in love, and in the midst of them all will be God – God enjoying! Here God lives among people. He will make his home among them; they shall be his people; and he will be their God; his name is God-with-them.

It won’t be “business as usual”, or simply “more of the same”. Rather, God assures us, Now I am making the whole of creation new. The process is under way. That could be what we are celebrating here this morning. But perhaps Eucharist will never be Eucharist until we have learnt to allow our whole world to be sacramental – tempting previews of the God of life and love, already present and thoroughly at home among us.