HOMILY EASTER SEASON WEEK 04 05 – Year II
Homecoming – A Place For Us All:
Optional Memorial of Our Lady of Fatima
(Acts 13:26-33; Ps 2; Jn 14:1-6)
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A Place For Us is a song in the opera West Side Story that resonates with the gospel today in which we are assured Jesus gives us a home with the Father – all we have to do is believe in him, and live his teachings.
In writing about the stages of our lives, Ron Rolheiser OMI teaches we are raised in a home; driven out of that home by puberty to establish a home of our own, and finally, prepared for a final homecoming by the aging process. It is all about coming back home – being at home.
In the gospel, Jesus not only assures us of an eternal home, but also informs us he is personally going ahead of us to prepare a place with the Father for us. Popular songs about home are archetypal. Humanity’s longing for a place, a home, is also archetypal and cross-cultural. Home is about eternal life, serenity, rest. At its deepest, our home is in the heart of the Trinity. That is why Jesus asks us to believe both in God the Father, and in him – the Son of God, the Word made flesh through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This reality of an eternal home is very much part of the good news Jesus shares with us. It is striking that as Jesus himself is facing the prospect of horrendous suffering and an agonizing death by crucifixion the next day, he calmly tells his apostles, “Do not be afraid – do not let your hearts be troubled.” Jesus is so grounded and secure in the Father’s love for him, he could calmly and with great dignity, especially in the gospel of John, freely give his life for us – so we could have that eternal home with him and the Father. This serene attitude of Jesus in the face of his own death is reassuring – he is with us in the most chaotic and stressful moments of our life, such as the present Covid-19 pandemic. We can truly say with Julien of Norwich, “All will be well, and all will be well, and in the end, all manner of being will be well.”
I believe I had a glimpse of that eternal home when visiting a friend and his wife one day. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, returning from a soccer tournament, barged in the house, threw down her equipment bag, made a beeline straight to her father, jumped on his lap, put her arm around his neck and rested her head against his. He calmly kept on talking to me over her, while his wife continued preparing the meal and her siblings continued playing in the living room.
I felt warm all over, deeply moved, and my heart touched as I left this tender scene. It dawned on me I had come as close as I ever will in this life to seeing God with these eyes, in that intimate relationship of a father, daughter and close-knit family. That is what we are all longing for and what Jesus is preparing for us, forever.
There is much irony in the first reading. The whole Old Testament is a preparation for the coming of Jesus as the Messiah who would inaugurate his reign among us – bring heaven to us here on earth and open the door to that eternal home here and now, at least partially. How regrettable the very ones who should have been most receptive and most prepared to welcome him with open hearts and arms, in the words of St. Paul, “did not recognize him and did not understand the words of the prophets they read every sabbath.”
How marvellous that in God’s mysterious unfolding of God’s plan for salvation, God was able to use their very resistance and rejection to not only fulfill those words by the crucifixion of Jesus, but also to fulfill all the promises God made throughout the Old Testament, by raising Jesus from the dead.
Our task is to do our part to help realize this reign of God, this sharing in our eternal home, here and now, on earth. We are to believe in God, trust in Jesus, and live out his teachings of love, healing and forgiveness.
Ron Rolheiser articulates what happens when we do live out this Incarnational spirituality, in one of his weekly meditations entitled Keeping our Loved Ones Connected to the Body of Christ:
Scripture says: “We ARE the Body of Christ on earth.” We’re not a replacement for Jesus’ body, not a representation of it, or even his mystical body. We ARE his body and, as such, are meant to do all the things he did, including the forgiveness of sins and the binding of each other, through love, to the family of God.
Those statements, among others, have immense, almost unimaginable, implications. As a family of faith, we continue to give physical flesh to God on earth and so, like Jesus, have the power to forgive and to link anyone who is sincere to the family of God.
Simply put, this means we can link those we love (our children, our siblings, our friends, our colleagues, and anyone who is sincere) to salvation, to heaven, to the family that shares God’s table. We can say to God: “My heaven includes those I love!”
Today the church invites us to celebrate Mary as our Lady of Fatima. This title was given to the Blessed Virgin Mary after she appeared to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, between May 13 and October 13, 1917, within the context of war and anti-Catholic persecution. The three messages or ‘secrets’ of Fatima stress the importance of repentance, conversion of heart, and dedication to Our Lady, especially through daily prayer of the Rosary.
Mary is a wonderful model of contemplative prayer, abiding in God’s love, as described by Luke who mentions Mary “pondered these things in her heart” (Luke 2:19). She is also a model of one who balanced action and contemplation in her life, exemplified by her caring for her cousin Elizabeth in her pregnancy. We would do well to follow her example.
The Eucharist gathers us around the altar for a family meal, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet in our eternal home. It is a meal of amazing grace, a miracle of faith in which we receive the Body and Blood of Jesus and in turn, are transformed into the Body of Christ.
It also sends us out, believing in our Trinitarian God, to live out the Eucharist as the Body of Christ through love, forgiveness and healing, inviting all we meet to join us in our final homecoming.
