6th Sunday of Easter
May 24, 1987
1 Pet 3: 15-18
Holy Cross, Fairfield, Conn.
This weekend (May 20-21, 2017) at Holy Cross in Champaign, the deacons preached. Here's a 30-year-old homily from the other Holy Cross in my life.
“Should anyone ask you the reason for this hope of
yours, be ever ready to reply, but speak gently and respectfully. Keep your conscious clear, so that, whenever
you are defamed, those who libel your way of life in Christ may be shamed” (1 Pet
3: 15-16).
When Peter wrote this letter to Christians
undergoing persecution, he described himself as a “witness to the sufferings of
Christ” (5:1). He had witnessed Jesus’
public ministry, with its daily portion of human problems, with its persecution
by the authorities, with its failure to convert many people. He had witnessed Jesus’ arrest, trial, and
execution.
More than that, Peter had experienced Christ’s
passion in his own life, in his struggle to be courageous, to persevere, and to
keep hoping for a share in Christ’s glory yet to be revealed to the faithful
(5:1).
Maybe you’ve read Quo Vadis or seen the movie.
If not, maybe you’ve at least heard the story. It tells how, when Nero’s persecution broke
out, Peter was hightailing it out of Rome.
About a mile out of town he met a strangely familiar figure walking
toward the city. He realized it was Jesus.
“Domine, quo vadis? Lord, where are you going?” the shocked
apostle asked his Master.
“If you won’t stay with my people in Rome,” Jesus
answered him, “I’m going back in your place, to be crucified again.”
The shamed leader of the Christian faithful turned
back and was soon arrested and crucified in the circus of Nero on the side of
the Vatican hill.
The church of "Domine, Quo Vadis" on the Appian Way |
As the Italians say, “Si non é vero, é ben trovato. If it’s not true, it ought to be.”
Peter calls his persecuted readers to understand
their sufferings as part in the sufferings of Christ, and thereby to bear powerful,
eloquent witness to Christ. He seems to
view these sufferings as a natural consequence of faith, and Jesus, in the
gospel, hints at this too (John 14:17).
If we really take up our crosses each day to follow Jesus, we feel the
burden.
So Peter advises his readers that their attitude
in their daily struggle should find a model in Jesus. If they respond gently and respectfully to
those who wrong them, they will disappoint and shame their persecutors.
Believers in America don’t face open, bloody persecution
the way Peter and the 1st Christian generations did. What we face is far more subtle.
How are Christians attacked today? The latest outstanding example is the way
that large segments of the population have gloated over the moral failures of
Jim Bakker and his associates. First,
all TV evangelists came under fire; some of them deserve to be under fire, but
to generalize from the failings of a few and paint all of them as greedy and
corrupt is a slander. And after the
evangelists, more subtly, the convictions of all Christians are mocked.
Another example: the media take the political opinions of men
like Jerry Falwell or Cardinal O’Connor and use them to put down fundamentalist
Christians or Roman Catholics who don’t subscribe to opinions hallowed by the
gods of TV and the press. A more specific
example: In the mid-70s when Cardinal
Madeiros vigorously denounced racism, particularly among the South Boston
Irish, the media lionized him. In the 80s,
when he vigorously denounced abortion during the campaign season, the media,
NOW, the ACLU, and the politicians lambasted him for interfering in politics,
civil rights, etc.
Another example:
When was the last time you saw a reasonably accurate, sympathetic
portrayal of Catholicism, our beliefs, our priests, ordinary Catholics like you
in the movies or on TV? It certainly
wasn’t in the recent episode of Family
Ties in which Alex’s friend died; it’s not in MASH’s Fr. Mulcahy; it wasn’t
in The Thorn Birds; it’s not in
coverage of the Church and conflicts over homosexuality; foster care in NYC,
birth control clinics in schools, speakers at church functions, or Fr. Curran
and Abp. Hunthausen.
To be fair, the media have given plenty of good
treatment to our bishops’ pastorals on peace and on the economy. Unfortunately, such objectivity seems to
depend upon whether the Church’s position squares with what has been called
“the liberal agenda.”
Another example: The US is the only Western nation in which
Catholics—or Lutherans, Jews, or evangelical Christians—must pay for 2 school
systems, one for everyone and one that respects their religious beliefs.
So we don’t have to be up against the lions in the
Coliseum or cutting timber in a Siberian labor camp or hiding from a Salvadoran
death squad to be defamed, to have our way of life in Christ libeled, to suffer
for the Gospel.
Anti-Catholic riot, Philadelphia, 1844 |
Our speech and our way of living is to be gentle
and respectful even as it is forceful and direct. We must live honestly, almost
irreproachably. As we’ve seen in the PTL
case and in some others, any moral flaw, any weakness, gives religion’s enemies
plenty of ammunition. “If it should be
God’s will that [we] suffer, it is better to do so for good deeds than for evil
ones” (3:17).
How much good we could do if our neighbors could
observe us as the pagan Romans observed the 3d-century disciples of Jesus, and
exclaim, “Look how these Christians love one another!”
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