Pentecost 2018

John 14: 15-16, 23b-26

I've known a lot of permanent deacons. Most of us have one thing in common. There was a time when we heard a little nagging voice telling us to look into being a deacon, and we ignored it – sometimes for a very long time, before finally giving in. I first thought about it when I took care of a man whose son was one of the first deacons ordained in our diocese. I was busy with my medical career and pushed the idea down into my subconscious. It kept popping up. Several years went by and my life became busier. I had six kids and was running a department at Baystate Medical Center. I also was seeing a full load of patients, and trying to expand our department's efforts into Greenfield and Ware. In this, perhaps the busiest part of my life so far, I finally gave in to the pressure. The Holy Spirit was pushing me in a direction I didn't want to go. If you want a nice quiet life, don't listen to the Holy Spirit!

So it's that one day of every year that we turn our attention to the Holy Spirit. And we will be happy next Sunday when we can get back to God as Trinity, and then Jesus as our food and drink, and then march through the year contemplating the life of Jesus. We can handle that. But the Holy Spirit is kind of scary. It seems that if we let him get too close, he does things to us; he makes us go where we don't want to go. I don't think Jesus wanted to be driven into the desert at the beginning of his ministry – but that's exactly what the Holy Spirit did. . I'm not sure the Blessed Mother wanted to be an unwed mother in a small town where people were always looking for someone to talk about, but the Holy Spirit didn't ask. The angel said, “He will overshadow you”. We see a lot of examples in the Acts of the Apostles when the Holy Spirit pushed the followers of Jesus around, making them defy the leaders of the Jews, making them disrupt the peace all over the empire. They knew that if they followed the promptings of the Spirit, it might end up badly. And that is still true – if you let the Spirit in, he will probably make you go where you do not want to.

Look at our readings. If you were a frightened apostle in a locked room, and Jesus appeared in the room, you would probably be quaking in your boots. But after he comforts you, he promises to send the Holy Spirit – or as we used to call him in the olden days when I was a kid, the Holy Ghost. Somehow that isn't as reassuring as it should have been. “You're going to send us a ghost to keep us company, Lord?” And in the reading from Acts, here the apostles have been spinning their wheels wondering what they are supposed to do now? And again they are gathered in a room, when fire and wind appear, and seemingly push them into action, out into the crowds, to the very temple at the center of Israel, where they begin to preach, where foreign languages are coming out of their mouths, where most astonishingly, people are listening.

So when we really think about the Holy Spirit, one of the things he brings besides grateful coolness from the heat, as the Sequence says, is the shaking up of lives. And if you are like me, you don't want that. You want things to be predictable, you want to do God's will, of course, but on your terms; and if you hear the Spirit pushing you to do something new, something outrageous, something totally out of character, if you are like me, you say, “I need a sign, Holy Spirit! After all, maybe you are just a hallucination, maybe you are just wishful thinking.”

And sadly, if I am reasonably satisfied with the way things are, even if they aren't perfect, the unpredictability of the Spirit is if anything an annoyance. Maybe if I don't bother God, he won't bother me. Maybe if I go to church and say my prayers and stay out of serious sin, he will leave me alone and let me get on with life. If tongues of fire appeared over your heads, I'd probably call the fire department.

But sometimes I am nagged by the knowledge that things aren't the way they should be, not in my life, not in the life of my family, not in society at large; and I see that there is something, some little thing that I could do to push things in the right direction. Someone is nagging me. And that's when I wish I could remember that those apostles, who hadn't been able to get their act together out of fear, out of a desire to avoid change – remember how Peter told his brother apostles after the Resurrection, after his joy at seeing Jesus return from the dead, – Peter said, “I am going fishing”. Not only were they pushed into action, but in that very moment they were assured that God was with them. And Saint Paul, after a lifetime of being pushed around by the same Spirit, was able to say, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Can there be any more joyful thought?

And here we sit, in our church, waiting—for God knows what. And the question is: Are we satisfied with the way things are? In our lives, in our world, in our church? If so, the Holy Spirit is very likely to leave us alone. We can safely read these lessons and say a few kind words about the Holy Spirit and be safe for another year.

