5th Sunday of Easter: Cycle A 22-23

Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 6:1-7 | 1 Peter 2:4-9 | John 14:1-12

 

Almighty, everliving God, constantly accomplish the Pascal mystery within us that those you are pleased to make new in holy baptism may, under your protective care, bear much fruit and come to the joys of life eternal through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

 

These readings seem, to me, to be focused on the role of the church.  Church is an interesting word.  We tend to think of it as a building, but the best description that I have of what the church really is came from Vatican Council.  Basically, it says so clear that, whenever people are gathered and believe in God and are seeking his presence in their life, being aware of it and then sharing it with each other, that’s church.  And yes, it needs a building, but the heart of every parish that I’ve ever been a part of or that I think is ever intended of God is that people there would grow into an awareness of very simple things, essential things.  Who are they?  What are we here for?  Who is this God?  What does he want?  And I think the most interesting thing in this first reading is that basically, we’re looking at the early church, realizing something about the nature of a community of human beings, and that is are they able to do what they’re there for.  What are they there for?  To bring people out of darkness into light, to minister, to feed people with the word, which is truth.  In the very beginning, the church realizes it needs to do reflection on how well they’re doing that.  So we see that there’s a group of people not really being nurtured.  They’re being neglected.  The widows of the Greeks were accusing the Hebrews of not paying attention to them and not caring for them, and that seems to be ⎯ that’s been the situation with the church from the beginning, that we have to continually look at ourselves as a church and say, “Who are we neglecting, or what are we neglecting?”  


And so I believe, in my own experience of the church, that they neglected to feed me something, and maybe it’s true for you, maybe not.  I hope it’s not, but we know from the beginning, the church’s call is to make clear the teaching of Jesus.  And what that teaching is is what we’re looking for, what we need to be fed, and I don’t believe I was ever fed the essence of what I now know to be the ministry of Jesus.  It wasn’t about inviting me into a community that would require me doing certain things that would then make me pleasing to God.  I was really hooked into performance.  Maybe that’s my personality.  Maybe it’s the way the church came across to me, but I always felt like, if I’d just stop doing stupid, unkind breaking rules of the church, I would find this enormous peace.  But there’s something that’s sort of connected to church in this second reading, and that is the church is usually made of a solid building.  It’s ⎯ churches are large and very ⎯ we have cathedrals that are ⎯ the one in Milan is just overwhelming, but the image in this reading from Peter is the church is supposed to be something that is rooted in, grounded in, built on the foundation of a teaching.  And the teaching isn’t about something to do.  It’s about who someone is, and so the image in this is Peter saying, “We believe in a way of life that is based on the life of someone.”  He’s a living foundation, not a rock foundation, but he’s living stone.  It’s interesting when you think of living stone, because living stone could be a way of comparing the message of Jesus in the New Testament and the way God presents himself in the Old Testament, and what he gave was commandments written on stone.    So there’s an image of not living stone but a stone with the requirements to be fulfilled, and this is a wonderful way of imagining how different the New Testament is from the Old Testament, because it’s not about law and justice.  It’s about intimacy with God, and that’s a thing that I don’t think they fed me very much.

So in John’s gospel, we have the heart of what I think the church is, Jesus talking to his disciples and saying, “I’m leaving you.”  This is a discourse from the Last Supper.  So he’s telling them not to be troubled, because he knows that they are rooted and grounded in him personally and his teaching and his affection and his criticism at times.  But what he’s wanting to say to them is, “There’s something you need to know.  I’m going to leave you now, because my role was to do something other than focus on me.  I came into this world so that you would see and get to know someone.”  And when he starts talking about he’s going to return to this someone, this Father in heaven, this God, he’s saying, “Look, I’m going there.  Don’t worry, because I’m going there for a very real purpose.  I’m going there so that you can come and join me in my relationship with God.”  And they look at him like, “What are you talking about?  How can we join with God?”  In the Old Testament, there was no way that human beings could even get close to God without being destroyed, so the idea that God is an intimate lover that wants to be in your presence and you in his presence, was just simply not able to be conceived in the Old Testament.  But Jesus is saying something.  “Look, I came into the world, and if you watched my life, and you did, you know me, everything I went through was something that is a way ⎯ it’s a way of living.  And it’s not so much what I said, but you’ve got to look at who I was, who I am and how I grew up just like you, and I was an outcast for most of my life.  And then I began to feel that God wanted to speak through me, and then my message was something that most people couldn’t fathom and couldn’t understand, because they didn’t have the capacity yet to imagine something as bizarre and as radical as God falling in love with me and wanting to be with me ultimately in heaven.”  So he’s trying to say, “Look, this has been my message.  My message has been to introduce to you the fullness of who God is.  That’s what I’m here for, and the best way I could do that is to do it as a human filled with divinity,” because that is exactly who you are going to be, asked to believe you are in that relationship with God, not as fully as Jesus.  Jesus was ⎯ 430 years after Jesus died, the church finally came together and said, “We think we’ve solved this problem about divinity and humanity in Jesus.”  And I love their solution.  He was 100 percent both, and that just blows away all logic and the work of the mind to figure all this out.  How can somebody be two things at the same time?  They can’t be, but the two things at the same time is an invitation to you and to me to believe that there’s a union possible between ourselves and God that is so lifegiving and so wonderful it's almost too much for us to even fathom, that Jesus is returning to the Father to be with him, and he’s saying, “I introduce the Father to you.  Father is going to call you from this life into a life with him.” 

I think about death as being with all the people I’ve known in my life, and that’s wonderful.  That will happen, but I haven’t really thought about what it’s like to be loved by God as an intimate friend.  That’s more of what heaven is like than renewing old relationships.  People in heaven have a work to do to share this incredible wisdom of what it feels like to have that kind of union with God, with those who are still working toward joining them.  So we believe the dead have a very important role in our life, and what a gift they are.  But what a gift this God/man Jesus is to us.  I feel sad that I haven’t been talking about this most of my priesthood, but I’m so aware of the invitation on Jesus’ very life to say you have this capacity because of something that’s been done for you, called redemption.  That redemption is anything that would keep you from the fullness of relationship with God has been dissolved and taken away, and all you need to do is trust in it.  So Jesus is the way, and the truth is the love of God for you.  And that is what we’re here for.  That’s what the church is here for, to bring us into that incredible promise.  No wonder Jesus starts this conversation with his disciples by saying, “Don’t ever let your hearts be troubled.  How can you when you’re loved as I have been loved?”  As Jesus has been loved, that’s what he’s saying  It’s a beautiful, hopeful, wonderful institution, the church, and often it gets sidetracked, being judgmental and making decisions for us that are our right to make.  But at its heart, it is a living message that the heart is made for, and when you hear it and can get past all the logic and all the mystery of it, just believe it and wait for it in hope.  Amen.

 

Father, I pray that you will give us the faith that you shared with your disciples.  It is essential that we believe in your message, not our image of who we are and who God is but continually to be changed and transformed by the fullness of the truth.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

 
Julie Condy