May 2010 Sánchez Sunday Commentaries & Sample Homilies (C)
FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (C)
May 2, 2010
Love Is in the Details
Patricia Datchuck Sánchez
Acts 13:14, 21-27
Rev 21:1-5
John 13:31-33, 34-35
Anyone who has been privileged to watch, wait and pray as a loved one approaches the final passage through death to life will probably never forget the experience. The dying one’s last words are especially unforgettable. Often these words convey a final expression of love, a wish for the well-being of the people left behind, even a sigh of fear or sadness. The survivors will visit and revisit these words as a way to feel connected to the person they miss.
In what has been called the Last Supper Discourse, the Johannine evangelist has presented the words that the soon-to-die Jesus wished to leave with his disciples. Four of the five Sunday Gospels for May put those last words of Jesus before us once again. The other Gospel, the one for Pentecost, reminds us that we have been empowered to make those words speak again in us.
For today, the word is a commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus, as we know, loved big and bold. To be in his presence, to hear his voice, to feel his healing touch was to know you were dearly loved and cherished. His love was so profound and authentic that he gave his life for the salvation of sinners. Although he is the redeemer of us all and we are indebted to him for our very breath, he calls us his beloved, his friends.
When they chose to respond to the great love they had come to know in Jesus, Paul and Barnabas (Acts) also loved large. They set aside their own plans for their lives and devoted themselves to a ministry that would extend the love of Jesus to all peoples. Their missiology is encapsulated in today’s first reading: a pattern that they would repeat in city after city for the rest of their lives. While all of us are called to love, we may not to be called to love as dangerously as Jesus, Paul, Barnabas and the other pioneers of our faith. Each of us has to discover the best way to express our love.
In her own quest to discover the best way to love, Oprah Winfrey has used her fame and success in order to be extremely generous to others. With Nelson Mandela as her mentor, Winfrey chose to build a school for girls in South Africa. She wanted to give students the tools they would need to become a transforming presence in their country. She could have simply written a check and left it to others to complete the work, but Winfrey remained personally involved in even the most minor decisions. “Love is in the details,” she explained.
Love was also in the details for Franz Kafka, a German-speaking Jewish author from Czechoslovakia who died in 1924. Kafka left a considerable legacy to the literary world. His writings were so characterized by surreal distortion and a sense of impending danger that they spawned the adjective “Kafkaesque.” In spite of this usual style, however, in person he could be quite compassionate and funny. Near the end of his life, Kafka met a little girl in the street who was crying because she had lost her doll. He quickly explained to her that although the doll had gone away, he, by a happy coincidence, had just met the plaything and it had promised to write. In the weeks that followed, as his tuberculosis slowly overcame him, Kafka wrote letters to the little girl in which the doll told about its travels and all manner of interesting experiences. We can only imagine the joy that his efforts brought to the child.
As yet, Winfrey and Kafka have not been numbered among the saints. Their actions have not been preserved in the scriptures like those of Jesus, Barnabas and Paul. Nevertheless, they can inspire each one of us to discover how to love in our own small ways: by choosing a kind word rather than a critical one, offering a smile or a helping hand, sending a letter to a friend, remembering someone’s birthday, listening to the lonely, being patient with the impatient, showing interest in someone else’s plans.
As the Gospels reflect, Jesus understood the importance of loving God and others in little ways: giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcome to strangers, and clothing to the needy and visiting the sick and imprisoned. These “little ways,” in fact, became the criteria for gaining a welcome into eternity. Love is in the details.
Acts 13:14, 21-27
John Wesley, whose followers are called Methodists, spent two years as a missionary among the settlers in America before returning to his native England, determined to set it on fire with faith. He mounted his horse, and before his life was spent he traveled 225,000 miles. He declared that the whole world was his parish. He desired that everyone would come to know God as he had on May 24, 1738 — the day of his conversion experience.
Wesley’s conversion was much like the one Paul experienced on the Damascus Road, around the year 40. We do not know the circumstances of Barnabas’ first experience of the risen Christ, but it clearly shaped and directed the rest of his life. In this text from Acts, readers can get a sense of how those first missionaries set about the task of sharing Christ with others.
Ordinarily, Paul and Barnabas began in a synagogue setting and remained in one place until they had established a faith community. The initial preaching of the Gospel was not an easy process. The message was received by some and rejected by others; some of the latter were adamant in their efforts to rid themselves of the disciples. Many times, circumstances beyond their control forced the early preachers of the good news to leave a city or foundation before they had intended to go. Paul arranged for additional visits to the places he left, from himself or from an emissary, and he kept up an active correspondence with his foundations. It is probable that he wrote letters we have not yet found or that were simply not preserved.
In verse 23 of this text, Luke mentions elders who were appointed by the missionaries in order to help the community maintain its faith life and commitment to Christ and the Gospel. Some scholars suggest that the installation of elders here might be an anachronism, since Paul’s first missionary journey took place about the year 48, and the appointing of elders was possibly a later practice. Others cite the role of the elders in Judaism and suggest that the disciples were implementing a hierarchy with which they were familiar.
Because the Greek word for “elder” is presbyter, the same word from which the term “priest” is derived, some see the appointment of elders as the prelude to clerical ordination. In any event, the early church elders functioned as people whose seasoned wisdom and maturity, combined with the prayerful fasting and approbation of the community, enabled them to serve the growing Jesus movement.
