Homily: 6th Sunday of Easter

Readings: Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; Ps 66; 1 Pt 3:15-18; Jn 14:15-21

I think sometimes as we participate at Mass we dutifully bow our heads during prayer but don’t really listen all that well. Distractions come easily, don’t they? Yes, our minds wander to all sorts of places.

For example, how many of us can recall the words of today’s Opening Prayer? Do you remember what we prayed for? Actually, we prayed for joy. That’s right. Today on this 6th Sunday of Easter we asked God to “help us to celebrate our joy in the resurrection of the Lord, and to express in our lives the love we celebrate.”

Joy. How joyful are you? Does your life celebrate your joy in the Resurrection of the Lord? I certainly can't speak for you, but I sure don’t see a lot of joy on your faces out there. And yet, to “celebrate our joy” seems to assume we already have it. And if we don't have it, why not? Perhaps, for some, joy is overshadowed by all the misery and hate and despair that fill our world today. Is joy still realistic in the face of all that? It should be, because our joy in the Resurrection should transcend all the strangeness and sinfulness of our world. Indeed, that's exactly what Christ's Resurrection overcomes.

If joy is absent from our lives, where can we find this Easter joy?

Well, first we need to turn again to the Resurrection of Jesus. This is the source, the very root of our joy. St. Paul was explicit about this: “…if Christ has not been raised, then empty is our preaching; empty, too, your faith…For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain…”


And so if Christ is not now alive, gloriously alive, alive in the fullness of his humanity right now, then you and I might as well get up and go home. If Christ is not alive our Creed makes no sense – “on the third day he rose again.” If Christ is not alive the words of consecration – “This is my body” – are spoken over a dead, not a living, Christ. And that small piece of bread you receive in your hand or on your tongue – “The body of Christ” – is just a piece of bread, nothing more; that taste of wine is just that, a little wine, and not the cleansing Blood of Christ.

But the truth we celebrate during these weeks of Easter, is that the Jesus who gasped out his life and spilled his blood on that Cross, the Jesus who lay lifeless in the arms of his mother, the Jesus who’s battered body was closed up in that tomb…this Jesus is dead no longer.

Do you remember the closing scene in the musical Godspell, when the apostles and Mary Magdalene ran among the audience shouting for joy? “He’s alive! He’s alive!” Perhaps it’s hard for some of us to recapture the tearful joy of Jesus’ mother when he stood before her gloriously alive. Or the reverent delight of Magdalene near the tomb when He said, simply, “Mary.” Or the awed amazement of the apostles when he came through the locked door and “showed them his hands and his side.” Or the sheer joy, the quiet happiness, of the apostles on the shore when he said, “Come and have breakfast.” Or the disbelief of Thomas before he exclaimed with all his heart, “My Lord and my God!”

But this is precisely the kind of joy we must recapture. As a Christian, it’s not enough that I accept the resurrection of Jesus with my intellect, even though it is inspired by faith. For a true Christian spirituality almost demands that I celebrate it with joy. I must feel it in my flesh, get goose-bumps on my skin, erupt with a joy that can’t be contained.

Have you and I found the risen Christ not simply as an object of belief, not only as an article of the Creed, but as a vibrant man alive with the glorified wounds of his passion? This is where Christian joy can be found, the unconfined Christian joy we celebrate today, the joy we prayed for in our opening prayer.

And this joy we celebrate in Jesus’ Resurrection leads us to another cause for joy: our own resurrection. By this I mean more than the resurrection that awaits us after death, but also our resurrection from sin, the freedom Jesus grants us through his Incarnation, his passion, death and resurrection.

The prophet Isaiah saw it coming when he told the people to: “Speak out with a voice of joy; let it be heard to the ends of the earth: The Lord has set His people free, alleluia!” The Lord has set His people free. Do you believe that? If you don’t, you should.

Listen to the words Father Peter will pray a few moments from now when He prays today’s Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer: “In Christ a new age has dawned, the long reign of sin has ended, a broken world has been renewed, and man is once again made whole.” This doesn’t mean sin is a thing of the past. No, it means sin no longer reigns like a tyrant over us.

With the grace that comes from the passion and resurrection, we are no longer slaves of sin; we can overcome. If we sin, we do so freely. If we truly repent, and seek the grace of the sacrament of reconciliation, we are forgiven. Our brokenness isn’t utterly healed; but with God’s grace we no longer need to be torn within; we should no longer despair over our brokenness. With Christ, we now have forgiveness. We now have hope. We now have salvation.

How did Jesus put it in today’s Gospel? “Because I have life, you also will have life.” This is a promise, brothers and sisters, a promise that tells us where the emphasis of our Christian lives should be.

Our emphasis shouldn’t be on our sinfulness. Not, of course, that sin has fled entirely; for it surely hasn’t. But the reason Jesus came, why he lived and died and rose to glory, why He made it possible for us to triumph over sin, was, in His own words, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”

What exactly is this “life” Jesus promises us? Listen again to today’s Gospel passage, the promise of Jesus: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.” And He goes on to say, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.”

This is Jesus’ joyful declaration of what it means to be Alive in Christ. It’s the Trinity, the Triune God, dwelling in you as in a home; making you, your very person, a temple of God as truly as is this tabernacle.
You don’t believe me? Well, believe St. Paul. He insists on it: “You are the temple of the living God,” he told the Corinthians, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?...God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.”

This, brothers and sisters, is what it means for man and woman to be “once again made whole.” Your flesh and your spirit are alive with the presence of the living God, of the risen Christ. This isn’t some romantic, poetic, metaphorical sentiment. This is the Gospel truth! Little wonder Paul could cry out: “If you are in Christ, you are a new creature!” That’s right, this state in which we live is a “new creation.”

Good friends, there are two realities of which we can be certain:

1. God will ceaselessly surprise us, and not always delightfully; and
2. No matter how unwelcome the surprise, God is always there – our Father who created us for joy, Jesus who died that we might experience His joy; and the Holy Spirit who generates this joy within us.

Before the Easter season ends, resolve that for you it will never end. An infallible sign that Easter is still yours is the joy that lights your whole being because you are alive – Alive in Christ -- that you rejoice in your very being.

Let’s celebrate this joy by sharing joyously in the central act of our worship: God with us in our gathering; Jesus Christ with us in His Word, and alive on our altar, in our hands, on our tongues, in our hearts.