But if we are aching and yearning for something more, if we look upon our lives and upon our world and upon our church with a combination of fear and hope, fearing that things won’t get better and hoping in our heart of hearts that they will, then we had best watch out. It is entirely likely that the Holy Spirit will soon burst upon us, leading us somewhere we did not know we wanted to go.

Seventh Sunday of Easter, cycle B

John 17:11 - 19

In Genesis after God creates everything, he looks at it and calls it “very good”. And in the Gospel of John, we have that famous bible verse, chapter 3, verse 16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” And yet, here we have Jesus talking in terms that seem to split his disciples off from the world. The world, Jesus says, hates them because they are not of the world any more than He is of the world. And yet Jesus does not pray that we will be taken out of the world, but rather, that we will be protected from the world. In fact he sends us into the world.

So what is this seeming contradiction? Does it mean that Jesus used the word “world” in a different way that those other passages? I think if that were the case people could have done a better job translating. I think the word is deliberate.

We human beings are part of nature, part of the world. That is basically a good thing. We share something with all other material creatures. Every creature has a “nature” and humans are no exception. Human nature got to be the way it is through evolution. And anyone who knows a little history could probably name components of human nature. They include good things like self-preservation, forming families and tribes – looking after each other. The instinct to be a father or a mother, to work to give our children better lives than we've had; even the instinct to worship God. But there are bad things about human nature as well – fear of strangers; the tendency to see the world as a zero sum game where we need to struggle to get our share; and the desire to be respected, or at least not to be disrespected. We humans, especially males, have an instinct to form hierarchies, where those on the top use those below.

And it's hard to believe, but God loves humanity, including human nature. We see some of God's friends in the Old Testament being all too human. Abraham and David commit adultery; Jacob lies to his father and cheats his brother; Judah sleeps with his daughter in law. David commits murder. And yet God continues to love them and bestow blessings on them.

But his greatest blessing was to become one of us. Jesus tells his followers that they are not of the world because he gave them the word of the Father – so that their joy may be complete.

Jesus shows us through word and example the next step in human evolution and calls us to literally change our nature. No more us vs. them, no more exploiting other people, no more fearing the stranger, no more operating on the idea that there isn't enough for everybody so I better get mine. Jesus calls us to a fundamental unity, one in which all human beings can take part, a unity which includes Jesus – God Himself.

How do we become “not of this world?” We have to practice being different. And there are two dangers. One is, as someone said, to be different but make ourselves a small target. We can do this by equating religion with social work or self-help. Who can hate that? Certainly not the world. Nobody will crucify you if you are harmless, turned inward, and your religion consists of doing good. Some people, as you know, are critical of Pope Francis because they think this is the kind of faith he is preaching, a faith in which everyone gets the benefit of the doubt.

The other danger is to withdraw from the world. We can be like the Amish and have very little to do with the rest of humankind, and we see that tendency all over the world when it comes to religion. Every religion has a group of people who are trying to avoid contamination by people who are not as religious as they are. We can withdraw mentally as well. We can have a secret knowledge that only those who are saved can participate in. And we can make that knowledge a condition for belonging. We Catholics do that a little bit.

One of the ancient rabbis told a wonderful story about a man who came to a small town. He noticed that everyone was barefoot, even though there was snow on the ground. He asked his carriage driver, why are you barefoot, don't you know about shoes? The driver replied that he did. Why aren't you wearing them? The driver said, yes, that would be a good thing. The visitor found that the same question got the same answer; general agreement that shoes were a good thing, but no one was wearing them.. Finally he met someone who said, “We have a shoe factory in town, and every week they tell us how good it would be for us to wear shoes. And we all agree.”

We have been sent into the world to continue Christ's mission of creating a new humanity, a new human nature. It can be done – that's what we mean by a saint. It requires more than agreeing with the word that Jesus gave us. We have to practice, we have to know how to be different, yes, but then we have to be different, and that requires an act of the will.

It would sure be nice to have shoes – the shoe people tell us about a few people who wear shoes and their feet are warm and they can walk on gravel without pain. Someday maybe I'll get some shoes.

And Jesus tells us that he has given us his father's word and this makes us not of this world. And if we listen to him we see how this new way of being human is different from the old way. But if we are to be consecrated in truth, we have to practice this difference. And he wants us to show this new way to other people, that's why he sent us into the world. And of course he promises that if we become new people, if we take on a nature that is molded by the Holy Spirit instead of evolution, we will have joy.

