A Homily for the 5th Week of Easter (B)
Have you ever known someone who has gone through a profoundly life changing experience that has made them seem like a whole new person? Maybe you have gone through one yourself, and at first people just cannot believe that you are the same person. Sometimes the change is one that gets people excited about the change, while at other times people might be very suspicious about whether the change is real, or if it is just a matter of time before the person turns back into their “old self.”
When I was in the seminary, one guy I knew went away for a year and quite literally came back half the man he was – he lost over 150 pounds. Of course we were all very happy for him, and some of use a little jealous, wishing that we could do the same. Probably if we were very honest, some of us, deep down, doubted that he would be able to keep the weight off. As a substance abuse counselor, I saw a similar reaction when a client first became “clean & sober” — many of their family and friends thought it would be only a matter a time before they went back to drinking. For many people, it is hard to believe that people really can change, and change for the better.
This is the situation that we find in today’s first reading: the disciples in Jerusalem cannot believe that Saul has really changed. Remember, Saul had been one of the leaders of those who persecuted the Church. I am sure there were still disciples in Jerusalem who remembered seeing people laying their cloaks at the feet of Saul as he looked on approvingly as they stoned St. Stephen to death. Now they were suppose to believe that he was one of them, a disciple of Jesus? However, when they saw Saul, whom we now call St. Paul, speaking out so boldly in the name of Jesus, so much so that he risked death, probably by the hands of many of his old friends, they came to see just how good God really is. They remembered just how much an encounter with Jesus really can change a person’s life; in fact giving them new life. In fact, several years later, St. Paul would write about how he had “put off the old man” and had “put on the new man, Christ the Lord.” St. Paul saw his transformation in Christ Jesus as being so profound that he exclaimed, “Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
Remember when I asked you at the started of my homily if you have ever known someone who has gone through a profoundly life changing experience that has made them seem like a whole new person? Well, it was kind of a trick question, because all of us have known just such a person – just look to your left, your right, in front of you, and behind you. In fact you yourself have had such an experience. It was called your baptism.
In baptism, each of us died and was reborn. We died to sin, and were reborn into the life of the Trinity, into a life of grace. At our baptism we were joined to Christ Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, becoming part of His Mystical Body. Using the image of the branch that is grafted to the vine, that we heard in today’s Gospel reading, we have been grafted to Jesus so that our souls are to draw life from Him, to be nourished by His word and the Eucharist. Separated from Him, the eternal life within us will just dry up and we will die. Sin separates us from Christ, the True Vine, and as we hear in today’s Gospel passage, branches that do not abide with the vine wither and will be gathered up and thrown into a fire and burned. We call that eternal fire Hell, and in case you have forgotten, Hell is real and it is a very bad place to spend eternity.
Of course as followers of Christ we are called to abide in Him, and if we do so Jesus promises that we will bear much fruit. That fruitfulness is not just blessing for ourselves, but a sharing of the grace of Jesus Christ with all those around us. While often this fruitfulness is pleasurable, Jesus cautions us in the Gospel “that if we are bearing fruit, we can expect that God will also “prune” us. A gardener trims and cuts back a plant so that it will grow stronger and bear even more fruit….We need to see our struggles as pruning, by which we are being disciplined and trained so that we can grow in holiness and bear fruits of righteousness” (Breaking the Bread, May 2006, www.salvationhistory.com).
How are we supposed to live, now that we have been transformed by Christ? St. John gives us the answer in today’s second reading, “Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18). Now, St. John is NOT saying that we should not talk about Jesus and our Faith. Rather, just as Jesus is the Living Word of God, our word and speech must be alive with our faith. Some people just pay lip service to being Christian. Their faith in Jesus is just fitted into a neat little box of time and circumstances. Too many Christians do not really live their faith, they do not in truth and humility seek guidance from the Church, with is the visible expression of Christ the true vine. All that we do and say should be done in, with, and through Jesus – that is what it means to have Christ live in you. Do we even let our Faith guide us in deciding what we watch on TV or in the movies?
This coming week the movie, The Da Vinci Code opens in theaters. I am sure that many of you have read the novel, and that many of you are planning to see the movie. How many of you know that the Vatican has called on all Catholics to boycott the movie? I am sure that many will say, “why all the fuss? After all, it is just a piece of fiction.” The simple answer is because it is a piece of blasphemous rubbish. Yes, you heard me right, The Da Vinci Code is blasphemy; it is a violation of Second Commandment because it says that Jesus was not Divine, not the Son of God.
If I wrote a novel, a piece of fiction, which denied the Holocaust ever happened I would rightly be called an anti-Semite. Why do Christians think it is OK to have the central teaching of our Faith denied, in hardly a respectful way, and not find it anti-Christian?
A homily is not the place to go into all the ways that The Da Vinci Code is in serious error; that is why we will be hosting a discussion night on it this Thursday at 7 pm in the Lower Church. However, just to be clear: Jesus is Divine, He is the Son of God, He died for our sins and rose from the dead. The Bible is the Word of God and it speaks truthfully about Divine things. The Holy Spirit, as the principal author of Sacred Scripture, gave us four Gospels. The other so-called gospels are merely the misguided works of human beings and not divinely inspired.
The Church is asking people not to go to the movie, however we are called to do much more. While we should be clear to people that we find both the book and the movie, no matter how entertaining they might be, offensive and anti-Christian, as followers of Christ Jesus we are called to in charity witness to the truth about Jesus Christ. The love of Christ must urge us on, to share the joy of our faith. We are called to introduce people to Jesus.
Finally, this weekend we pay a special tribute to a person who most likely was one of the first to introduce us to Jesus. While she has a different name for each of us, we all call her “Mom”! To all the mothers here today I wish you a very happy Mothers’ Day, and I thank you for saying “yes” to that precious vocation to which God called you when He invited you to be a mother.
I would also like to share with you a little bit of our Catholic tradition. It is pretty common to see, when a Catholic dies, a Rosary wrapped around the hands of the person who died. There is, however, an old custom of something different for the mother of a priest. As you may know, when a priest is ordained the bishop anoints his hands with Sacred Chrism. In the old rite of ordination, the bishop would then wrap the hands of the new priest in a cloth called a maniturgium, which is Latin for “hand cloth.” The new priest then use that cloth wipe the oil off his hands, and the custom was to give his mother the maniturgium. Then, when his mother died, instead of wrapping her hands with the Rosary, her hands would be wrapped in her son’s maniturgium as a sign that she had given her son to the priesthood.
Although the maniturgium is no longer a formal part of the Rite of Ordination, my hands were still anointed with Sacred Chrism when I was ordained a priest, and I still needed to wipe the oil off, so I did give my mother my maniturgium. And I just want to say to her, “Thank you Mom for introducing me to Jesus Christ.”
