7th Sunday of Easter
June 1, 2014
1 Pet 4: 13-16
Iona College, New Rochelle
“If you are insulted for the name of Christ,
blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you” (1 Pet 4: 14).
The introduction to the First Letter of St.
Peter in the New American Bible, which is the official Bible of American
Catholics, published by our bishops—the one we use in our Lectionary—describes the
letter as one encouraging Christians “to remain faithful to their standards of
belief and conduct in spite of threats of persecution.” Depending on where and when one lived in the
Roman Empire, there might have been outright persecution with the forfeiture of
personal goods, imprisonment, torture, and possibly death. Or, as the introduction says, “The problem
addressed would not be official persecution but the difficulty of living the
Christian life in a hostile, secular environment that espoused different values
and subjected the Christian minority to ridicule and oppression.” (Does that sound familiar?)
.jpg) |
| The Martyrdom of Sts. Perpetua, Felicity, and Companions at Carthage, 203 A.D., from the Menologion of Basil II |
Such harassment, such insults, such persecution,
Peter says, are a “share in the sufferings of Christ” and are linked to our
share in “his glory” when that glory will be fully revealed, when he “comes
again to judge the living and the dead” (Creed). Hence, suffering for and with Christ is a
cause for rejoicing. (1 Pet 4:13) It’s a
sign of heavenly blessing (4:14).
Those words of Peter are similar to Jesus’ words
in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are
you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against
you because of me. Rejoice and be glad,
for your reward will be great in heaven” (Matt 5:11-12). But “woe to you when all speak well of you,
for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way” (Luke 6:26).
One should be ashamed of evil behavior—Peter
gives some examples (4:15)—but not of belonging to Christ. “Glorify God because of the name” of Jesus
Christ, he exhorts us (4:16).
Persecution is a real part of Christian life in
vast parts of the word today, from the Central African Republic (where there
was a massacre at Our Lady of Fatima Church last week) and Nigeria (you know
about the Christian schoolgirls who’ve been kidnapped) through Sudan (where a
Christian mother has been condemned to death for “converting” to Christianity
even tho she was raised as a Christian from infancy, because her father was
Muslim) and Egypt (where churches have been burned and Christians killed) across
the Middle East to Pakistan and in parts of the Far East. People are assaulted, kidnapped, driven into
exile, and murdered for their faith.
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| Refugees in one of the Salesian compounds in Bangui, Central African Republic (ANS) |
It’s not just a foreign issue. At the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in
Washington on May 13, Professor Robert George of Princeton University—one of
the leading Catholic intellectuals of our age—advised listeners, “The days of
acceptable Christianity are over. The
days of comfortable Catholicism are past.”[1] He went on to say that our contemporary
culture is losing its tolerance for Catholics (and other Christians) who hold
fast to the teachings of the Gospel.
The costs of
discipleship may be personal, familial or professional, he said. Standing up for the Church’s teaching on the
dignity of human life and marriage—teachings which he said are “not fourth-class
Gospel truths” and must be proclaimed with all of the Church’s revealed
teaching—may lead to charges of “bigotry” or waging a “war on women” or that Christians
are an “enemy of reproductive freedom.” “To
believe in the Gospel is to make oneself a marked man or woman,” he said.[2]
Professor George reminded his audience that
Jesus triumphed over his persecutors, and the test that we face, if we hope to
take part in his triumph “when his glory is revealed” (4:13), is that we be
faithful witnesses of the Gospel.
And if we are faithful witnesses to the Gospel, our
secular culture is going to oppose us.
We’ll be labeled as bigots for maintaining that marriage necessarily
includes both mutual love and procreation.
We’ll be labeled “anti-woman” for defending the lives of unborn human
beings. Our institutions risk financial
ruin if they won’t provide contraception, sterilization, and certain forms of
abortion, and there’s serious pressure to include all forms of abortion. In Massachusetts and Illinois the Church has
already been excluded from adoption services because we won’t place children in
homosexual households. You all remember
the Legion of Decency? The Legion of
Decency’s ratings system as a criterion for acceptable entertainment went the
way of the dodo bird a long time ago, and who even knows that the Catholic News
Service still reviews and rates movies on behalf of our bishops?[3]
The civil rights movement produced a sense of “black
pride.” The women’s movement has
promoted not only women’s rights but pride in being a girl or a woman. Other identify movements have done the same. It’s nothing new that on March 17 the Irish put
their identity on glorious display. St.
Peter is exhorting us to rejoice and take glory in who we are as followers of
Jesus Christ, and therefore truly to follow him, even if that means being
unpopular, disliked, or harassed. If
“the Lord is my life’s refuge,” as today’s psalm says, “of whom should I be
afraid?” (27:1).
Unlike 1st-century Christians, those addressed
by St. Peter, in 21st-century America we can speak up freely and even push back
for our rights and for what we believe is right. That’s why there are dozens of cases in the
federal courts right now against the contraception and other mandates of
HHS. In the land of the free we
shouldn’t have to hide our identity like 1st-century Christians or those who
lived behind the Iron Curtain. We
shouldn’t be “insulted for the name of Christ” and made to suffer for it by the
government, the mass media, or society’s self-styled elites. We can and must continue to defend unborn
human life, identify marriage as ordered toward the procreation and raising of
children as well as toward mutual love, and speak for the rights of people in
our country and around the world to food and shelter, to a decent livelihood,
to education, to respect for their persons, and to freedom of conscience.
Our steadfastness in adhering to Jesus, in our
words and our actions, depends upon our doing what the apostles did, according
to the Acts of the Apostles: “All these
devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and
Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers” (1:14). We pray in union with Mary and the whole
Church to be filled with the Holy Spirit, who is our wisdom, knowledge,
strength, and courage.
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