But it's hard, and that's why he prays for us.

Sixth Sunday of Easter, cycle B

John 17:11 –19

God is love, John tells us. Love one another as I have loved you, Jesus says. Remain in my love, Jesus tells us. And he promises that his joy will be in us and our joy will be complete. When I read these two readings, I feel as though I am entering a bottomless pit. The words are simple, but the more you dwell on them, the less understanding. And probably the biggest question is not what Jesus means by love, but whether we have the love he is talking about.

God is love, for example. What comes to your mind? I'll bet it's a man with a beard and a white gown maybe smiling and holding out his arms? Or maybe it's Jesus inviting us into paradise. But John did not say, “God has love” or “God loves”. So how do we understand that God is love?

Love as someone said, is a verb, it is not a thing. And the way to see that God is love is to remember that God is Trinity, at least that's the best way we can understand what we are talking about. Because the very essence of the Trinity has to do with each person emptying himself out into the other, who in turn empties himself out into the third, and so on. This giving one's whole self to the other defines God; the whole giving of self defines each person. You could say that the only difference between the persons lies in their relationship to each other. And John tells us in plain terms that God loved us first; love spills over from the trinity and creates the universe.

Jesus further defines love: He in fact is the definition of love, in that he gave himself up for us. And he tells us that we will remain in his love as long as we keep his commandments. And his commandment is “love one another”.

And I think we can probably conclude that what Jesus is talking about, what John is talking about, has to do with how much we give up ourselves. It is not a feeling, it is not that we somehow equate praying and piety and good behavior with loving. Not the same thing at all. And it isn't that we equate love with good deeds. How are we giving ourselves up?

It's astounding, but God, the Trinitarian God, wants the same relationship with you and I that exists in the Trinity, a relationship in which there is mutual emptying and filling up. C.S. Lewis was of the opinion that this doesn't happen all at once or all the time. It is necessary each day to offer yourself to God, but shortly afterward, we find we have taken back what we offered. Over time if we persist, we do better at letting go of ourselves, and to the extent that we make room, God can work in us to put himself in the space we have made. God's love consists of taking a creature with free will, you and I, with a strong streak of selfishness, because we are bodies, because we evolved this way, because we share that self-centeredness with all conscious creatures – and transforming us into his Son.

CS Lewis says that this is a very hard thing for a human being to do – not because it's hard to become Jesus – it's impossible for you and I to accomplish. What makes it so hard is that once we allow God to begin working on us, even a little bit, our progress will do two things; first, it will make us feel righteous, because perhaps we have conquered our anger, or developed a little humility, or stopped abusing our spouses. Second, there will be a point where we say, thank God, I've gotten rid of those parts of my make up that are disturbing, negative, those things that keep me from being good. Now, God, you can go work on someone else, I'm done.

The point of course, is that God is never done. Once you put yourself in his hands, once you allow him to love you, he will not leave you alone – unless you break off your relationship with him. So being loved by God, who is willing to do all the work of love, is not easy.

But to the extent that you are loved and return that love, as with God it will spill over, into acts of love for your neighbor, and indeed acts of love for God. Those are consequences.

Human beings by nature worry about respect, freedom from pain and suffering, having enough “stuff”. We are attracted to things that give us pleasure, sometimes to our great detriment. And as long as these very natural inclinations motivate our lives and actions, we will never be happy, we will never have joy.

Our joy becomes complete when we completely empty ourselves in love. Will we be able to do this during this life? Probably not. If we are still motivated by those natural inclincations, to that extent we will need further work by God in us, and that is painful, and if it takes place after we die, it is what we call purgatory. If on the other hand we act as though we are motivated by love, over time, we will be. I think there's a great insight in the Church's attitude to martyrdom, defined as being put to death because of one's faith. If I die because I am a Christian, even a very imperfect one, then I am giving up everything for love of God. No wonder I am considered a saint, no wonder everything is forgiven me. Love of God, love of neighbor, emptying myself out for someone else, that is the goal. And every time we do such a thing, even if it is small, we become a little more like God.

Jesus knows that true joy can fill us to the extent that we are empty. We cannot bring about our own joy, because we confuse joy with many other transitory emotions. But Jesus tells us that he has the answer, that he wants to give us his own joy, so that our joy may be complete.

