Journey's Weekly Homilies

7th Sunday of Easter, Cycle A, 12 May 2002
Homily by Joe

Acts 1:12-14
1 Peter 4:13-16
John 17:1-11a

On another seventh Sunday of Easter, many years ago, when I was an idealistic young liturgist, I got into a dispute with another expert over whether the Easter candle should disappear after Ascension Thursday.  My colleague’s point, derived from a pre-liturgical-enlightenment church practice, was that, since Jesus was now gone, the candle, as a symbol of him, should be as well.  This was anathema to my post-liturgical-enlightenment understanding of the Easter season as one uninterrupted, non-event-specific fifty-day period of rejoicing. The days when you had until Trinity Sunday to fulfill your Easter duty are long gone; now we celebrate every aspect of the Paschal mystery on every Sunday of Easter. So even though Ascension Thursday was three days ago, our candle burns brightly tonight, and will do so until the end of mass next Sunday.

But my friend had a point. Jesus is no longer present to us as he was to the people who saw and heard him during his lifetime, or as he was to his disciples just after his resurrection. It would be a whole lot easier for all concerned if the ever-living one was occasionally available to answer a few questions directly – if only he had a call-in cable access show as he does on South Park.

Unless our candle burning here is just wishful thinking, the absence of Jesus – or at least the changed mode of his presence – is something we have to deal with.  It raises issues of the nature or truth of the resurrection, God’s acting in the world, etc. If anyone’s going to challenge us, as the first letter of Peter warns, it’s probably on this very issue: where’s your Messiah now?

In the Gospel of Luke, the ascension takes place on the evening of Easter Sunday. Those disciples who encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus have rushed back to Jerusalem to tell their story to the eleven remaining disciples. While they’re talking, Jesus himself pops in to say goodbye, and is immediately taken up to heaven. In the Acts of the Apostles, written by the same evangelist at the same time, Easter Sunday somehow stretches into forty days of regular encounters with Jesus and instruction about the reign of God. John’s Gospel has no ascension account, only an encounter with Jesus at an unspecified later date, by disciples who seem to have gone back to their former occupations. 

Call them rationalizations if you will, but each of these – Luke, Acts, and John – is an attempt to work through the transition from the Jesus of history to the Jesus of faith, from Jesus touched and heard to Jesus remembered. A new reality has taken hold. For Luke, there’s an orderly development taking place, from the time of Israel in the Old Testament to the time of Jesus in his Gospel, to the time of the church in the Acts of the Apostles. John, writing later, gets it best for us, I think, with the suggestion that Jesus may be encountered, though unrecognized at first, when we least expect him. We come to Jesus in ways we cannot fully explain: in the hope that the first letter of Peter speaks of, in faith, by the workings of the Spirit.

There is a serious crisis of faith in our church, and I’m not referring to the countless disaffected and disillusioned catholics, those who have gone beyond lapsed to “collapsed.” Rather, it’s the leaders of our church who have lost their faith and show it so pathetically when they consult their lawyers before the Spirit. When they cannot ask for forgiveness but instead resort to legalism and scapegoating, piling insult upon insult and injury upon injury, the Spirit has been shut out and faith and hope are dead. The perpetrators of these injustices are desperately in need of our prayers and our stories of hope and faith.

There are places where windows are open to the spirit. They are not chanceries but communities like Corpus Christi in Rochester, New York which has separated itself from the Roman church rather than be deprived of the ministry of its pastor and of its assistant pastor, Mary Ramerman. There are churches of the Boston archdiocese trying to form a confederation to claim a greater role for lay people. They are churches in rural areas that keep community life and the eucharistic banquet alive without the regular presence of a priest. And there is, I hope, this community, where we support and encourage one another and accomplish things we couldn’t do alone.

Last week Nancy told us how our lectionary is organized for the Easter season, what the Acts of the Apostles and the first letter of Peter are all about. I’d like us to consider the shift in focus that takes place as the season progresses. We homilists are used to being the storytellers when we read the gospel; the other stories that are read, while important, are chosen for the light they cast on the gospel reading. But as we go through the Easter season, we find the action shifting away from the gospel to the first reading, from Acts. In the second and third Sundays of Easter, the stories of doubting Thomas and the road to Emmaus are in the gospel. Beginning with the fourth Sunday, Acts provides the story: Peter begins his preaching ministry, the first deacons are commissioned, etc. Meanwhile, the Jesus we hear in the Gospel of John is more conceptual, speaking in generalities and not doing much.

What this means is that the workload has shifted to the church – to us.  Whatever work there is to be done, it’s our job now, and we have to learn by doing. No matter what your mother (or father) might have told you about adult life, you only really learn by experiencing it for yourself. Don says that Jesus last words were something like “so long, hope you got it.” But if Jesus were around to answer every little question, we’d never learn for ourselves, never know that we had got it. But we are doing: consider how we are continuing the healing and reconciling ministry of Jesus by working to undo the effects of classism, homophobia and misogyny in our church.

This is where the work begins. When we gather we call down the Spirit for strength and insight. When we share the word we learn what it is we’re up against. When we sing our songs we know we’re not alone. When we stand around the table we see who our partners are. And when we share the bread and the cup we say “Amen” to the mission.

The Acts of the Apostles continue to be written. So whether Easter Sunday lasts one day, forty days, two thousand years or twenty thousand years, the time of the church is now, the work is ours.