Homily: One Vine, Stock and Branches

The risen Jesus never tires of offering himself to us over and over, now under one image, now under another. What he wants to be for us is such a mysterious and profound reality that it cannot be reduced to only one image. Last Sunday he presented himself as the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep; today he tells us the parable of the Vine and the Branches. This metaphor invites us to consider the absolute need for the branches to remain attached to the vine, and this verb remain (or abide) recurs no fewer than seven times in the gospel text. Jesus’ message is clear: ‘Whatever you do, make sure you do not detach yourselves from me!’ Life laid down by the Good Shepherd; life infused by the stock into the branches: whatever the image, we should never forget that we do not generate our own life but must receive it from the One who loves us.

As used in the Old Testament, the image of God the vinedresser and Israel as God’s vine evokes a general religious conviction: that Israel is God’s People and that God takes good care of what belongs to him. But there is a great novelty when Jesus uses this image today because it points to the specific intimacy that exists between Jesus and those who deliberately choose to follow him and adhere to him. Much more than the shepherd who stands in the midst of his sheep but is still distinct from them, Jesus is now the stump to which all are bound and out of which all grow: I am the vine, you are the branches. Where does the vine end and where do the branches begin? You really can’t tell because they are, in fact, but one inseparable thing. 

These branches bear not their own but his fruit, another key term here that recurs no less than six times. And please note the mutual dependency implied by the image: if it is true that the branches quite depend on the sap transmitted to them by the stock (Without me you can do nothing), it is also true that the stock extends itself into the branches, which it cannot do without for the production of fruit. Yes, the Messiah and his followers belong to each other in an intensely organic and necessary way. 

We’ve seen that this gospel makes a great deal of the concept of remaining or abiding, so much so that we can consider this word the heart of its message. Just as vine and branches are mutually dependent, so too the Messiah has invited his disciples to collaborate with him in the Redemption of the world. Incredibly, Jesus does not wish to save the world without our participation in that task. He says: Those who abide in me, and I in them, bear much fruit. There is, therefore, a double consensual abiding here, thanks to which divine life circulates and transmits itself; and the fruit of that mutual abiding in love then goes forth out of this relationship into a hungry world. 

A little further on, Jesus specifies how this transmission of life is realized: If you abide in me and my words abide in you..., he says. This is the absolute condition: the Lord dwells in us and transmits God’s life to us—and from us to the world—through the indwelling of his words in our heart. But we are not mere passive receivers; we must allow Christ’s words to abide actively, explosively, in us. It is the words of the Master that transmit life. But let’s be realistic: this can happen only to the extent that they abide and take root in the heart of the disciple. Only then can they have their effect. And these are the same words that serve the Father as tools to prune and clean the branches, so that they may bear even more fruit. To allow the Lord to abide in us, to allow him to stand in the midst of our community as the Risen One appearing to the frightened disciples, to allow him to prune us, means letting his words indwell all our feelings, thoughts, words and actions dynamically, and thus inspire, direct and condition us. 

At the conclusion of today’s gospel Jesus manifests to us the keenest desire of the Father: By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. The Father is thus glorified by whatever manifests his generative, parental action and care: precisely a vine—the Church, ourselves—that bears fruit. Here Jesus uses a peculiar turn of phrase, for he declares that the Father is glorified not only by our bearing much fruit but also by our becoming his Son’s disciples. What can this mean, since this gospel already begins with the words, Jesus said to his disciples…? Were they not his disciples already, before Jesus’ instruction on the vine? How can he encourage them to become his disciples when they were such already?

As someone has wisely observed, in every other religion the disciple longs to “graduate” and become a master some day; only in Christianity does the disciple long to become, ever more deeply, a truer disciple! Indeed, the greatest fruit of belonging to Jesus is to continue growing as disciples of the Risen One, since growth is the surest sign of the presence of life. We must long to be ever more intimately bound to him, grafted into him, receiving life from him, in a dynamic process that is never completed. Such a proposition requires much patience and effort but also instils boundless hope, joy and gratitude. 

This magnificent Parable of the Vine, then, speaks to us of our call to intimacy with the risen Christ. It also speaks to us, more starkly, of our need for a sharp Grace to come and cut off the dead branches in our soul, and prune the fruitful branches. Above all, however, this gospel reveals to us our deepest identity which, at a mundane level, we are constantly in danger of forgetting out of fear and isolation: namely, that we are members of Christ and, in Christ, of one another, and that we derive our common life from this mutual coinherence which the Father has so generously created. This is not a static doctrine to be merely believed but a dynamic sacramental mystery, realized and concretely lived in the one Eucharistic Sacrifice we are now invited to celebrate.  