So simple, yet so hard.

Fifth Sunday of Easter, cycle B

John 10:11 -18

When I started visiting patients at a local nursing home, I met a man named Tom. He had a neurological disease, and had lost the ability to walk; he was also beginning to show weakness in his arms, and had trouble getting from his wheelchair into bed. And he was angry. The first time I met him, he told me he was busy; come back later. So I did. And I persisted until we actually had a brief conversation. He had been a career military man. He also was an alcoholic, and had been on and off the wagon for several years. He and his wife had divorced and he had very strained relations with his two children. He had been raised a Catholic, had been an altar boy, had been married in the Church, but hadn't been to the sacraments for years. Over a few weeks he had regained a little strength through physical therapy and his apartment had been modified so that he could manage, and he left.

About a year later he was back. Now he was bedridden, and could barely lift his arms. But he was changed. His wife was there nearly every day and his two grown kids made visits. He had reconciled with the Church and received communion. He received the sacrament of the Sick several times from Father Reilly. He was optimistic that one of these days things would get better, but when they didn't he didn't seem to be too bothered. And he had become nice. He thanked people for helping him out; he gave compliments; he listened to his fellow patients when they wanted to talk. And he liked to talk to me about what he was reading in the bible and other spiritual books. And when the end was near, he went home with the help of hospice and his wife, to die a few days later.

So what happened? Was this one of those situations where you turn to God because there is no other answer? In my life of dealing with cancer patients I don't think I've ever seen someone change his basic personality because he knew he was going to die. If she was a fighter, she fought to the end; if he was depressed, he stayed depressed; and if she didn't believe in God, the threat of dying didn't change her mind.

I think we see a hint of the answer in today's gospel reading. Jesus tells us that we are branches to his vine, that without that connection we can't bear fruit. Buy the way, he doesn't say that if we are cut off we can't be grafted back on. Jesus point is that connection to him is life, and a very special kind of life. And connection to him is what is necessary to bear fruit.

I used to read this scripture passage and feel inadequate. What fruit have I born, compared to Saint Francis or any saint for that matter? I can easily find examples of people who have born a lot more fruit than I ever will. But whatever fruit is born comes from God and depends on connection to the vine. And maybe that isn't the fruit Jesus is talking about anyway.

Saint Paul tells us that the fruits of the Spirit are charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control And you notice that these have to do with how we approach life, not with great works. I think the Father uses some of us branches to build up the Kingdom – some to a great degree, some to a small degree. But he isn't primarily concerned about that with respect to the individual Christian. What the Father wants is to see Jesus Christ in us. As John the Baptist remarked, “He must increase, I must decrease.”

And those of us who are branches are pruned by the word Jesus speaks to us. If we take his words and examples seriously and apply them to our spiritual lives, how we try to look at the world, how we try to grow in virtue, how we try to conquer our sinful impulses – and you will note I use the word try, because our progress depends not on our own efforts, but allowing the Holy Spirit to work in us, we will all be transformed. Some of us may become great saints; others might show tiny changes, like the Good Thief who at the last moment threw himself on Christ's mercy. And there will be those who simply don't bear fruit, simply don't cooperate with the Holy Spirit flowing through the vine which is Jesus. And some of those people may very well look like saints. Talented and clever people who turn their energies towards appearing holy can even believe they are holy – but holiness is the work of the Spirit, not of anything we can do.

We sometimes say things like “Look busy, God may be watching” or “God's in his heaven, all's right with the world” as the poet said. And we are comfortable with a far-off God who is going to weigh us according to our merits and demerits, preferably on a sliding scale. But the vine dresser is not up in the house on the hill; he is there in the vineyard, cutting off that branch which no longer shows life; trimming back this one because it is making leaves, not grapes; and perhaps grafting on a branch that came from another vine and shows promise.

My friend Tom never accomplished any great work. But he clearly bore great fruit if the fruits of the Spirit are what we are talking about.

They tell a story out in the West about a man from the city who asked an old cowboy if he believed in God. The cowboy said he did. The city man then asked, with a smirk, “ I guess the nest thing you will tell me is that you've seen God.” The old cowboy replied, “I've never seen God, but I've met a few Jesus's in my time.”

