Training to receive the Spirit: Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter 2023

St. George battling the dragon, Joriskerk, Antwerp.

My dear brothers and sisters,

As we approach the great feast of Pentecost the lectionary for this Sunday already whispers to us about the wonderous coming of the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel our Lord promises the Advocate, the Spirit of truth who will come to those who love Him. In the first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, the people of Samaria accepted the word of God, and welcomed the apostles, who, after laying hands on them, ensured that they received the Holy Spirit. The responsorial psalm sings of a wild, a delirious, joy for God, a joy that is possible only when we are filled with the Holy Spirit. Recollect for a moment the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Romans (8:26):

the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words.

The second reading, from the first letter of St. Peter, concludes with St. Peter advising us:

Put to death in the flesh,

He [i.e. Our Lord Jesus Christ] was brought to life in the Spirit.

And this is the phrase that I would like to spend some time on today.

The dichotomy between the Spirit and the Flesh, a dichotomy that admittedly exists in the New Testament, especially in the epistles, is often misunderstood. A perfect example of this misunderstanding is in evidence in our own parish of St. Thomas the Apostle, especially in some of the responses to the suggestions for our spiritual lives that I made over the past few weeks.

Two of the suggestions I had made were that we dress up to mark significant occasions, that we ideally receive communion on the tongue and while kneeling. I thank those who communicated their discomfort with these suggestions to me, because this is the way in which the shepherd may appreciate the spiritual condition of his flock, and calibrate his ministrations to them. Indeed, I would like to recall the words of the letter of St. Peter we heard today, and hopefully use it as my guiding light as I continue this homily:

Always be ready to give an explanation

to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope,

but do it with gentleness and reverence,

keeping your conscience clear

To the suggestion that a significant feast like Easter be marked by our wearing a suit, jacket, and tie, there were some of were of the belief that this was an unnecessary focus on externals. What mattered was our hearts and how we felt. A similar response marked my suggestion regarding the ideal way to receive the Body and Blood of our Lord. One friend suggested to me that our hands may be cleaner than our tongues, and what matters anyway is that we have clean hearts.

Indeed, it is true. What matters is that we have clean hearts, which is why I counsel against receiving communion unless you have made a recent confession and are thereby in a state of grace.

This focus on the clean heart and clean mind is typical of the modern thinking which ruptures the relationship between the mind and the body. The two are not separate entities, but indeed tied together. You cannot have one, without the other. Think of it this way, so important is the body, that the Son of God, who existed before time began, took flesh so that He could show us the way to salvation. Had our minds been so capable, He, who is wisdom, need not have taken human form. This is to say that the body is critical to our salvation. Thus, we are able to have the clean heart and clean mind, only if we train our bodies in particular ways to ensure that our heart and mind are clean.

So many of those I discussed the issue of dressing up for Mass with – people I love and hold dear – responded saying that it was too hot to consider wearing a suit for Easter Sunday. However, I ask you, would you not wear a suit if you went to a wedding? Or to some important business meeting? Why not then, to the most important thing you will do on Sunday.

However, let us concede the situation that it is inconvenient and bothersome to wear a suit in this heat. In such a case, take a lesson from the words of St. Peter in the reading today:

it is better to suffer for doing good,

if that be the will of God, than for doing evil.

If you wear a suit to a feast day Mass, and feel some amount of discomfort, be assured that you are doing it for good, i.e., stressing the importance of the event, and more importantly you are doing it so that so eventually avoid slipping into evil.

What might this evil be? According to St. Thomas Aquinas, evil is the lack of a due good. That is to say, evil is not doing something that is good to do. Thus, evil begins when we forget that we are participating in the representation of the sacrifice of Calvary, that we are in the presence of the Body and Blood of Christ and fail to act in a worthy manner.

Now, in an earlier homily I had recognised the legitimacy of receiving communion in the hand. However, the permission for reception in the hand comes with a strict protocol, precisely to remind us that it is no ordinary thing that we hold in your hand, and that we must treat it only with the greatest reverence.

