The Power of the Paschal Mystery

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

During the Easter Season we celebrate the Paschal Mystery. We concentrate our attention on not only what the Paschal Mystery means, but also how we are to live out that mystery, how the power of that mystery can change our reality. The readings for this Sunday are intent upon this realization. They offer us a story, and exhortation, and a parable.

We find the story in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Soon after his conversion, St. Paul tries to join the Christian community of Jerusalem but is rejected. The Jerusalem community did not believe that someone who had been so intent on destroying Christians could, in fact, have become one of them in so short a space of time. They were still skeptical about the power of the Paschal Mystery to transform the vision and goals of a persecutor such as Paul. There is something strangely moving and immediately relevant to our own times in this reluctance to accept Paul. We also seldomly believe that the world can really be transformed in the mystery of the risen Christ – at least in its more intractable elements, such as the great ideological oppositions of our own times, or the economic and political structures of power

Another aspect of interest in this story about Paul illustrates the way the challenge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ works. The persecutor has been won over to faith, but inevitably becomes, in turn, the persecuted because the conversion questions the entrenched positions and beliefs of others – convictions by which people define themselves and in which they rest their security. To be converted to Christ, to live in Christ, necessarily means to share this experience of reversals in some measure. For most of us this does not involve the dramatic aspects of actual persecution, but there is a movement of conversion in which the judgmental become the judged, the contemptuous become the despised, the exclusive become the excluded.

The reading from the First Letter of St. John, like so many of John’s writings, insists upon the heart of the matter; love is not expressed in words but in actions. To believe in Jesus is to love one another, and it is love which fulfills all the commandments. God is not waiting to judge and condemn but rather to convert us to the truth, and the truth is to be found in Jesus and in the authentic charity that has been made possible by him and in him.

The parable of the vine and the branches speaks directly to this point; so much becomes possible in the risen Christ, which we, on our own, are not capable of achieving. One cannot really appreciate the imagery of the vine and the branches without realizing the role that the vine and the vineyard have played in the history of Israel and in the expression of its vocation as a community in harmony with God. The image of the vine speaks of an intimate communion of life, fruitfulness, and of responsiveness to the one who plants and tends. Yet the allusions to vine and vineyard in Psalms and prophecies are ambivalent; they speak of divine longing and outpouring and of human failure and unresponsiveness. They tell of divine persistence and undaunted fidelity in the face of constant rejection. Jesus himself presented the theme in a new light when he told of the vineyard and the unfaithful tenants who appropriated the fruit and killed the messengers and the owner’s son.

In light of these other references, the claim of Jesus that he is the true vine comes into sharper focus. It is a claim to be a new beginning, a new foundation for community, a whole new communion of life. It is a claim to open hitherto undreamed-of possibilities. It is a challenge and an invitation into the new life of the Paschal Mystery.

This challenge and this invitation is beautifully illustrated in a story from the life of St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. A man had come to the door of the convent and told Mother Theresa of a family with eight children who had no food. She took a bag of rice and went to that home and saw the effects of hunger in the faces of those children. She gave the rice to the mother who immediately divided it into two portions. After feeding her own children, she took the second portion to a neighboring home. When she came back, Mother Teresa asked her what she had done with the rice. The woman told her that she had taken it to a neighbor. Mother Teresa asked her why she had done this. The woman answered simply, “She also had some hungry children in her house.” Indeed, this woman understood the message of St. John that we hear today. Love is not about words or speech; love is about action and truth.

Let us continue to pray for our own conversion so that we can come to believe in the power of the Paschal mystery in our lives.