Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter - Dom Brendan

6th Sunday of Easter
3 May 2005
Cycle B

The most solemn moment in the Liturgy of Good Friday occurs during the proclamation of the Passion according to John when Jesus cries out in a loud voice and delivers over his spirit. At that point, the rubrics instruct the priest and assembly to kneel in silent worship before the God who dies. If you were here last year on Good Friday you may remember that was the moment when someone’s cell phone went off.

I have been pestering the Prior for some time now to put up a sign in the entryway that reads:
OUR NEW CELLPHONE EJECTOR PEWS HAVE BEEN INSTALLED. PLEASE! FOR YOUR SAFETY AND THE SAFETY OF THOSE IN THE PEW WITH YOU, TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE BEFORE ENTERING THE CHURCH.

I was visiting my brother in California once before one of his tours of duty in the Middle East. I dragged him to the 10:00 Sunday mass with me at the local Catholic Church. Someone’s cell phone went off during the Eucharistic Prayer: the opening bars of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik floated through the Church which, on the positive side, was a step up from what we had been singing, a mixture of Kenny G and Up With People. The priest looked up from the altar and quipped “God Calling”. Everyone broke into a nervous laugh.

I fear that I am getting old. Under the burden of years my sense of humor is receding at twice the pace of my hairline. I fail to find this sort of thing funny. Not the least because its bad theology, the kind of bad theology that has become the default mode for talking about God.

You may be thinking to yourself at this moment, as you reach into your pocket or purse to turn your own cell phone off, that wringing a theological truism out one phone call is the homiletic equivalent of squeezing blood out of a turnip. And you may be right. You can do lot’s of things with turnips, I highly recommend them. But I am less concerned about cell phones than I am with the comment “God calling”. It betrays a theological mindset that has infected us all. A mindset that you can check by answering a simple question: where is Jesus Christ?

The standard answer that most people tend to give is that Christ is in heaven, a place which by everyone’s definition puts him beyond pain, fear or death. And this is not entirely wrong. The Creed affirms that:
He ascended into heaven from
And he will come to judge the living and the dead.
The problem is when believers, like their non believing neighbors, fail to finding him here on earth in meaningful and significant ways. So that we have to imagine that the only encounter we will ever have with him is at the moment of our death. This ensures that praying to Christ is a little like placing a long distance phone call. One of the few that the NSA can’t listen to, but what exactly is the area code for eternity?

The question that should we should be struggling to answer in the post-modern age is how do we move from abstract knowledge of God based solely on creedal statements about Him to a personal encounter with a living Christ: and more specifically to a living communion with the Risen Lord through the institution called the Church?

This is not a modern preoccupation. Judging by John’s Gospel it was also a problem for the young Christian communities for whom the Gospel was written in the late first century. And it revolves around two questions: How do we carry on in Jesus’ absence? How do we come to know him now that he is gone? John’s answer is given in the passage we hear today.
The key lies in the common human experience of knowing how to love.

This is my commandment; love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

In the weeks after Easter Sunday we hear longs portions of John’s Gospel in which the world “love” is a prominent verb. It’s important to remember where these chapters come from: they are not records of conversations Jesus has with his disciples after Easter Sunday, that is after he has come through the crucible of the Good Friday whole and triumphant.

No, they come from Holy Thursday, the evening before Christ’s personal journey into the heart of darkness that we call evil.

This is makes it a remarkable passage for two reasons: First, in his confrontation with evil Christ will be crushed by it, swallowed by it whole in death. And he will do this armed with nothing more than love.

Few of us will argue with the fact that the world is not a loving place. These are lessons that most of us learn very early: bad things happen to good people but evil things also happen to good people. And yet on the night before he dies Christ has the chutzpa to talk about love.
The second reason the passage is remarkable is for what it says about love, loving, and being loved for anyone who calls himself a friend of Christ: Christian love—Catholic love if you will—for the world and all who live in it looks exactly like the broken body of Jesus on the Cross. It is the giving away of self in order to discover self. This is love made visible in a way that many people in our nihilistic, suspicious and self-seeking culture are ill prepared to understand or accept. Even among some in the Church who want the agenda to be about ideology and power. Yet for some unfathomenable reason God has chosen the cross as the means by which His love and presence are made visible in the world. And we need to get used to the fact that we are not only its beneficiaries, but also its ambassadors and its witnesses.

This is why the stories and books that say that Christ did not die on the cross, that he lived to marry and have children and that he’s really buried in southern France or in Northern Israel or in an unmarked grave near Jerusalem, why this new “take” on an old story needs to be firmly opposed with the truth about the meaning of Christ’s death as God’s irrevocable offer of love and reconciliation which sets aright a world gone wrong.

This is the church’s job: not merely to preach the cross to but to live its meaning as those who have truly died and risen with Christ. A people whose agenda is not determined by power, influence, money, or distraction from the burden of consciousness but by another set of priorities centered on the fact that in the death and resurrection of Christ everything in the world has changed.