A father loves his son, but wants to see him grow into the fullness of manhood. In the same way, God wants to see us achieve holiness, writes Father Hawkswell. (Pixabay photo)
Fifth
Sunday of Easter, Year B
First
Reading: Acts
9:26-30
Second
Reading: 1 Jn
3:18-24
Gospel
Reading: Jn
15:1-8
In this Sunday’s First Reading, we hear how the early Church was “built up,” living “in the fear of the Lord” and “the comfort of the Holy Spirit.”
“Fear of the Lord” inspires us with profound respect for the majesty of God. It protects us from sin through dread of offending the Lord and gives us confidence in the power of his help.
I once reminded a woman that it was wrong to live as the wife of a man to whom she was not married. “Oh, I don’t worry about that,” she responded. “God knows I’m weak, and he loves me just as I am.”
This expresses what the Church calls presumption: continuing to sin because we know God will forgive us. Fear of the Lord is the virtue that prevents it.
This fear is not a servile (“slave-like”) fear, in which we dread punishment. It is a filial fear, in which we dread doing anything contrary to our Father’s will and obey his commands out of love. (“Filial” comes from the Latin filius, “son,” or filia, “daughter.”)
Whoever obeys God’s commands “abides in him, and he abides in them,” we hear in the Second Reading.
Jesus explains what this means. “I am the vine; you are the branches,” he says in the Gospel Reading. “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.”
If we abide in him and he in us, we bear fruit, he says. However, “every branch that bears fruit” is pruned by his Father “to make it bear more fruit.”
God loves us just as we are, but he is not satisfied with us just as we are. Similarly, a father loves his baby son, but he would not be satisfied to see him stay a baby all his life; he wants to see him grow into the fullness of manhood.
Now the fullness to which God calls us is the holiness of God himself. To enter heaven, we must be “made perfect” as he is perfect, Jesus said. God will do whatever is necessary, but he will not do it against our will. “In a certain sense, one could say that confronted with our human freedom, God decided to make himself ‘impotent,’” or “powerless,” St. John Paul II said.
The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us of a passage from the Book of Proverbs: “My sons, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord, nor lose heart when he reproves you; for (he) whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he receives.”
It goes on: “Endure your trials as the discipline of God, who deals with you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you do not know the discipline of sons, you are not sons, but bastards.”
Our human fathers discipline us “to prepare us for the short span of mortal life, but God does so for our true profit, that we may share his holiness,” the Letter says. “At the time it is administered, all discipline seems a cause for grief and not for joy, but later it brings forth the fruit of peace and justice to those who are trained in its school.”
“Fear of the Lord” is one of the seven gifts the Holy Spirit bestows on us at our Confirmation. “Peace” and “goodness” are two of the twelve fruits he “forms in us as the first fruits of eternal glory,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The choice is clear; either we let ourselves be disciplined, or we fail to reach the holiness to which God calls us. That means forfeiting eternal happiness, for God the Father “removes every branch in me that bears no fruit,” Jesus said, and the branch “withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.”