3d Sunday of Easter
April 13, 1986
Acts 5: 27-32, 40-41
Rev 5: 11-14
Assumption, San Leandro, Calif.
This past Sunday (April 30), I was away from Champaign for
a sacramental occasion and a couple of days of vacation in the woods. Here’s a homily from long ago and far away (my
sabbatical year in Berkeley, Calif.).
“We must obey God rather than men”
(Acts 5: 29).
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It’s a few months after the
resurrection. Guided and encouraged by
the Holy Spirit, the apostles are preaching fearlessly about Christ: “The God of our fathers has raised up Jesus,
whom you put to death…. God has exalted
him at his right hand as Ruler and Savior, to bring repentance to Israel and
forgiveness of sins” (5:30-31).
As we heard last week, the power of
Jesus works thru the apostles: not only
the power of the word and the power of forgiveness but the power of healing
too.
But preaching the need to
repent—preaching Jesus—is unpopular, especially with men of power and
influence. So the high priest and the
Sanhedrin have tried to silence Peter and the apostles.
The answer of the apostles, as we’ve
heard, is bold proclamation: “We must
obey God rather than men.” After
consultations, the Sanhedrin again issues an injunction—no more of this Jesus
in public! The prohibition is explained
by a sound flogging—which, for some reason, got dropped from v. 40 in the
lectionary; but that’s the “ill treatment” in which the apostles rejoice in v.
41.
So the apostles face a bitter and
painful persecution, one soon to burst into murderous violence. But for the sake of the Name of Jesus,
they’re happy. Now they can more closely
identify with Jesus, who suffered for his preaching, when they offer themselves
to God by doing what God asks, viz., preaching Jesus, repentance, and eternal
life, and when they suffer for that.
The reading from Revelation today
refers to “the Lamb that was slain,” thereby attaining “praise and honor, glory
and might” (Rev 5:12-13). The lamb, as
you know, was the main animal of sacrifice for the Jews, especially for the
liberating Passover sacrifice. So it
became the symbol of Christ, our crucified and gloried Lord Jesus. This Lamb’s death and resurrection have made
him our “ruler and savior,” freeing us from our sins.
Like Peter and his companions, you and
I must obey God rather than men. We must
practice our Catholic faith even when it’s inconvenient, event when we might
stand out, even when society says to cut it out.
Last month our Holy Father—Peter’s
successor—described the part that lay people have to play in the world. He said, “The common priesthood of the
baptized … consists in their making their lives a spiritual offering, in
witnessing to the Christian spirit in the family, in taking charge of the
temporal sphere and sharing in the evangelization of their brethren.”[1]
To make our lives a spiritual offering
is mostly an interior act, of course. It
means prayer and an attitude of submission to God, a readiness for whatever he
may ask of us, praise for his goodness and even for what we don’t understand in
him.
To witness to the Christian spirit in
the family puts us a little more in the public eye, like the early Christians
praying in Solomon’s Portico, of which we heard in last week’s reading from
Acts (5:12). It means giving good
example to one another: especially with
the husband-wife, children-parents family, but the Christian family too. It means teaching the Faith and teaching to
pray. It means praying together—do you
say grace together when you eat in a restaurant? It means recognizing and respecting God’s
plan in human sexuality. It means
readiness to forgive, to help and support, and to allow others to mature as
individuals. It means parents being firm
with kids but being friends too, as Christ would have it.
To take charge of the temporal sphere
and to share in the evangelization of others—Pope John Paul puts them
together. Christians managing the world
means preaching the Gospel—by what they do and how they do it. Christians can’t evangelize, i.e., preach the
Good News of Jesus Christ, without taking charge of the temporal order.
The temporal order means the realities
of business, labor, play, school, politics, our ordinary daily lives. We have to live our faith in Jesus in this
world, let others see the power of Jesus’ love:
his power for goodness, for respect, for justice, for peace, for
life. It’s all this that puts us in
conflict, makes worldly powers and influences tell us, “Come on!” or “Don’t
force your morality on me”—as if honesty, human dignity, and life were private
values and not public ones.
We can’t be private Christians and
public agnostics. We can’t be Sunday
Catholics and weekday wimps. We can’t be
church-building believers and business, school, or political weather vanes,
spinning with the social wind. While
respecting the dignity of every person, we can’t yield to human respect, i.e.,
sacrificing our basic beliefs and values because of what people might think or
say. “We must obey God rather than men.”
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