True Health of the Soul

There can be no properly Christian conversion without a piercing of the heart, because only the man whose heart is pierced loves, and only the man who loves—the man whose spiritual substance truly flows out of him—can be called “healthy” in a fully Christian sense. There is no true health of the soul besides authentic, self-giving love.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR Explorations in Theology V, Man is Created, 284

Be Holy

Do not aspire to be called holy before you really are, but first be holy that you may more truly be called so. Live by God's commandments every day; treasure chastity, harbor neither hatred nor jealousy of anyone, and do nothing out of envy. Do not love quarreling; shun ignorance. Respect the elders and love the young. Pray for your enemies out of love for Christ. If you have a dispute with someone, make peace with him before the sun goes down. And finally, never lose hope in God's mercy.

ST. BENEDICT The Rule

Above All, Clothe Yourselves With Love

At the close of life you will be examined as to your love: learn to love God as he wishes to be loved, and give up all that is your own.

SAINT JOHN OF THE CROSS Spiritual Maxims

Homily For The Fourth Sunday of Easter

Does it not strike you how much the Lord loves to spoil us, especially during these Fifty Days of Easter? All the texts of the Liturgy overflow with expressions that should fill our hearts with joy and gratitude. On this 4th Sunday of Easter, for instance, the Church invites us to contemplate the image of Jesus the Good Shepherd. This is much more than just a comforting theme, since it is not any poet or preacher who announces it to us but the Lord Jesus himself. He looks into our eyes and, with all the ardor of his Heart, reveals to us his identity: I am the Good Shepherd! It is the Son of God himself, dead and risen, who speaks to us. And what does he seek from us by doing so? Quite simply, that we give him permission to take care of us! 

Jesus is indeed the Good Shepherd; but are we humble enough to allow him to cast us in the role good sheep? Do we even want to be such? Admittedly, it is more than a little humiliating to be called a “sheep”, an animal famous for its stupidity… There are so many things that must first change in me if I am finally to rejoice in having been elected to the humble flock of Jesus Christ!

First of all, I must agree to be a follower rather than a leader when it comes to the spiritual quest, and I must admit to my existential condition of being lost, of having gone astray. I will only be sensitive to the approach of this divine Shepherd, and tuned in to the sound of his voice, if I feel the urgent need to be sought and found by Someone who can save me from my lost condition. For this I need humility and realism, springing from a certain honest knowledge of myself, out of a bitter experience. Sometimes we first have to fall very low for our pride to finally surrender to the action of grace, and for me to cry out from the bottom of my heart: ‘Lord, save me! Now I truly know that I cannot save myself!’

Within our family and community, we must have the humility and realism to look at ourselves and each other and admit with good humor that we are all of us, most of the time, rather stupid and lost sheep, and that it is not from someone in our midst that we will find a shepherd who saves us: neither heads of state, nor politicians, nor scientists, nor economists, nor (believe it or not!) abbesses or abbots or superiors ad nutum, nor above all the generals and their soldiers, whose god is war. And yet, socially and culturally speaking, it is not so easy to give up our instinctive search for salvation from among those whom the world presents to us as the “wise and strong” who will “take good care of us”.

No, we must definitely look elsewhere, realizing that the only one who can save us is the One who declares to us today in the tone of a lover: I am the Good Shepherd, [and] a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. This moving and consoling statement is nevertheless difficult to accept, for two further reasons. First, it seems insane to us that a shepherd could save his sheep by offering himself as a sacrifice to the wolf. Why would this wolf ever stop his carnage after having devoured the shepherd? And the second reason touches us even more closely: If this Shepherd saves others by giving his life, will not his own tough logic apply to us, too, as having been saved: namely, that we also, in turn, become shepherd for others and give our own lives so that they may be saved? Something in us recoils at that thought, and whispers: ‘Yes, you want to be a good Christian, but surely not a fanatic!’

