How They Love One Another: Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Easter

2nd Sunday of Easter, A                                                                                             April 15, 2023
Fr. Alexander Albert                                                               St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette

“See how they love one another.” That was the phrase most commonly used to explain why people were converting to Christianity in the ancient world. Not “see how clever they are” or “see how successful they are,” or “see how pretty their buildings are,” but “see how they love one another.” Our first reading gives us a glimpse of this.

Starting with Advent, the Church has taken us through all of salvation history: creation, fall, promise of redemption, the old covenants, the arrival of Christ, his ministry and finally his passion, death and resurrection completed this last week. This is the foundation, the story of who we are and what we believe. Once salvation is accomplished in Christ’s victory over death, God’s next move is to proclaim that salvation to the ends of the earth. And he plans to use us to do that – not just priests, but every single baptized person is expected to evangelize and all of us will be judged by that expectation.

So, even while we’re still looking forward to Pentecost, we are already hearing how the Apostles and disciples go throughout the world proclaiming the Gospel. The next several weeks will take us through parts of the Acts of the Apostles to show us evangelization in the early Church. All the while, the second reading and gospel will be delving deeper into just what it is that’s being proclaimed throughout the world.

It is intentional that this journey starts with a snapshot of what Christian community looked like in the very beginning: The teaching of the Apostles, communal life, breaking of bread, prayers, and possessions held in common. Then notice especially that it tells us that “every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

The first and most important to note is who is doing the adding. It is the Lord who added to their number, not themselves. I’ll call this the “primacy of grace” in evangelization. Strategies, training, arguments, and even the performance of miracles are not what cause people to join the faith. God causes them to join through his gift of grace. One of the great failures of the so-called “New Evangelization” over the last 60 years is that too many have lost sight of that fact.

This is not just an idea, but something I have directly experienced. All but one of the people that I have received into the Catholic Church have come out of the blue. I had never met them, heard of them, or had the chance to try to convince them to become Catholic. They have quite literally called me up or walked in the door and said “I want to be Catholic.” It wasn’t because I was clever or a good preacher or aggressively arguing with these people. It was an outpouring of grace and the result of God’s providence that simply put me in the position to receive them. I don’t convert people, God does. At best, I cooperate with his grace. At worst, he saves them despite me. That’s a consolation.

This is not to say we can sit back and do nothing but say the occasional prayer for people’s conversion. It is to make the point that evangelization depends on God’s grace. That in turn means that the first question we must ask ourselves – one that is answered in our readings today – is this: How do we call down more of God’s grace to bring people to faith in Jesus Christ? Do what the community in Acts did: devote yourself to the teaching of the Apostles, communal life, breaking of bread, prayers, and possessions held in common.

The communal life. This is easily one of the top 3 things wrong with our culture and the Church in our country today. We live an unnaturally individualized, mobile life. For ancient Christians, faith was utterly incomprehensible in isolation. It still is. Jesus doesn’t just save you as an individual. He saves you precisely by uniting you to his body, the Church. It is belonging to the community that make us Christians.

Notice that everything else in this list is based on the communal life. The teaching of the Apostles? We learn that from the Church. The Breaking of the Bread? That’s Mass, done in community. The prayers? That’s a biblical way of speaking about the liturgy, which is all of those communal prayers which include but go way beyond just the Sunday Mass. Then there’s the sharing of things in common – the idea that community is so tangible and real that it matters to us more than our own possessions… that we’re willing to see what own as being there primarily in service to the community.

If your faith feels dead and burdensome, if the idea of sharing your faith and evangelizing others scares you or simply doesn’t make sense to you, chances are that you’re missing out on this communal aspect. Yes, your faith must be personal, but it must be personally invested in the Community of Faith. There’s far too much to say about this for one homily, but we can begin by connecting it back to that primacy of grace and to the special focus of this unique day in the Church’s liturgy.

It is Divine Mercy Sunday, where we read the same gospel every year: the institution of the sacrament of Confession, where Jesus gives the Holy Spirit to the Apostles and tells them they can forgive sins. When you’re tightly bound to others in a communal way of life, sharing space and possessions and responsibilities, your faults are going to show. You are going to hurt others and be hurt by them. You are going to need to forgive and be forgiven. And, as we explored during the Paschal Triduum last week, that willingness to be vulnerable and yet forgive is precisely what most reveals love for another.

The primacy of grace is that it starts with admitting our faults to God. But God, in his infinite wisdom, made confessing our faults to another person part of how we receive forgiveness from God. The sacrament of confession is required for our salvation – so go to confession! – but that is not all there it is. This sacrament is a model, a wellspring for communal life. It utilizes divine command and grace to train us in the practice of seeking and giving mercy to one another.

So this week, consider these questions: does your faith matter to the people around you? And does their faith matter to you? Is St. John the Evangelist parish a community to you? Or a pit stop?

Better yet, ask yourself this: have you ever asked your fellow parishioners for forgiveness? I mean beyond your own blood relatives. If not, is it really because you’re so good that you never hurt someone in this community? Or because you are so distant from us that what we do doesn’t matter to you? And have you have been asked by them for forgiveness? Do people really look at this community and say “see how they love one another?… see how they forgive one another?” If not, what are you going to do to change that?