The whole reason the Son of God, at the request of the Father, became man and suffered and died, the whole reason he breathed the Holy Spirit into his disciples and through them his Church, was to make it possible for you and I to become Jesus – and God will do all the work. That's the promise of the parable of the vine and the branches.

Fourth Sunday of Easter, cycle B

John 10:11-18

My father's dad, my grandfather, was the oldest child in a family of four. His parents were farmers and he had a fourth grade education in a one room school house in Wyoming. When he was fourteen he left home and took a job on a ranch in Montana. He was a cowboy, which meant that he got food and lodging and a very small salary for herding cattle, mending fences, digging holes, putting out fires – you name it. His parents were Mormons, but I don't think my grandfather ever went to a Mormon church after he left home. When he married my grandmother the ceremony took place in the rectory of the local Catholic church since in those days so called “mixed” marriages were not allowed in the church proper. My grandfather would faithfully take my grandmother to Sunday Mass as she refused to learn how to drive. He would remain in the car reading the newspaper and smoking a few cigarettes. During his lifetime he never showed any interest in religion that I'm aware of.

I learned from the nuns who taught us that “Outside the Church there was no salvation.” However, this was nuanced by the doctrine of “limbo”, a place of natural happiness open to unbaptized babies and people like Moses and Abraham and maybe by extension really good people who never heard about Jesus through no fault of their own. I learned later that this was not an official church teaching. Besides, it didn't apply to my grandfather who obviously had heard of Jesus. The other escape route was baptism of desire, which meant that you tried very hard to please God but you lived in a society where baptism was unavailable. That didn't sound like my grandfather, either; he was a nice guy who fulfilled his obligations to his family but I don't know if he ever prayed.

I remember a particular moment when I was expressing my concerns over the ultimate destiny of my grandfather's soul to my grandmother. She responded, and I think I am quoting her exactly, “If you were God would you send him to hell?” To my ten year old mind, that seemed theologically valid so I stopped worrying.

But scripture is pretty clear: Saint Peter says “there is no salvation in anyone else, for there is no other name in the whole world given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” And Jesus himself says “He who believes and is baptized will be saved” and “unless you repent you will likewise perish” and “he who eats my body and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day”. So Jesus lays the basis for sacraments. And of course Paul tells us that the members of the Church constitute the body of Christ. So salvation can only come through Jesus, and Jesus established the Church to be the vehicle for salvation. So the statement “Outside the Church there is no salvation” is true. But before Jesus established the Church, he told the Samaritan woman that salvation is from the Jews, and that is the way we can understand this statement. Today Jesus might say, “salvation is from the Catholics”.

But if Jesus is the savior of the world is he constrained so that only those who hear the gospels and receive the sacraments are saved?

One theologian says that the Church is a sign of what God does in us, rather than a requirement for meeting God. The reality is that all salvation comes from the saving death of Christ. It is by the fact of God taking our body, dying our death, and rising in Jesus that our destinies are forever changed. God now looks upon all human flesh and sees the face of the beloved Son. Now it is possible to not know this. On the other hand, to have heard this and consciously reject the possibility is another story.

Today Jesus says, “Other sheep I have who are not of this fold, and I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice and there will be one flock and one shepherd”. In every human being there is the desire for unrestricted goodness. In every mind there is a thirst for the ultimate truth. Every human heart longs to be loved. We in the Church who have met Christ know that Jesus is the answer to these longings. But for those who have not met him, they must be faithful to these longings and hope that there is an answer. The gift of faith is exactly that, a gift. But our humanity is also a gift, and it is shared and transformed by Jesus.

When you read the New Testament, you keep coming across the notion that salvation is not something we earn – it has been earned – but in some way it requires a relationship with Jesus, and that relationship transforms us. Could it be that Jesus offers that relationship to everyone, even those who don't know him as Jesus? Could my grandfather have in some way responded to Jesus but not known it in formal terms?

This of course does not let us off the hook. When we look at the apostles they went about proclaiming the good news, that there is someone who fulfills all the deepest desires of our hearts, and he can be met in the Church through the word and the sacraments. They had been transformed by this discovery and wanted to share it with everyone else. And that should be our default position as well – it is, after all, very good news and if we have any love for our friends and neighbors who aren't members of the Church it's still our duty to tell them this good news.