The Word of God we have just heard, on the other hand, intends to persuade us to become more available, more consenting, to the action of God in our lives through the coming of his Son. The Paschal Mystery requires that I radically change the commonly shared logic I have received. Like Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, I must come to be totally convinced that only God can raise from the dead the One whom human beings have put to death. God follows precisely the logic that you and I conventionally reject, in order to bring about the salvation of the world, instanced here in the healing of a cripple: There is no salvation through anyone [other than Jesus Christ, the Nazorean]; nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved. The strength and courage to affirm such an unheard-of thing, first in our own inmost heart and then before the hostile world, can only come to us from the power Holy Spirit dwelling within us, as in the case of St Peter.

The intimacy with himself to which Our Lord invites us today is so extraordinary that it can have its source in only one place: the sphere of the Blessed Trinity, and more precisely in the mutual love and trust existing between the Son and the Father in the bond of the Spirit. Let’s listen carefully to what Jesus is revealing to us today: I am the good shepherd, and I know [my sheep] and [my sheep] know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. This revelation seems to me almost unimaginable: the same reciprocal and eternal knowledge and love between two divine Persons who are inseparable and necessary to one another—this same mutual knowledge and love has been communicated to us, poor creatures that we are. We exist within the Trinitarian relationship; the roots of our life suck up sustaining sap from the ground of God’s own intimate life! 

As if that weren’t enough, the Lord adds: This is why the Father loves me: because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. Now, for whose sake exactly is Jesus laying down his life? For the Father’s sake, since he says: the Father loves me because I lay down my life? But the Father has no need of such a sacrifice! For what precisely, then, does the Father express so much gratitude to the Son? It must be for Jesus’ laying down his life for our sake. The inevitable conclusion may sound blasphemous to rigid ears: namely, that the Father must not love us any less than he has loved the Son from all eternity. I leave you to ponder this unbelievable truth, which we must nevertheless believe because nothing less would be worthy of the God we worship, and nothing less can raise us from the dead. As we have just heard in the First Letter of John: See what love the Father has bestowed on us, that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are! … We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

Changing the Tide of History

Selfishness makes people deaf and dumb; love opens eyes and ears, enabling people to make that original and irreplaceable contribution which – together with the thousands of deeds of so many brothers and sisters, often distant and unknown – converges to form the mosaic of charity that can change the tide of history.

ST. POPE JOHN PAUL II World Day of Youth, 26 Nov. 1995

Homily: All You Need is Thirst

Have you ever been struck by this astonishing fact of the Easter Mystery: that the risen Jesus, instead of returning immediately to the Father in heavenly glory, insists rather on pursuing his beloved disciples doggedly over the course of fifty days by visiting them repeatedly wherever they may be, searching for their love and wanting to heal them with his presence? When the Risen One appears to them today, we hear that they were startled and terrified. And what Jesus does on first encountering them is to take away the fear they feel thinking they are seeing a ghost. He does this by urging them to explore his corporeality in the most tangible way possible. Yes, he offers them his body for palpable contact, with repeated protestations of love in the form of commandments to intimacy: Peace be with you! It is I myself! Touch me! He seems bound and determined to remove any obstacle still separating him from constant union with his friends. He knows his work of redemption will not be completed until he accomplishes this; only then can he return to the Father.

Now, the Greek word psêlaphêsate, here translated simply as ‘to touch’, has the more precise meaning of ‘examining closely’ or ‘searching by feel’, just as blind persons do with their hands when feeling their way in the dark. It is as if the Lord were saying to his apostles: ‘You are blind with fear and unbelief. But go ahead: handle me familiarly. Through your eager touch I, who am the Light, will enlighten the eyes of your heart!’ 

Indeed, any true lover always wants to know, without intermediaries, all the details of the beloved’s whole being. Jesus clearly wants his friends to see and touch the wounds on his hands and feet; he wants them to handle him intimately to make sure that he really has a human body like their own; and he also wants them to see him eating very earthly food, to be assured that he is not removed from their own sphere of experience. A ghost has no flesh and bones as you see that I have, he tells them with some humor. How fundamental to our faith is this bodily and, indeed, Eucharistic experience of Jesus’ presence! 

But this encounter between Jesus and the disciples in the truth of the flesh is only the preamble to what Jesus really wants to teach them: namely, that his bodily Death and Resurrection is the ultimate fulfilment of God’s age-old plan of redemption from the beginning. Jesus wants them to know that all prophetic allusions to salvation in the Old Testament have now become palpable reality in himself: Everything written about me … must be fulfilled, he affirms. Now, in the context of traditional Jewish piety, this is truly an earth-shaking claim on Jesus’ part: that the deepest meaning of the Law and the Prophets—that is, what Israel held most sacred as God’s revelation of himself to them—was always a hidden reference to himself, Jesus of Nazareth, and that this fulfilment is communicated to all humankind in the historical and mystical event we call the Paschal Mystery. It all comes down to the truth of his body, because only a body is capable of undergoing both death and resurrection. In this way we can clearly understand the close link that Jesus establishes between his bodily truth (flesh and bones) and the victory over death communicated by participation in the Paschal Mystery. Jesus is no mythological figure and his death and resurrection are no merely helpful Jungian symbols. Here we are talking real and concrete human existence, both before and after the Resurrection.

