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Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary-
Homilies |
"Through Tangible
Realities, God Reveals Himself to Us"
Homily for
the Fifth Sunday of Easter
Fr. Jonathan L. Reardon
22 May 2011
Year A
It’s probably a safe bet to say that most of us here, at some
point in our childhood, had an imaginary friend. You can admit
it; there is no shame in that! A person totally constructed
within our minds that belongs to me and no one else – my friend
and no one else’s. A person who listens and never talks back!
And all the while we had this imaginary friend no one ever dared
to question – let alone ourselves – the existence of this
person. How amazing it is to think that simply believing that
something we can bring it into existence. The problem is that we
grew from children to adults and, as St. Paul once said, we “did
away with childish things.” It was easy to simply believe that a
person could exist solely in the mind. We have passed from that
stage of our human existence to the “prove it to me” stage. The
stage in life that demands evidence – especially when it comes
to matters of faith. For example, our patron St. Thomas doubted
the resurrection of Jesus until he placed his own hands into the
nail marks and wounded side of the Risen Lord. And in today’s
Gospel, Philip turns to Jesus and says: “show us the Father and
that will be enough for us.”
Scripture scholars all agree that Jesus is speaking about the
sight of the Father as a vision of faith. But the Apostles still
find our Lord’s words very mysterious and difficult to grasp.
This is why Jesus upbraids Philip for not yet knowing Him even
though His works are those that are proper to God – walking on
water, controlling the wind, forgiving sins, raising the dead,
and so on, all of which Philip and the rest of Twelve had
witnessed. Jesus scolds the Apostle because He did not recognize
His divinity through His human nature. What Jesus is trying to
say to Philip and the others is that shown you, through my
works. All of God’s manifestations throughout Scripture have
come by way of a medium and are only a reflection of His
greatness – all of which culminate in the highest expression of
God’s greatness, in the Person of Jesus Christ. In its document,
Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council highlights this point:
“He did this by the total fact of his presence and
self-manifestation – by words and works, signs and miracles, but
above all by his death and glorious resurrection from the dead,
and finally by the sending of the Spirit of truth. He revealed
that God was with us, to deliver us from the darkness of sin and
death, and to raise us up to eternal life.”
Throughout his pontificate, in his catechesis, his writings and
homilies, Pope Benedict XVI has said time and time again that we
are living in the era of a new form of atheism. This is not
atheism in its proper sense – the denial of the existence of
God. This type of atheism carries with it the “may be” factor
where we find many people practicing some form of religion
because there “may be” a god and they do not want to be left
out, just in case. And at the same time, if there turns out to
be no god at all, then perhaps one might learn some life lessons
or gain some practical knowledge. Others might even consider to
have been wasted time.
The mind is such a
powerful thing that one point in life we could believe that
another person existed solely in our imagination and then later
in life almost outright deny the existence of God because He
cannot be seen. What we forget is that the existence of that
person – that imaginary friend – is based upon what we have
already experienced in relation to another human being. We have
taken that which we have seen and heard and so on from other
human beings and crafted in our minds another one – solely for
ourselves. So, God does the same thing in order to show that He
is not some faraway abstract entity. It is through that which we
can touch, taste, hear, smell, and see that makes God known to
us. Think about it – we hear the words of Scripture, the words
of so many prayers and blessings – the prayer of absolution in
confession, the words of consecration for the Holy Eucharist –
we can smell candles burning and incense rising up from the
censor, we see the elements of bread and wine, oil and water, we
can feel them on our foreheads and hands. God touches, quite
literally, all five senses and by doing so He stimulates the
mind and strikes us to the very core of our being – to our
hearts. Thus, showing Himself to us, proving to us that He is no
fairy tale, that His existence is not a matter of wishful
thinking or a mere illusion. But that He is indeed real and that
faith in Him is not a sign of weakness. Furthermore, it is the
belief and the reality, that this God who touches the senses,
that uses these tangible realities to make Himself known,
emptied Himself by becoming a human being in order to enter into
the reality of our existence, our daily lives, to be with us at
every waking and sleeping moment, to fulfill the deepest desire
of the human heart. Therefore, all of this is directed at
bringing us into contact with the divine reality of God – with
the Person of Jesus Christ.
We must not let this opportunity pass us by, to encounter the
Lord here, in this Eucharist – through what we hear at Mass:
music, the Scriptures, the homily, the blessings, the prayers,
the bells, and so on – through what we see: gold chalices,
bread, and wine – through what can taste by consuming the Sacred
Host, in and through these tangible, sensory realities, Jesus
shows Himself to us, He puts Himself into contact with us and
raises us up to experience a foretaste of that heavenly reality
to which we are all called. By experiencing this reality and by
believing in Him, Jesus lifts us up out of the darkness of
confusion, doubt and mistrust into His light of clarity, grace
and truth.
