Mass readings for the 5th Sunday of Easter:
Acts 14.21b-27 Psalm 145.8-13 Revelation 21.1-5a John 13.1, 33-35
Jesus today speaks to us to calm our fears. And that could not be more needed than in our current anxieties over the economy, national unity, international relations, etc. It’s at times like these that we have a fundamental choice to make: for Christ or against Him. Fear can drive us away from him as we choose to do things the world tells us are best to address our problems – these always make things worse: be aggressive, belligerent, bellicose, threatening, insulting; or conversely, surrender, submit, lie down, give up. Like apes, we screech at each other and hurl excrement, and then when one makes a convincing show of force, the other rolls over and exposes himself in humiliating submission.
Jesus, of course, shows us a better way. He tells us we can find peace, joy, shelter from the storm, with Him. So, don’t be afraid, don’t let our hearts be troubled. But that offer has a condition: that we love him. We love him by keeping his word. Keep his word, and God will make his home among us. Fail to, and we will live, in fear, apart from God.
What does it mean to have God among us? How would we know he is among us? Well, one is that we keep his commandments, we meet our moral obligations to God and others. And that’s not to be in selecting a few of them; it’s to be all of them to the true best of our ability. Second, the qualities of God will then become manifest among us. By keeping his word, we are changed, the community is changed. What are the signs of this? We see God’s qualities in each other, in ourselves, in our families, in the community. And when they are lacking, we know why: we have not kept his word. Simple.
But we need to be careful in naming these qualities. A great many things are called virtues today that are nothing of the sort. They may be the values of a political philosophy or movement, but that’s not the same thing. Human beings can value things that aren’t truly virtuous, just convenient, sometimes evil. And we can value things like freedom or tolerance, but lacking in virtue, these become destructive. We can engage in vice and bully others into saying its virtue; and that really is wicked. We need to know our faith so as to defend it, and to defend a way of life that many more, outside the Church enjoy even as they foolishly work to undermine it.
What are the qualities that we can say with certainty are good? Well, consider the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the one Jesus sends to teach and guide us: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. In exercising these we bear fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
So, we’ve fourteen distinct qualities, gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, virtues we know to be good. Do we see them in our lives as individuals and as a community? Do we see these at a national level, provincial, or municipal; thinking more ecclesiastically, are these seen in the Church? In the Vatican? In our diocese? In our parish? These are pretty good metrics of God’s presence or absence. Our own examinations of conscience, done regularly, should keep us in our personal lives on the side of virtue even as we fail from time to time. Together we should be aspiring to be wise, strong, knowledgeable, loving people distinguished by our kindness, patience, prudence and piety, among other qualities already mentioned.
We shouldn’t reduce our faith to ritual acts, getting our sacraments occasionally. That’s what we see in the first reading: some in the early Church are saying that to belong to the Church, one needs to adopt outward signs of religious adherence; keeping the dietary laws of the Torah; for men, being circumcised. The Church’s decision on the matter, thank God, is that it is our obedience to Christ’s word that makes us Christian. The sacraments, particularly that of our communion in the eucharist, are to nourish us by worthy and regular reception, toward the virtues God asks us to live. But if we don’t live them, receiving communion unworthily won’t save us anymore than circumcision would make an ancient pagan a child of God.
It’s encouraging to encounter these virtues in other people; and I do. Here in the parish, in the community. Sadly, however, I find myself often at the threshold of despair when I personally encounter or observe in the wider society a lack of these virtues. Elections always disappoint, and the recent call for “elbows up” was unworthy of us. We could have found another way of expressing national pride. I played hockey, and going into the corner with an elbow up was dirty play, and a referee would be more than just in sending a player off the ice for such conduct. No one, to my knowledge, questioned this or discouraged it. We might say, “don’t take it so seriously” but given that we’ve been in the midst of a culture that took offense at the most innocuous things to find racism, sexism, or other forms of bigotry, it’s not unreasonable to say that something so blatantly offensive can’t be called out. It was a milder instance of something we’ve seen in our streets where crowds chant for the death of other groups, the destruction of other nations. Those who defend such appalling behaviour tell us not to take it literally, even as we see day after day, evidence of its evil effect. Look at the young man who murdered that Jewish couple in Washington D.C. this past week. His only connection with the conflict in the Middle East was in his political activism; he went on protest march after protest march where that idea of murder as a virtuous act was inculcated. And he obviously, had nothing in his life, in his formation as an adult, to resist such an evil.
Modern Israel is a source of much confusion today, we must admit. It exposes the contradictions at the heart of the liberal world order in which we are all steeped; and our liberalism provides us with no answers to this quandary. Israel resembles the liberal West, yet differs in a fundamental way as a Jewish state. We have sympathy for the people of Gaza, but they don’t share in our Western values at all. Neither are multicultural; and the multiculturalism we’ve embraced is increasingly proving a source of internal conflict in our own society. All of this is confusing, and angering as we cannot square our secular liberal convictions with the reality we’re experiencing. As Catholics, we must recognize that Christian virtues and political values are not the same thing. Our civilization was Christian before it was liberal, democratic, and economically capitalist. We have to stop compromising our faith to fit the mould of dominant ideologies and put Christ first. All else can only be retained insofar as it is compatible with our faith. That may seem intolerant of difference, but Jesus himself was tolerant up to the point in which evil came into view. We must militate against evil, not tolerate it, and do so as Christ would: speak against it fearlessly. First and foremost, we resist it by living as Christ taught. By word and deed conformed to Christ we then fight for the world’s redemption.
So, there is a reason why Catholic piety, our life of public worship and private prayer demands introspection with respect to both what we say and do. That our speech is indicative of our thinking. Corrupt thought leads to despicable action. Listen to the everyday speech of people on the streets of our city that shows us their minds. Through casual eavesdropping picking up fragments of conversation, one hears vulgar and hatefulness words, words reflecting a judgmental attitude and self-justification. There is too little humility.
Keeping God’s word means consciously refraining from speech that is unworthy of us. To gossip, for example, makes us accustomed to and accepting of our fallen nature, our predilection to sin. It moves us onto the line that separates the virtuous life from the world of vice, and there we can trip over that line into darkness. Then our words become poisonous; our actions following our thoughts, probably more violent.
I get that the world angers us; it provokes us. It’s trying to draw us into its games of power, its violence, its decay, degeneration and death. Let’s not go there, let’s not be drawn into that, but instead respond as Christ tells us, listen to his word, and rely instead upon Him when we are troubled, when we fear. Let’s make our home with him, and invite others to join us there, abiding in God, and God abiding in us.
Amen.