Homily from the Parish Priest for the Fifth Sunday of Easter
Readings for Year B: Acts 9:26-31; I John 3:18-24; John 15:1-8
Change, people say, gets harder as we get older. And yet to change, we are taught, is to mature. One of the paradoxes, one of the challenges in life. Many of us have I’m sure experienced this in the last year as a result or indirect or direct of COVID. Perhaps you’ve found yourself newly and strangely alone in the world, through losing loved ones perhaps or just through isolation; maybe we’ve found time to pray and reflect; maybe we’re coming out of this – because indeed we surely are now, eventually – come out of this more depressed, or maybe the opposite – more hopeful of a new start. Whatever it is the pandemic is for us the world has been through it and we are called to learn from it, to be renewed, and to embrace what Pope Francis heralds as not an era of change but a change of era. A time when we are challenged to embrace a closer sense of connection between us, with our earthly habitat, recognising how we need to change in the ways we treat each other and the kingdom we inhabit so it truly does become more like that of heaven than of earth.
It’s also this kind of time for us right now in the liturgical year.
As we are invited to enter into the life of the disciples at this time of change, this time of uneasy transition.
Jesus is about to leave us. We shall soon see him no more as we approach the Feast of His Ascension to His Father in ten days’ time. Yet – Jesus is telling us that we must press ahead on our mission, that is his mission. We have to leave behind our anxieties and rest in the peace that he will work through us. He is the vine; we are the branches, and if we are always attached to the vine we will bring his message to others. In fact being attached inseparably to him through our baptism we bring his very presence as he resides in us. And central to this to bring what he stood for to others when he is with us no more: and that mission he spells out very clearly in this 2nd reading from the letters of St John: “love one another as I have loved you…”
These are challenging words from Jesus. This is in the command to love not in the way we might understand it but nothing less than as he has loved in giving himself up for us. To love as Jesus did is to say goodbye to self and to embrace an uncertain future, an apparent void of aloneness on this earth which can only be embraced through the giving of oneself. This is a message the disciples didn’t want to hear. It is a message our world does not want to hear and yet that selflessness has begun to peep through the cracks of the cosy world views we have created. The selflessness of the NHS workers on the COVID wards, those homeless left on the streets who experience love for the first time when they meet a real human being who treats them with unconditional respect, the hotels and restaurants that put aside their balance sheets and feed those who otherwise would die – a number not far from here, the determination I hear from many that we won’t go back to the “new normal” – that many will fall away from coming to church is not to be a cause for hopeless despair or even resignation to struggle but a call to embrace new ways of meeting people and bringing them into this Church we love so much, an opportunity to inhabit not the walls both real and metaphorical of our Church’s buildings but to inhabit the peripheries where religion of any kind is so alien and misunderstood and yet so much needed by the many who now are striving to give, to care for our beleaguered world, to love truly and generously. And to go there not to preach but to listen and understand the soaring of the spirit.
These weeks between the great Feast of Easter and the Ascension and then Pentecost – the giving of the Holy Spirit to be our helper to bring his message to the world – are sacred weeks – weeks to pray for us as his Body on earth, as his Church, that we can be renewed so we may truly act as he commands us to act. We need again to truly know God’s love for us in the self-gift of Our Lord, and to recommit ourselves to becoming more like him. And if we desire to be like him the Holy Spirit will change us, will move our desires to be transformed more closely into the perfect love he bestowed on us in the gift of his very self.
Fr Dominic Robinson SJ