+LIKE LIVING STONES 5th Sunday of Easter, 2017
Being Mother’s day, it is all together fitting to say something in gratitude to mothers everywhere, both living and deceased, for the wonderful witness you have been in our lives. Your love and care has been the vehicle of God’s very own. For this, none of us can express adequate appreciation.
As we heard from the letter of St Peter, we are to be chosen and precious in the sight of God, to let ourselves become living stones, built into a spiritual house. Each of our lives is intimately related to those around us just as every stone or brick that makes up this church is closely related to those around it. And Christ Jesus is the cornerstone on which the whole structure depends. The very cement that holds the whole thing together is the love Christ has for us, the love with which he is one with the Father, a love that makes us one with one another.
The way we are built into the living temple of God is brought home to us with great clarity in our gospel this morning. Thomas’s question to Jesus is a haunting one, a question that lingers in each of our hearts as we live our Christian lives each day: “Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” and then Christ’s response can be as baffling to us as it probably was to the first disciples: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
So often in our lives we find ourselves asking where is Jesus in this situation. Our neighbor, Joe Mahoney, was seemingly in good health only a few months ago but having an accident and found to be with leukemia, he passed away just this last Tuesday, leaving his loving wife and children and many of us with a real sense of loss. This is only one instance but we are constantly being immersed in the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, into those moments when there is no human explanation that proves adequate. It is then that we learn to trust in an all loving God. And it is in these very moments that we come to know what Jesus means when he says: “I am the way and the truth and the life.”
Jesus then tells us not to “let our hearts be troubled. You have faith in God; have faith also in me.” By doing so he takes us still further into the whole divine plan for us. Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us so that he may come back to us and takes us to himself. John’s gospel has a way of making present the mystery of God’s love that is not only all around us but also at work within us. Just as Jesus is one with the Father and does the works of his Father, so we too are to be one with him so that we may do the works of God. He dares even to say that “the one who believes in him will not only do the works that he does but “will do greater ones than these” because he is going to the Father.
It is hard to imagine anything like that ever happening but we have to remember that what is impossible to us human beings is possible for God who is at work in those who believe. And for me this is what we celebrate each time we gather for the Eucharist and let our own lives become the bread and wine that is brought to the altar. Of ourselves we are no more than a bit of ground wheat become bread or crushed grapes become wine. But once we are filled with the Holy Spirit, as often as we open our minds and hearts through faith to the prayer of Epiclesis, to the gift of Holy Spirit, our minds and hearts become one with that of the risen Christ who does wonderful things with our lives wherever we may be.
Then it is that Christ truly becomes the way, the truth and the life for us so that it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us. This it is to be truly Christian in every domain of human life today.
Acts 6:1-7; Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12