MAY 10, 2020
ORDINARY FORM (ENGLISH) MASS
Today is Mothers Day.
To all mothers, grandmothers, and those relatives, friends, and neighbors who nurture and support in a maternal fashion:
Happy Mother’s Day.To that end, on the porch of the parish office – at the corner of Liberty and Western – there are carnations for Mother’s Day. There are also Rosaries, medals, and prayerbooks – most of them devoted to the Blessed Mother, Mary – since May is the month that the Church dedicates to her maternal intercession for the entire Church.
Today is also the 5th Sunday of Easter.
Last week, the Gospel readings from St. John shifted from happening after the resurrection to now having happened at the Last Supper. Several chapters worth of John’s Gospel are spent on Jesus’s Last Supper discourses.
Our Lord speaks of his “Father’s house” – and we might be confused. Is His Father’s house this beautiful building? Is it the Vatican? Is it an ethereal, spiritual community?
We receive other symbols in today’s other readings as well. We hear of the first “argument” in the early Church in the first reading from Acts – something about food, and ethnicity, and language. Indeed, “nothing new under the sun.”
But something amazing is going on here. Even in our own culture, people tend to separate out by the languages they speak, or their ethnic history, or the country they came from. It’s a question of comfort … it’s easier. But already in the early Church, the Holy Spirit was reaching beyond human comfort. God continues to take us outside of our comfort zone, if we let Him.
In the early Church, and in our own community, what we’re seeing is the movement of the Holy Spirit within the humanness of the members … and despite the humanness of the member … “the number of disciples continued to grow,” “filled with the Spirit and wisdom,” devotion “to prayer and the ministry of the word,” “the whole community,” “the word of God continued to spread,” and on and on – regardless of human conflict or politics, the Church continued to grow through the Word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit.
So that, despite the human weaknesses within any Church community, as long as we “let go and let God,” the power of the Spirit of God – the divinity incarnated in us – keeps us “one” … and not in some lock-step, cookie-cutter way … but a true unity in diversity.
In the second reading from the First Letter of St. Peter, we hear:
Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beingsbut chosen and precious in the sight of God,and, like living stones,let yourselves be built into a spiritual house …A key line here is “for you who have faith,” because without faith, St. Peter points out, none of this makes sense, and it becomes an obstacle – a “stumbling block” – to those who disobey God’s word.
By Faith, we are brought into relationship with God, and are “chosen and precious”. And he repeats that word, “chosen race,” going on to call us “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of [God’s] own”. This “holiness” is not of our own making, but rather because we have been “chosen” or “taken” by God, for God’s purpose.
And in the Gospel, when Jesus talks about “the many dwelling places” in His Father’s household, he is talking about the universality of His Gospel. As we heard in the first reading, already there were Greeks and the Jews were fighting over who got the most food.
The Gospel message is not limited by race, language, or ethnicity. Rather, it is meant for the whole world. And Jesus told the disciples to expect this – whether they understood it or not.
And this lack of understanding is made evident in the Gospel, where Thomas and Phillip don’t quite get it. Jesus calls them out for their lack of understanding, but he doesn’t condemn them. These are the Apostles – and they didn’t get it.
The Apostles weren’t perfect, or geniuses … Jesus didn’t give them a diploma and push them out of the nest. They were hard-headed, practical, working men … looking for answers – which they found in Jesus. But with each answer, there came so many questions. This should give us hope, that when we are sometimes lost or confused, we are in good company – the company of the Apostles.
And so, what is the “Father’s house” Jesus is talking about? It is the Church. And the Church is “like” a lot of things … the chosen of God, called to holiness by faith, united in Christ and by the Holy Spirit; a nation that transcends all nations, a race that trancends all races; a priesthood, a family, a fellowship, a school of prayer.
We acknowledge this in the Creed when we talk about the Church being “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic”.
The key is Faith, which we receive in Baptism and which is strengthened in all the Sacraments – and not just Faith, but Hope, and Love. The key is to “let go and let God,” to “get out of the way,” and allow the power of God to go beyond our human weaknesses and raise us up beyond our understanding, and beyond our abilities.
As we continue in this liturgy of prayer, offering the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ – the Son of God – as an acceptable Sacrifice to God the Father, in the Power of the Holy Spirit … let us be open to the transforming power of God to take us from where we are and who we are, and make us into living temples of His presence in the world.