Jesus clearly longs for there to be one flock and one shepherd; that's the reason he took on our flesh and laid down his life for us. I would rather know this than be ignorant of it. But if he loves my grandfather as much as he loves his own mother, and he does, I suspect he will move heaven and earth to get my grandfather into his eternal company.

Third Sunday of Easter, cycle B

Luke 24:35 - 48

Some of you may be familiar with the Go Local magazine that you can pick up free in your grocery store. The last issue featured an article on a man named Timothy Payne. He was a soldier in Afghanistan, and one day he stepped on a concealed explosive device. He lost both legs and severely damaged one arm. He could not be fitted for prostheses because their was nothing to attach a prosthesis to. After a very long period of rehabilitation, a bout of drug addiction, suicidal thoughts and PTSD, he finally came out of his ordeal. He now goes around working to connect disabled veterans with their community resources and speaking to various groups about their problems. In his spare time he participates in various sports – scuba diving, long distance swimming, racing on his arm-powered tricycle – and he has put more than 100,000 miles on the van he has fitted out so he can drive it. And when people first meet him, he tells them, “I got blown up” and smiles. His body shows the marks of his experience; it can't be hidden.

When you think about this gospel we just heard, it sounds very familiar. Jesus appears, the disciples can't believe it, they recognize him, then the are joyful. But if you were trying to convince someone that you were not dead, would you show them your hands and feet? We know from the story of Thomas that Jesus risen body showed the nail marks in his hands and the spear wound in his side. Jesus did not conquer death and come back as though his battle never happened. He wore the signs of his death on his living body. He did not avoid death, he went through death; death could not stop him, but put up a pretty good fight. And that may be why the apostles were incredulous. Besides the hands and feet, they very well may have seen the marks on his head from the crown of thorns; they may have seen streaks of dried blood on his face. It's as though Jesus is saying, “I'm just like you, I'm alive to pain and suffering. I'm not immune. This body is real. The theologian James Allison said, “Jesus wore death on his body like a trophy, and he can show his death to others to allay their fears.” We Catholics unlike most other Christians, decorate our churches and homes and sometimes even our bodies with realistic images of Christ on the cross. At some level we see these as symbols of death conquered.

The other odd thing about this gospel story is that Jesus asks for something to eat and then eats it. Now if you read the gospels you might say, “You can usually find Jesus around food – the wedding feast at Cana, the meal with Mary and Martha and Lazarus, the meal Peter's mother in law prepared after he healed her, eating with Simon the leper, with the Pharisee, with Zaccheus – and when Jesus isn't popping up at banquets he makes them himself – the feeding of the crowds comes to mind. And of course, Jesus instituted the central sacrament of Christianity, the Eucharist, at a real meal, a Passover meal. If you read the gospels, you know he had a healthy appetite. So it isn't surprising that after battling death and conquering death, he does something his disciples recognize – he asks for something to eat. As you can tell, I think this is one of those places in the scriptures where we are allowed a little smile.

But more seriously, we can look at this event as Jesus putting on a show, or Jesus really desiring to eat something, Jesus physically hungry. If he is putting on a show then he is not authentic; but if he is truly hungry, then he not only has returned in his body, but in a way he has made holy those impulses of the body. If Jesus rose from the dead so that we could rise at the end of our lives, Jesus was hungry and thirsty and in need of human companionship after the Resurrection because that is human, truly human. Jesus in not merely carrying out a demonstration for us, that he is risen; He is by his actions blessing and making holy everything we do, little pleasures, great pains, fellowship with each other – as Jesus lives through his post-resurrection days, he shows us that our bodies are loved, are blessed, are immortal.

Why is this emphasis on the body so important? Because our bodies are the means by which we love and are loved. And when Jesus rises from the dead in the flesh, he makes human flesh sacred. And the consequences of that are incredible. If Jesus' body is sacred, so is mine, so is yours, so is the body of the woman pushing a shopping cart with all her belongings in it, so is the body of the man sentenced to life in prison; so is the body of the person with end stage Alzheimer's disease – human bodies are sacred because Jesus still even today lives in a human body. He didn't just cast it off and ascend into heaven 40 days after he rose from the dead. He continues for all eternity to share our humanity because he took on our flesh and will never leave it.

