The Sixth Sunday of Easter
April 27, 2008
Homily for the Anglican Usage Mass
of the
St. Thomas More Society
celebrated at
St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church , 1013 Wood Street
Scranton, PA
John 14:15-21
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen
If you desire to receive the sacrament of confirmation in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, it is not enough simply to present yourself at the local parish on Confirmation Day. In order to be confirmed, you even need more than a sponsor and confirmation name. Before the Bishop will confirm you, he must receive assurance from the Pastor of the parish that you have demonstrated your love for Jesus and your obedience to His commands. That is, no one who is leading an immoral life is supposed to receive the sacrament of confirmation. Nor is the Bishop to confirm those who do not fulfill their obligation to assist at Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation. Though this sometimes happens, the Church has reasons for the rules it has set down.
The reasons the Church requires her members to demonstrate their love for Jesus and their obedience to His commands before they are confirmed can be seen in today’s Gospel. Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “If you love me you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth” (John 14:15-16). We see in this short statement that love of Jesus leads to obedience of His commands, which leads to the dispensation of the Holy Spirit and the recognition of the fullness of Truth. That is, in the sacrament of confirmation we receive a dispensation of the Holy Spirit, given to us when a successor to the Apostles lays his hands on us. In order that the Church may not be accused of throwing pearls to swine, she reserves the dispensation of this gift to those who have shown they desire the sanctification and the wisdom this gift imparts. The Church is true to Christ’s command and shows forth His love for all men when she refuses to confirm those who desire neither holiness nor truth. And at the same time, the Church witnesses to the world, in confirming only those who have demonstrated their love, that faith without works is dead. If we say we love Jesus, it must be reflected in how we live our lives.
We see, then, that there is a direct connection between the failure to love Jesus and the ubiquitous confusion about what is right and what is wrong. If we do not love Jesus, we will not be obedient to His commands and thus, working against the presence of the Holy Spirit, we will experience confusion about the truth. The world is turned upside down, and in this state, even the murder of the innocents is proclaimed a virtue.
Radical Islam provides us with an excellent illustration of this truth. Though Osama Bin Laden and his ilk believe that all Americans are guilty and thus deserving of death, even these terrorists will admit that children, particularly Muslim children, are innocent and therefore are not to be killed. How then, the radical Muslims have been asked, even by other Muslims, can the targeting of civilians be justified, when so many children are killed in this way? The terrorists answer that such children are “involuntary martyrs” who go immediately to heaven, and thus we need not worry about the loss of their lives because their eternal salvation is assured by killing them. I am not making this up! Such absurd reasoning only can manifest itself and manifest the works that proceed from it when there is within a person absolutely no love for Jesus. Even the smallest amount of love for Jesus would prevent the unrighteous from killing the innocent and then claiming they are doing the innocent a favor. Because the radical Muslims are so removed from the love of Christ, so disobedient and so distant from a dispensation of the Holy Spirit, they turn the truth on its head and make the murder of the innocent a virtue.
Even if it is clear then how the failure to love Jesus issues in grave confusion about what is true, it is perhaps less clear how people who claim they love Jesus and have received a dispensation of the Holy Spirit at the hands of a validly ordained bishop could live such immoral lives. Indeed, the poorest witnesses to the truth of Catholicism are those Catholics who profess their love for Jesus while crucifying Him through their actions. The world takes note of their hypocrisy; so we must be able to offer an explanation.
We note just this: If a person says he loves Jesus but he denies the truth either by his words or his actions, we can be certain that he is being disobedient in some significant way. Jesus tells us that the truth that the Holy Spirit teaches us comes as the fruit, as the reward so to speak, of the love we demonstrate by our obedience. We cannot expect to know the truth, to understand the truth, to live the truth, even to receive the truth, if we are lacking in the sacrificial love for our Lord that Jesus Himself exemplified in laying down His life that we might live. To be obedient, in other words, we must be willing to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of others. Nothing inhibits our understanding of the truth of the Catholic faith more than an unwillingness to be obedient to the necessity of sacrifice. If we want to know why the Spirit seems to be having such little effect in the lives of those who have been baptized and confirmed, we need only look to their disobedience to the demands of love.
What we ought to do instead is look to the lives of the saints, those whose sanctity and good works are an example to every Catholic. What we will see in them is that their love for Jesus always issued in obedience to Jesus and to those Jesus has entrusted with the office of the Apostles. There is no such thing as a saint who disobeyed a faithful bishop. There is no such thing as a saint who denied the truth that the Universal Church has handed down to us through our bishop.
Therefore, what is true for candidates for confirmation is true for all Catholics: if we desire to know the truth that the Spirit imparts, our love for Jesus must be demonstrated in our obedience to Jesus. That is, we must demonstrate our love through our obedience to those obedient bishops our Lord has appointed to lead His Church until He comes again.