Further, at the heart of this Paschal Mystery is the forgiveness of sins: all of our torturing guilt is wiped away because the Lord has taken on, in his body, the consequences of everyone’s failings. The passion that always drives Jesus’ love is the forgiving of the sins of all, the removal of all guilt. He fervently wants everyone to feel forgiven and thus loved by his Father. This mystery of forgiveness through Jesus’ death and resurrection must from now on also be preached to all peoples by Jesus’ own chosen witnesses. Of this you are witnesses, he solemnly declares to them, which means: ‘You must proclaim and give to others the forgiveness you have already received from me. Share generously with all my gift to you: your own joyful experience of being forgiven!’

In his sermon in the temple Peter shows that he understood this well. He first rebukes the people harshly for their crime, saying: You have killed the author of life; but immediately he softens his tone and adds that the people and their leaders had acted out of ignorance because they had not understood the Prophets’ teaching that the Messiah should suffer. Here we see a magnificent example of the forgiveness of others that authentic faith demands. From his personal experience of redemption and conversion, Peter first rebukes his listeners as he had indeed rebuked himself so bitterly; but immediately afterwards he spontaneously forgives them, excusing their infidelity, because he cannot forget what the Lord had already done for him in the face of his own unfaithfulness and inability to accept a suffering Messiah. Peter does not ask whether this ignorance on the part of the Jews was culpable or innocent; he simply addresses to them the same exhortation he directs to all: Repent and change your lives, that your sins may be blotted out. 

This universal forgiveness and remission of sins is celebrated in the second reading as an event full of consolation and hope for everyone: We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is expiation for our sins. Each of us can indeed participate in this immense absolution pronounced by God upon the whole world. The only condition is that we convert our hearts and return to Jesus. Conversion is always necessary because those who call themselves “Christians” but do not keep God’s commandment are liars and stubbornly persevere in pre-Christian ignorance. They are a living contradiction and the truth is not in them. Without repentance and conversion, we cannot live in truth nor can we enjoy God’s mercy given to us in his beloved Son. Mercy is not like rain falling idly on a cement sidewalk. The cement merely gets wet and there the effect ends. Mercy, rather, is like rain falling on sensitive seeds buried deep in the ground, seeds that have to open up thirstily to the promise of growth that the water brings. As our Guerric of Igny has written: To benefit from “the living waters of Christ, you do not need merit: all you need is thirst”. But this thirst is an absolute requirement. How thirsty are we, in fact, right now, for Christ’s love? How eager are we to touch him? How willing to put him at the center of our lives, where he belongs, no matter what the cost to our ego?

Hidden With Christ in God

The unbounded loving surrender to God and God’s return gift, full and enduring union, this is the highest elevation of the heart attainable, the highest level of prayer. Souls who have attained it are truly the heart of the Church, and in them lives Jesus’ high priestly love. Hidden with Christ in God, they can do nothing but radiate to other hearts the divine love that fills them and so participate in the perfection of all into unity in God, which was and is Jesus' great desire.

SAINT TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS (EDITH STEIN) The Hidden Life

There Are No Bad Things

That “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow, or is too hasty to notice. It is the thesis that there are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with. But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh, have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.

G.K. CHESTERTON St. Thomas Aquinas

Homily for the Annunciation

 An unwanted interruption, a sigh, my eyes roll back, I force a smile, then, “Sure, let me get the car.” This was a damp, foggy Sunday morning years ago, when a brother asked me to take him driving around the property. He was a bit unsure of himself after an injury and wanted some practice behind the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat; we didn’t speak much. He was intent, maneuvering carefully down north road, then around to south. I gazed out the windows transfixed. There was a breathtaking, most delicate beauty all around us. Our hills and fields were wrapped in deep fog, as we inched along through what seemed a Japanese watercolor painting, thick mist resting on early spring trees, droplets on the branches’ delicate tracery. Hills and fields would disappear and then softly emerge into view. A mystical ride, unexpected and experienced only because a brother rudely interrupted my morning routine, as he relaxed with relief and good pleasure and found his flow behind the wheel.