The gift of the Holy Spirit was also at the constant service of the community. By the grace of the Spirit — who was promised by Jesus — the missionaries were able to continue their efforts despite the hardships they encountered (v. 22). When their journeys brought them home to the community who had sent them forth, it was not their own accomplishments they recounted, but those of the Spirit of God at work in each of them. For that reason, the Lucan author concludes this report on the spread of the gentile mission not with kudos for Paul and Barnabas but for with praise to God, who opened the door. God should always get first billing.
Rev 21:1-5
These eloquent words of the ancient seer underscore the basic conviction of Christian apocalyptic literature — that nothing and no one can ever defeat the goodness that is the very essence of God. When the believers who lived in the seven churches of Asia Minor received this message from John, their hearts probably beat faster and their flagging spirits were raised. Someone knew what they were suffering. Someone cared. That Someone was God, and the author of Revelation would never let them forget that God was on their side. And not just on their side or even by their side; God dwelled within them. God was theirs and they were God’s. What could possibly prevail against them?
At the time, it was the Roman Empire attempting to prevail against the followers of Jesus, who were being persecuted for their beliefs during the reign of Domitian (81-96). As a result of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66-70 C.E., great numbers of Jews and Jewish Christians had fled Palestine for Asia. There, both groups went through a clarification of their own identities and a restructuring of their institutions.
Jewish believers in Jesus had previously been regarded as part of the larger Jewish community. Now they were no longer being accepted as such. Therefore, Christians in Asia were caught up in what M. Eugene Boring has described as a crisis of identity and survival (Revelation, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Ky.: 1989). The church was in a transitional, vulnerable situation, trying to find its way forward in the generation between the deaths of the apostolic eyewitnesses and the emergence of a firm structure. The author of Revelation kept their eyes on the prize as he shared this vision of the New Jerusalem, where they would live in peace and intimacy with God.
Except for his assurance that it will be centered on the presence of God, John’s description of eternity seems to focus most on what will not be there. In verse 1, he promises that the sea will be no more. While he could have been referring to the Aegean Sea, which separated him from the readers he wished to help, it is more likely that John meant the “chaotic power of un-creation … the abyss-mal depth from which the dragon arises to torment the earth, the very opposite of God” (Boring, op. cit.). The earthly sea was reined in at the time of creation; the sea of the new creation is no more because every source of evil has been irrevocably overcome, defeated by God’s goodness.
With the threat of evil erased forever, John could assure his readers that there would be no more tears or pain, no more wailing or mourning, no more death. God, who created all and then recreated all in Jesus Christ, has turned the page on the old order and made all things new. Christians near the end of the first century were heartened by this message, and Christians through the centuries have continued to find hope in these words.
John 13:31-33, 34-35
In an almost matter-of-fact voice, the evangelist begins this scene by announcing that “Judas had left them.” The previous verses had described a dinner between intimate friends: Jesus had washed his disciples’ feet, indicating that they should do the same for one another. Soon after that Jesus, began talking about his betrayer, and the disciple he loved leaned back against his chest to ask who it might be. Tradition says this disciple was John, and according to the Roman custom of reclining at table, he rested to the right of Jesus.
William Barclay is among those who place Judas at Jesus’ left — Judas must have been close to him, as he received a special morsel of food from Jesus’ plate, and Jesus spoke to him without others overhearing (“The Gospel of John,” The Daily Study Bible, The Saint Andrew Press, Edinburgh, U.K.: 1975). Despite his special nearness to Jesus at table, Judas was apparently unmoved.
With Judas’ departure, the evangelist signaled to his readers that the die had been cast; Jesus’ death had been set in motion. John 13:30 tells us that when Judas went out, it was night. In that moment, when the powers of darkness seemed most overwhelming, the Johannine Jesus began to speak of glory and love. His death on the cross would not be a victory for evil. It would be a means of glorifying God. It would not be an execution but a sacrifice that spelled out with unmistakable clarity the depth of his love and God’s love for sinners.
A comparison with the synoptic accounts will reveal that at this particular moment during their last meal together, Jesus instituted the Eucharist. In the fourth Gospel, Jesus gives a mandate of love. “It is as if for him love was just as real a memorial of Christ as the Eucharist itself” (Thierry Maertens, Jean Frisque, Guide For the Christian Assembly, Fides Pub., Notre Dame, Ind.: 1972). Our love of one another takes on a sacramental character; it is a sign that communicates the visible presence of Christ: “This is how all will know that you are my disciples” (v. 35).
Sample Homily May 2, 2010
Fifth Sunday of Easter
“One Day We Will Rise”
Fr. James Smith
John sees a new heaven and a new earth. Jesus is about to be glorified by dying on the cross. His Easter resurrection is fast approaching. As the climax of his life and the linchpin of our faith races toward us, it is time for us to decide what we believe about resurrection. Because as Paul said, if Jesus is not raised from death, the rest of our faith is useless.
We don’t really know what resurrection means. We’ve never experienced it, and we know of only two people who have. Jesus, in trying to dramatize his experience, walks through walls and eats fish. His mother doesn’t even try to explain the wondrous thing that happened to her.
One thing we do know about resurrection is that it’s not the same thing as reviving our old life — that is resuscitation. Nor does it involve a totally different life that’s unconnected to our old one. Then we would be different people. As the theological principle says, grace does not destroy nature; grace builds on nature. Which means that we get our best clue of what the new life is like if we analyze the old life.
So, what is an earthy human?
The popular notion of earthly existence is that we are individuals careening through space and time, now colliding, now caressing each other. It’s ultimately everyone for themselves. Of course, that selfish attitude reduces the world to our private stage and other people to our impersonal props. That is not even a human life, let alone a Christian life.