Homilies

April 27, 2008
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; 1 Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21
Fr. Justin Sheehan

Every human life is a story; and what is most interesting in that story is that it's not about me - it's about God in me. From the eternity before our birth to the eternity after our death, we are personally known to God, and every moment of our lives is touched by his presence. The story of our lives is the story of our re-fashioning in the likeness of Love, beginning with faith, growing by suffering, and ending in joy.

Today's psalmist puts the human story into words inspired by God: "Come and see the works of God; I will tell what he did for my soul. Blessed be God who did not withhold his love from me". God's first grace is to allow us to be born or baptized into a people who already have a relationship with God. "He turned the sea into dry land": he brought our ancestors through the Red Sea and delivered them from the Egyptians, forming a community which still nurtures my spiritual life today. It is as a member of this community that God does good things for my soul.

This people of God is wider now than the Jewish community. "Philip went to a Samaritan town", we are told, "and proclaimed the Christ to them. The people united in welcoming the message" and were "baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. No longer is membership in God's people limited to those who were born Jewish. All those who have faith and are baptized begin their refashioning in the likeness of Love not as isolated individuals but as members of a divine society. My spiritual life is not what I do with my solitude; it is what God does when I am in communion with his people. It is only when the apostles Peter and John laid hands on the Samaritans that they received the Holy Spirit, and still today, the Holy Spirit most clearly guides my spiritual life when I am in communion with the successors of Peter and John, the pope and the bishops.

In the letter attributed to Peter, the Holy Spirit gives us the principle of the life of faith, and the means of its growth. "Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts", he says. We become like what we love, and if we reverence Christ in our hearts, we come to resemble him more. That is all that God wants, and all that he can want: his whole relationship with us is for that purpose. Everything that happens to us should be seen in the light of God's plan for us. That is why it can be the will of God that we should suffer - to become "other Christs"; to be Jesus over again, and, like him, misunderstood, persecuted, and made to bear our cross.

It is the spirit of faith that sees God's love even in our suffering, The hope that God has for us is that we will respond as Christ did, continuing to look upon God with love when he sends us these hours which mean so much for our spiritual growth, when our hearts can do little more than say "Thy will be done". Suffering in this way enlarges our capacity for the divine life, because it enlarges our capacity to give ourselves, and the gift of self is the source and condition of life, and therefore of spiritual growth and joy. Christ himself went through this transfiguring process so that his humanity could be refashioned in the likeness of Love his Father.

The world sees only the suffering, because it has never received the Spirit of truth, and does not know him. But we know him because he is with us and in us teaching us to find joy in sorrow, love in suffering, and life in death. It is in our hearts that we reverence the Lord Christ, and it is in our hearts that we receive the Spirit of truth. The kind of truth the Spirit brings is love-knowledge, the understanding that God who is love is in us. To understand this is to understand that the meaning of life cannot be found apart from love, and that the goal of our faith, and the purpose of our suffering, is to refashion us as members of Christ's body, into the likeness of Love so that we can share in the divine life of God who is love.

Christ has not left us orphans in this interim time between two eternities. He comes back to us in the form of bread and wine, becoming God within us in our suffering, and initiating a lover's quarrel with our sins. Let us not fear to give ourselves totally to him, so that our story ends not in death, but in eternal joy.his resurrection for ever and ever. Amen".