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 recent years, we have heard “unprecedented” again and again.
For example, COVID-19 was called “unprecedented,” but in fact it had been preceded by a flu pandemic after the First World War and by three waves of bubonic plague between the 14th and the 19th centuries.
Today we hear that the Church’s difficulties are “unprecedented” – to the point where some people are predicting the end of the world! However, this Sunday’s First Reading reports that Saul was threatened with death as early as the first century for preaching “boldly in the name of Jesus.”
Christ himself warned us. “If you find that the world hates you, know [that] it has hated me before you. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own; the reason it hates you is that you do not belong to the world.”
“They will harry you as they harried me,” He said. “They will respect your words as much” – or as little – “as they respected mine. All this they will do to you because of my name.”
“Do you think I have come to establish peace on the earth?” He asked. “I assure you, the contrary is true. I have come for division.” In fact, “a time will come when anyone who puts you to death will claim to be serving God!”
“I tell you all this that in me you may find peace,” he said just hours before his crucifixion. “You will suffer in the world. But take courage! I have overcome the world.”
Christ gave us the same kind of assurance about his Church.
“You are ‘Rock,’” he told Peter, “and on this rock I will build my Church, and the jaws of death shall not prevail against it.” (In other words, his Church would not end with Peter’s death.) “I will entrust to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you declare bound on earth shall be bound in heaven; whatever you declare loosed on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
“He who hears you, hears me,” He told all his apostles. “He who rejects you, rejects me.” At the very end, he said, “Know that I am with you always, until the end of the world.”
The late Father Donald Neumann used to stress that “Christ-and-his-Church” were “a package deal.” St. Paul, he noted, called the Church Christ’s “bride” – “one body” with him like a wife with her husband.
No matter what the Church’s difficulties, therefore, we should not lose confidence in her, any more than we should lose confidence in Christ, who promised to have his Holy Spirit guard the Church so that what she bound or loosed on earth would be, indeed, bound or loosed in heaven.
If we obey God’s commandment to “believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ,” as St. John says in the Second Reading, we will keep the “peace” Christ promised even when we hear of his bride’s “unprecedented” difficulties. We will realize, as Jesus says in the Gospel Reading, that God prunes “every branch that bears fruit to make it bear more fruit.”
We will cultivate the attitude of the theologian Pope Benedict XVI cited, who, after arguing “passionately” against the dogma of Mary’s Assumption, was asked, “What will you do if the dogma is nevertheless defined? Won’t you then have to turn your back on the Catholic Church?” After a moment’s reflection, he replied, “If the dogma comes, then I will remember that the Church is wiser than I and that I must trust her more than my own erudition.”
With the same humility, we will trust everything the Church teaches authoritatively, not just her formal “dogmas.”
After all, as G.K. Chesterton said, what we need is not “a religion that is right where we are right” but “a religion that is right where we are wrong.”
ather Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The title of the presentation next week is Marriage and the Family. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.