This morning we celebrate the great feast of divine interruption. Mary opens herself to God’s intrusion, an angelic messenger, an invasion of grace. Mary is the spring meadow heavy with soft mist, enveloped by God’s fair Shekinah, God’s Spirit overshadowing her. Amazed at what the angel calls her “favor with God,” nonetheless, her faith allows, her faith sees grace in the interruption. Her faith enables God to take her. Our faith. This is always God’s way; it’s what Jesus her Son will always say when a healing takes place, Your faith has made you well. Mary’s faith in the God of outlandish proposals and promises, enables God’s dream to become reality, real flesh. God’s proposal depends on her cooperation and thus exalts her nature. 

It is Mary’s faith that allows God to take our flesh, so that he can transform, reform, inform it with his love and tender mercy and bring it to new resurrected life. This has been God’s intention from the beginning., this incomprehensible, unjustifiable love, which now can come to full fruition because of Mary’s cooperation. Her flesh given to God will enable God to save us from the trap of our sin-proneness. Mercy grows and swells within her, her blood is his blood, the blood that will heal and redeem us, that will gush with water from his pierced side.

Unlike two despondent disciples on their way to Emmaus, Mary of Nazareth is not slow of heart to believe. Her virginal emptiness, her utter poverty, is our poverty, even our sinfulness and emptiness made a great empty space that God can fill with himself. Mary invites us to go down into the dark recesses of our own hearts and discover there a great emptiness that God can fill. Through Mary all the dark ambiguity and all the empty incongruities of our lives are pregnant with presence and possibility. 

With her we encounter the baffling extravagance of God’s desire for us. Our surrender is the secret we were born for, to be totally defenseless in the face of God’s offering of himself; utterly nonresistant to God’s desire for our bodies, our hearts, our wills, our memories, our whole selves. Mary shows us how to how to fall backwards into this desire, how to receive with joy what we cannot, will never understand; to surrender to the Mystery of God’s unfathomable predilection for each of us in our own particular poverty and smallness. Mary allows the lovely dewy fog of divine tenderness to envelop her. She invites us to do the same - allow God to interrupt us with the ridiculous truth of his favor.

The Annunciation

"When the angel appeared to Mary, God was announcing this love for the new humanity. It was the beginning of a new earth, and Mary became ‘a flesh-gift Paradise to be gardened by the new Adam.’ As in the first garden Eve brought destruction, so in the garden of her womb, Mary would now bring Redemption.”

FULTON SHEEN

"The Annunciation teaches us that God's ways are not our ways, and his plans are not our plans. It invites us to trust in his providence, even when we do not understand."

ARCHBISHOP CHARLES CHAPUT

Mercy Sunday Homily

Today is the Octave of Easter, meaning that it has been Easter Day all week long, culminating today. This Octave Day has lately been given the name Divine Mercy Sunday as a way of attesting to the fact that the Easter Resurrection is the epitome of the Divine Mercy revealed to us in the Paschal Mystery of our redemption: the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We need not look to the writings of St. Faustina or to a somewhat recent liturgical directive for the origin of the name for this Sunday: it is rooted in the New Testament, most explicitly in the First Epistle of St. Peter, our first pope. He writes, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy ( IN HIS GREAT MERCY!) gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

We hear in this passage the resurrection of our Lord Jesus as the manifestation of the the Divine Mercy. This outpouring of the Divine Mercy upon all humanity began two thousand years ago in the mysteries of Christ that we celebrated in Holy Week and the Paschal Triduum. It is radically applied to each of us by the Holy Spirit's work in the Church at our baptism and confirmation. That new birth is nourished through the Word of God and the Eucharist and other sacraments: among those other sacraments particularly the sacrament of Reconciliation. As the Lord's Paschal Mystery began he instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper in which he stated upon taking up the chalice, “Drink from it all of you, for this is my blood of the New Covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins.” Then, days later, as Easter Day of the Lord's Resurrection was drawing to a close, the risen Christ appeared among the apostles and instituted the sacrament of Reconciliation with the words, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” There is, thus, an arc of Divine Power stretching from one sacrament of Mercy to another—from the Eucharist to Reconciliation—an arc of sacramental power that is generated by the saving events of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