And yet, these protocols are not followed, and the casual way in which the faithful take the Body and Blood that is given to them is horrifying to say the least. What is clear from this casual approach, however, is that we are not aware of what we hold in their hands.

This is precisely why Holy Mother Church privileges the reception on our tongues. Pronouncing on this matter, the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff, i.e., the Pope, indicates:

From the time of the Fathers of the Church, a tendency was born and consolidated whereby distribution of Holy Communion in the hand became more and more restricted in favor of distributing Holy Communion on the tongue. The motivation for this practice is two-fold: a) first, to avoid, as much as possible, the dropping of Eucharistic particles; b) second, to increase among the faithful devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

And so it is that we urge people to act in particular ways so that we may not forget who it is we are in the presence of, Christ Himself, of what it is we are required to do, take Christ to the world.

I must add that not too many years ago I was very much like those in the congregation today who are critical of my suggestions for improving our spiritual lives. But ever since I have started taking this issue of training the body to train the soul correctly, I have come to realise how unevenly we apply the arguments that we often pose when it comes to acting appropriately in our Christian lives.

Let us return to the argument “what matters is what I think”. This is an argument often applied to the reception of communion on the hand, but it is not an argument that we use when talking about relating to people we love. For, with the people we love, we do not say “it does not matter how I behave with them, what matters is how much I love them in my heart”. No, to those we love we physically show it! We touch them, we caress them, we use sweet words with them. All to make them know our love, and more importantly, so that our love for them may grow even more! And this is precisely the point, when we come to Mass, to church, we need to act in a way that will make our love for Jesus grow even more!

In the first line of the Gospel today we hear:

Jesus said to his disciples: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

Remember that our Lord did not merely ask us to love our neighbours. He asked us to love God first! And it is only because we love God properly, and as He should be loved, that we are able to love our neighbours with the same love that He showed us. Too often, we stress the love of our neighbour, without stressing the love of God. And believe me, this focus on the neighbour before God is because Christ has been relativised. He is not, in fact, the central figure of our lives, but one more god among many other gods we worship. It is for this reason that we often do not feel the Spirit move us.

Behaving in a particular way is important, and indeed necessary, if we are to make our bodies worthy receptacles of the Holy Spirit. By virtue of our baptism the Holy Spirit is already within us, but to allow it to move us, we have to open the doors and windows in our soul which are currently shut. These doors and windows can be opened not by simply thinking them into opening, but by training our bodies to take part in certain practices, practices that have been sanctified by tradition, and proved by the lives of the saints. Let us, therefore, this morning go forth committed to rethink our attitudes so that we may more readily prepare our hearts to allow the Spirit to move us.

(A version of this homily was first preached at the church of the parish of St. Thomas the Apostle, Aldona on 14 May 2023.)

Rely on the Rock of Ages: Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter 2023

My dear brothers and sisters,

The second reading from today's lectionary, the reading from the first letter of St. Peter, which we have been reading through the Easter season, offers some powerful images.

Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings

but chosen and precious in the sight of God,

and, like living stones,

let yourselves be built into a spiritual house

to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices

acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

“Come to him, a living stone.” My mind goes back to the third Sunday of Lent when we read of the thirst of the Israelites in the desert and the way in which this thirst was satiated by water from a rock. That Rock, I pointed out in my homily, was a foreshadowing of God the Son, who fulfills our spiritual thirst with the water from His side.

The marvelous character of Jesus Christ, this rock of ours, this rock – as the words of the psalm 94 tell us – “who saved us”, is that it transforms the nature of those who drink from it. This water transforms our stony hearts into living stones.

In the episode at Horeb, where Moses struck the rock and drew water, so terrified was Moses of the unrest among the peregrinating Israelites that he:

cried out to the LORD,

“What shall I do with this people?

a little more and they will stone me!”

In their hardness of heart the children of Israel would have harmed their prophet who drew them out of the darkness of their days in Egypt. As it turned out, they did something similar to the Saviour who would, as St. Peter tells us, draw them out permanently from “darkness into his wonderful light.”

