Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Parish, Manhattan
Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter
May 5, 2023
Acts 13:26-33, Ps 2, Jn 14:1-6
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.5.23_Homily_1.mp3
The following points were attempted in the homily:
* In today’s first reading we have the second part of St. Paul’s word of exhortation in the Synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia. Yesterday we had the first 13 verses, today the next eight and the last five we have for homework. As I mentioned yesterday, throughout this “word of exhortation,” we see how St. Paul puts the Gospel into a context of what is relevant for his listeners.
* He begins by discussing his listeners’ hopes and expectations, their longing for a Messiah, so that he can show how Jesus is the fulfillment of their deep desires. He shows there’s a purpose to history.
* Second, he declares forthrightly that Jesus is the fulfillment of their hopes.
* Third, he discusses that even though Jesus is their hope, many, in blind folly, rejected him, but that rejection didn’t have the final word, because God raised him from the dead, showing that hope placed in him is never in vain.
* Finally, Paul makes that news actual, bringing us to a moment of decision. He describes how this is Good News, joy, for all of us who accept Jesus and begin to live by his ways — and bad news for those who disobey that summons.
* This is the pattern of proclamation for us in every age. We begin with the context of people’s aspirations and hopes, how Jesus fulfills them, how God has triumphed over people’s sins and rejection in the past, and how he wants us to share in that victory, but then we turn to how we must choose to respond to that incredible offer. St. Paul would elsewhere describe his own conversion and how he was among those who initially opposed, but came to grasp this life and that’s what motivated him to share Jesus with others. Similarly, even with those who have never heard of God, we can always begin with their desire for happiness and lead them from that desire to see what we’ve found in Jesus as the fulfillment of our longings for happiness, give witness over time to the choice we’ve made for him and seek to help them imitate that choice.
* Today in the Gospel Jesus meets those aspirations. We will hear this Gospel three times in five days: we heard it on Wednesday for the Feast of the Apostles Philip and James; we hear it today; and we will hear it on Sunday, as we do every third year during Cycle A of the Sunday lectionary. This repetition should providentially help us to build our life more concretely on what Jesus says to us, in fulfillment of our hopes. He gives us one of his most famous phrases: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
* We’ve heard Jesus’ self-description as the Way, the Truth and the Life so many times that their revolutionary shock value is almost entirely lost on us, but to first century Jewish listeners, they would have heard Jesus saying that he was the full realization of their three deepest religious aspirations. Jews had been praying for centuries, “Teach me your way, O Lord” and Jesus was saying, “I am the way.” They had been imploring God, “Teach me your decrees” that “I may walk in your truth,” and Jesus was saying, “I am the Truth.” They had been begging, “Show me the path of life,” and Jesus was indicating, “I am the Life.” Jesus was saying that he was the personification of all their religious aspirations and the answer to so many of their most insistent prayers. But these aspirations were not exclusively Jewish. They point to the perennial needs that spring up in every hum...