Thomas Merton had a revelation while standing on a street corner in Louisville. He wrote:

“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all of those people, that they were mine, and I, theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness … Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts, where neither sin, nor desire, nor self-knowledge, can reach the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only we could all see each other that way all the time! There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose that the big problem would be that we would all fall down and worship each other.”

The Resurrection of Jesus, the fact that God became man and conquered death for you and I, really does unite us all to each other and to Him. Let us be Resurrection people.

Second Sunday of Easter, 2018

John 20:19-33

After my father mustered out of the army, he and my mother and I moved back to Montana. My mother quickly got a job as a nurse, but my dad wasn't so lucky, and ended up taking a job as a farmhand for one of my uncles. This meant that he didn't get home except every other weekend. So I was given to my grandparents for several months. During this time, I was about four, and I remember how much I looked forward to seeing my dad. My mother stayed in nurse's quarters in the hospital so they would pick me up and usually take me out to lunch or the park or some activity. And after the big day I'd look forward to the next visit.

One day I was particularly naughty, I guess. I broke something my grandmother valued after being told not to keep running in the house. As my grandmother swept up the pieces, she said those words which strike terror into small hearts: “Just wait till your father hears about this!” But by the time my dad blew in again, I think she must have forgotten her threat because my father treated me just like he always had.

The apostles are in a locked room. If you read the accounts of the rewsurrection in the other gospels, you are told that they were fearful. In Luke, they think Jesus is a ghost and they are terrified. John, or gospel writer of today, doesn't mention fear, but I think we can assume they were afraid – afraid of the Jewish leaders, afraid of the Roman soldiers, afraid that if they went out someone would recognize them as disciples of Jesus – but maybe what they were really afraid of was what if Jesus returned as he had promised?

Everyone knew that when one king conquered another, that king's supporters would be deported, sometimes blinded or maimed, and often put to death. What would Jesus do if he came back? They had, after all, deserted him in his time of need; Peter had denied knowing him three times. If Jesus came back, the least they could expect would be a serious scolding – and in the Gospel of Mark Jesus does speak to them about their lack of faith. And certainly if Jesus was to come back and this time show forth God's power against the enemies of the Jews, they would have nothing to do with it; they, who had been his closest friends, would be out.

But Jesus appears and offers them his peace. Not once but twice. And then he tells them that they have the power to forgive sins. Sometimes we read what Jesus said as justication not only for the sacrament of reconciliation, but also that if the priest chooses to not forgive you, you are stuck with your sins. But Jesus may be saying something to all of us – he may be saying, “I have forgiven you and now go and forgive each other, because unless you forgive every sin against you, you won't have peace.” In other words, Jesus shows mercy and instructs the apostles to do likewise.

And that is probably Thomas' problem as well. When the disciples tell him they have seen the Lord, he notices that they are still in the same room; and they don't show any effects of having been scolded or kicked out of the disciple's club. They are, rather, full of joy. And I think it's interesting that when Thomas refuses to believe, they continue to include him in their group. They are already passing on the mercy that they received. Thomas may not believe, but he is still their friend.

And finally Jesus appears and offers to fulfill Thomas' conditions for him to believe. And we don't read that Thomas took Jesus up on this. Instead he drops to the ground and says, “My Lord and My God!” Thomas has experienced the mercy, the forgiveness, that Jesus offers with his whole being, not just his intellect. And we know that Thomas was probably as great a missionary as Paul; stories from the first couple of centuries have him founding communities up and down the Arabian peninsula and into southern India, where he was martyred. Thomas didn't leave a paper trail like Paul did.

So Jesus whose friends betrayed him, deserted him, denied knowing him, not only offers complete forgiveness and mercy, but commissions them to show mercy as well, through the forgiveness of sins. And while you and I can't forgive sins in Jesus' name as our priests can, we can forgive in our own names, those sins against us. And we can strive to forgive as Jesus did, offering mercy and love to the people who have offended us.

Because if we choose not to forgive, it not only keeps a barrier between me and the person who offended me, but it also impairs my own spiritual life, because in not forgiving, in not showing mercy, I cease to imitate Jesus' example.

So this weekend, this Mercy Sunday, imagine Jesus offering you his peace, and take advantage of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. And pray that as you receive the mercy that He offers, you will have the courage to offer it to others. As we learn to forgive we begin to restore the world and bring about the kingdom of heaven.