The apostles had locked themselves up in a state of fear. The Divine Mercy in the person of the risen Christ came miraculously into the room to mercifully free them from fear through the gift of His Peace and to give to them a share in the Father's love and mercy towards us. Jesus says to them, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” I think that if you put the emphasis on the word “As” in this sentence you can interpret it to mean, “The intention with which the Father sent me is the intention with which I send you and empower you in turn to have.” What is that intention? The Gospel of John spells it out very clearly at John 3:16-17, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

We, all of us Christians, are sent by our merciful Father through his Son, who poured out his love for us. With that, we ourselves become for the world vessels of divine mercy. Too often in the past and at times still in the present, we Christians have been vessels of wrath and condemnation. We see the witness of Pope Francis to reconcile the Church with marginalized, alienated groups and peoples throughout the world—efforts that are sometimes highly scorned. We hear in the Gospel this morning how Our Lord approaches Thomas the Doubter so gently as to help him to come to belief in the risen Jesus to the point that Thomas makes the most explicit, the strongest statement in the whole New Testament about who Jesus really is: “My Lord and My God!” Again, as St. Peter writes in the First Epistle, “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...”

When I was a kid, I had the Sisters of Mercy in Our Lady of Mercy School in Our Lady of Mercy Parish in East Greenwich, R.I. I suppose you could call that “Mercy upon Mercy upon Mercy.” They taught us to say as a silent prayer in our adoring hearts the exclamation of St. Thomas the Apostle at the moment in the mass when the priest held up the host after the consecration: “My Lord and my God!” May our reception of the Holy Eucharist transform us into apostles of Divine Mercy in this world that God loves so much as to send his Son to die for us that we might live His risen life.

The Divine Invitation

God does not belong in a special way to any one people; for it is he who calls us, convokes us, invites us to be part of his people, and this invitation is addressed to all, without distinction, for the mercy of God “desires everyone to be saved.” Jesus does not tell the apostles or us to form an exclusive group, a group of the elite. Jesus says: go out and make disciples of all peoples (see Matt. 28:19). Saint Paul says that in the people of God, in the Church, “there is no longer Jew or Greek…for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

I would like to say to anyone who feels far away from God and the Church, to anyone who is timid or indifferent, to those who think they can no longer change: the Lord calls you to become part [of] his people and he does this with great respect and love! He invites us to be part of this people, the people of God!

POPE FRANCIS General Audience

Why Jesus Was on the Shore

We may ask why, after Jesus’ Resurrection, he stood on the shore to receive the disciples, whereas before he walked on the sea. The sea signifies the world, which is tossed about with various causes of tumults, and the waves of this corruptible life; the shore, by its solidity, symbolizes rest.

The disciples then, in as much as they were still upon the waves of this mortal life, were laboring on the sea; but the Redeemer, having by his Resurrection thrown off the corruption of the flesh, stood upon the shore.

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT Homilies on the Gospel of John

The Core of All Mankind’s Questions

The modern technological world may have tremendous problems that seem utterly remote from the Gospel, but ultimately it comes down to the attitude adopted by Jesus in his living and dying: the attitude of perfect, selfless love, service to the very last and the fruitfulness that comes from it. This is the innermost meaning and core of all mankind’s questions, including those of politics, economics and other fields. And the attitude shown by Jesus is the attitude of God himself to the world. Thus anyone who follows Jesus is walking in God's footsteps, in the footsteps of absolute truth and goodness.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR You Crown the Year With Your Goodness, 255

Why the Disciples Believed

If any persons had removed the body of Jesus, would they have stripped it before doing so? Or if anyone had stolen it, would they have taken the trouble to remove the cloth, and roll it up, and lay it in a place by itself? They would have taken the body as it was.

On this account John tells us, by anticipation, that the body of Jesus was buried with much myrrh, which glues linen to the body even more firmly than lead. So when you hear that the linen wrapping lay apart, you may not endure those who say that the body of Jesus was stolen.

For a thief would not have been so foolish as to spend so much trouble on a superfluous matter. Why should he undo the clothes? And how could he have escaped detection if he had done so? He would probably have spent much time in so doing, and be found out by delaying and loitering.

But why do the clothes lie apart, while the cloth was folded together by itself? That you may learn that it was not the action of men in confusion or haste, the placing some in one place, some in another, and then wrapping them together.

From this disciples believed in the Resurrection. On this account Christ afterwards appeared to them, when they were convinced by what they had seen.

ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM Homilies on the Gospel of John