Every object in this world has an end, that is a purpose for which it was created, a purpose for which it is most fit.  St. Peter tells us that now that our hearts of stone, which would once stone the prophets of God, and indeed His only son, are now turned into living stones that have a different end:

like living stones,

let yourselves be built into a spiritual house

to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices

acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

This, my dear brothers and sisters, is now our only task, “to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” As in the words of St. Paul to the Romans (14:8):

We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.

If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord

As I have said in earlier homilies, the Father wishes us to thrive, but not at the cost of contravening the words of His only son. Thus, when there is a choice between Christ and the world, our option is clear, we must not stumble, we must choose Christ.

We must not stumble, nor, as St. Paul tells us in the letter to the Romans (14:21), “do anything that makes your brother [or sister], stumble.” But this seems to conflict with what St. Peter suggests to us in the portion from his letter which we just read:

The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone, and
A stone that will make people stumble,
and a rock that will make them fall.

If Christ is the living stone, and we are to be living stones like him, does that not mean that like him we will become stones that will make people stumble and fall?

Yes indeed! That is to be our purpose! To make people stumble and fall, but which people? Not our brethren in Christ, but those who, as St. Peter continues to tell us, “disobey the word”. Their stumbling, he clarifies, is not because of anything wrong we have done to them, but because of what they have done, or do to themselves: the disobeying of the word of God which naturally causes people to stumble. After all stumbling and falling is the fate that befalls people who walk in the dark, of those who do not have faith. Recall St. Paul once again in his first letter to theCorinthians (1: 23):

we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

The stumbling we offer the world is a favour, to stumble off the road of darkness, and into the light of Christ. And this stumbling is the context within which we should understand the words that Christ addresses to St. Philip in the Gospel we heard proclaimed today:

Amen, amen, I say to you,

whoever believes in me will do the works that I do,

and will do greater ones than these,

because I am going to the Father.

What were the works that Christ did? He proclaimed the Kingdom of God and assured us that this Kingdom is at hand. To us then, falls the task of proclaiming the Kingdom, not merely in words, but in deeds, in our daily lives. These are the miracles that we are called to do, and do everyday, lead lives that are so charged by Christ, lives that are so markedly different from all the non-Christians around us, that we are lights in the darkness. By leading truly Christian lives we offer stumbling blocks for those who, perhaps because they do not know better, prefer the ways of darkness. And we should rejoice in our ability to cause this stumbling, for to the extent that we cause people to stumble we are bringing them closer to Christ. Think of it this way, we may not be causing them to do good, but we are ensuring that they do not sin. It is of such acts, my dear brothers and sisters, that the kingdom of God is built.

And so, there is no place for cynicism, a sin that is such a marked feature of the Goan Catholic that it is almost our national character. The stumbling that we provide to the works of the evil one, which abound in contemporary Goa, are works greater than what Christ did when he was on this earth. And believe me, these are built on small works of mercy. A gesture of courtesy when we are in traffic that follows no rules. A refusal to break a queue and jump the line. Acts that restore dignity to the persons we interact with. Do this, and as Christ promises us today, you, and others around you, will “have life and have it more abundantly” and you will ensure that “the number of the disciples …[will be ] increased greatly.”

The stumbling of the world will result not from something we have done, but indeed because of what the non-Christian has not – that is has not placed all their faith in Christ. But regardless of whether the stumbling of the world is not because of something we have done, but what the non-Christian has not, the Christian still has to often face very severe consequences. This could be the crown of martyrdom, or it could be a rejection from immediate benefits. But remember, even though the Catholic lives in this world, s/he is not of this world. For as St. Paul reminds us in his letter to the Hebrews (13:14) “here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” This city is the heavenly Jerusalem, where Christ has promised us today He is “going to prepare a place for you.”

Go then, and amidst the undignified that populate our world today, “offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ”, and while doing so remember your dignity, for you are:

"a chosen race, a royal priesthood,

a holy nation, a people of his own,

so that you may announce [the] praises" of him.