5th Sunday of Easter
Fr. Albert
St. Peter Catholic Church, New Iberia
“No one comes to the Father except through me.” “Who cares? Who said that I wanted to go to the Father anyway? Keep your way and truth to yourself, Jesus, because I’m gonna live my own life and I don’t want or need your father.” Does any of that sound familiar? This Gospel is a profound excerpt from the Last Supper where Christ is pouring out his heart to his Apostles and strengthening them for what is to come. But his message, this whole revelation and gift is based on a very significant assumption: that people want to see the Father; that people actually desire heaven and eternal life shared with God and other people. But do they? Do you?
A common obstacle to conversion and holiness is not hatred, but indifference. We pray, we worship, we speak of God and his good news and many people simply shrug. “God can forgive my sins? So what, I live with no regrets.” “Oh, Jesus Christ gives your life meaning and hope? Good for you, but I don’t need Jesus. You do you, I’ll do me.”
Even though Jesus is disappointed in Philip’s request, “show us the Father,” he is glad that Philip at least desires the right thing. We can work with someone who is searching for the Truth, but it’s impossible to satisfy someone who isn’t even hungry. We’ve seen a rise in the number of people who have no interest in religion. We’ve seen a rise in the number of Christians who don’t actually practice their faith. So, what do we do? There are three things to consider: beauty, the stumbling block, and sacrifice.
First, there is the power of beauty. Beauty is an experience that produces wonder. It opens our eyes to something greater than ourselves. Genuine beauty can causes us to want something we never realized we wanted. Consider how people often fall in love. They lead a life of relative contentment until one day they are surprised by seeing, by encountering a person that shakes them to the core. All of a sudden, they can no longer be happy with the way life was. They’ve seen a vision of a greater world, of a happiness that is expanded to include another human being, a beautiful human being. Now, they want something and it was because beauty opened their eyes to that desire.
In the same way, the people who seem to be happy without God the Father, without the way, the truth, and the life that lead us to him, can be moved to desire God by an experience of authentic beauty. A profound piece of music, an exquisitely decorated cathedral, a moving painting, a compelling story of an extraordinary life. Read and listen to the conversion stories of others and you will often find one or more of these things playing a key role in their journey.
So, too should our worship of God be beautiful. Often enough, I hear that people want Mass to be fun or approachable. I get it, we want people to feel welcome, we want our children to be engaged in what we are doing. We want people to understand what we do here on Sundays and every day of the week. Deep down, there is a good instinct underneath this. Many Catholics realize that Mass is central to the faith, so they want that central point to be as accessible as possible.
And yet, there is a sneaky temptation in the midst of that. If we make the Mass too approachable, too earthly, too easy to understand, we will probably miss the point altogether. It is a mystical reality. It is the worship of the all-powerful, triune God whose very nature is beyond our comprehension. Like the other sacraments, Mass is one of the “greater works” that Jesus promises believers will do. Being struck by beauty is not the same thing as understanding or having fun. Being attractive and being approachable are often two different realities.
Yes, we want people to participate in Mass and to be able to connect to what’s happening, but we also want the liturgy to be beautiful in a transcendent and even mysterious way. Ritual gestures, complicated but poetic prayers, the use of a sacred language like Latin, and music this isn’t quite like what we hear on the radio. All of these things, when done well and with reverence, can make our worship beautiful, despite sometimes being confusing to outsiders, to children, or even to ourselves. Beauty has an element of mystery and it is that mystery which opens us up to desire more, to want what we never knew we wanted.
The second way to help people want to see the Father is to accept that Christ is a stumbling block. Peter quotes Psalm 118, “the stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone” and Isaiah “a stone that will make them stumble.” To put it bluntly, it may be better for someone to hate Christ than to not care about him at all. It is the hatred of Jesus that got him crucified, which in turn saved the very people who killed him. A person who actively works against Jesus is really resisting the fact that Christ’s existence challenges him.
Someone who becomes the enemy of an authentic Christian will have the chance to experience what it means to be loved by their enemy. The sheer paradox of a loving enemy, of a faith that gets stronger when it suffers, can work wonders in the hearts of men and women. If we can choose between suffering for doing the right thing and being ignored by keeping to ourselves, we should choose suffering for the right thing every time. It defies ordinary human logic, but the person who attacks you because of your faith is probably closer to conversion than the person who finds you totally boring. A stumbling block, the stone they reject, God can make into the cornerstone of their life, but we have no such promise for the stone they never encounter.
Last of all, the offering of spiritual sacrifices. Jesus tells his Apostles “whoever believes in me will do the works that I do.” All of Christ’s works were offered to the Father as spiritual sacrifices. Prayer, fasting, almsgiving are always relevant. Gradually turning our whole lives into an offering for God begins to imbue that life with a hidden power, an attraction we cannot explain. Print out a prayer of Morning Offering and put it on your mirror, so that you can offer that day to God while you brush your teeth. A life lived as a spiritual sacrifice to God, even if it looks totally ordinary, can cause people to want God the Father, to desire the hidden power behind your life.
If we want others to want God, we have to live our desire as fully as possible. Pray for God to increase your desire for himself, so that you too are desperate to find the way to God, to embrace the Truth, and live the life that Christ gives us. Fill your life with beauty, direct others to beauty, and seek out beautiful worship. Don’t be afraid of making enemies, so long as you are willing to love those enemies. And offer today, tomorrow, and each part of each day as a spiritual sacrifice to God, acceptable to him through Jesus Christ. He goes to Father to prepare a place for you. He will come back to take us there. The only question is, when he comes, will you want to go? Will anyone else?
