Homily for 7th Sunday of Easter

Homily for the
7th Sunday of Easter

May 24, 2020

Ps 27: 1, 4, 7-8
Acts 1: 12-14
Ursulines, Willow Dr., New Rochelle, N.Y.

“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear” (Ps 27: 1).

Psalm 27 voices extreme confidence in the power of the Lord to save the individual who is praying.  Attributed by its inscription to David, it’s the prayer of a faithful individual and not of the entire people.  Fiercely pursued by enemies and afflicted by the anger of God that he’s aroused—by Saul in his pre-monarchic period; in midlife by his rebel son Absalom; and late in life when he thoughtlessly orders a military census of the nation, against the advice even of his general Joab, no icon of piety—David always finds his refuge and protection in the Lord (2 Sam 24).  Therefore he’s not afraid of his enemies or of his troubles.

It may be that today’s liturgy means for us to see a kind of parallel between David and the apostles.  Returning to Jerusalem after the ascension of Jesus, they repair to the upper room (Acts 1:13).  This most likely is the same upper room where they’d celebrated their last supper with Jesus, and the same place where they’d hidden in fear after the crucifixion.  It’s their place of refuge, and probably a regular safehouse in dangerous times, as when James has been martyred and Peter arrested to face trial and death (cf. 12:1-17).  The Lord Jesus told them to remain in the city to await “the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak,” their baptism with the Holy Spirit (1:4-5).  It’s a familiar place to stay, with a certain amount of trepidation and a good deal of uncertainty.

Model of the Temple of Herod (https://vhoagland.wordpress.com/tag/temple/)

Not so much fear that they can’t still act like faithful Jews.  There’s a hint of their faith in the reference to the Mount of Olives being just “a sabbath day’s journey” from the city, i.e., about 2/3 of a mile, the distance a pious Jew might walk on the sabbath.  When “all these”—the apostles, Mary and the other women of the company, Jesus’ kinsmen, and the others, to the number of about 120, Luke tells us (1:15)—“devoted themselves with one accord to prayer” (1:14), we may guess that they frequented the Temple like pious Jews—not as a large group but singly, social distancing as it were—longing for the presence of the Lord, like David, so long in exile from the Ark of God:  “One thing I ask of the Lord; this I seek:  to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord and contemplate his temple” (Ps 27:4).  “To dwell in the house of the Lord” means to have access to it as a place of special closeness and contemplative prayer; we know this was a vital part of the life of Jesus’ earliest disciples (cf. Acts 2:46).

There’s another kind of longing suggested here.  When they will be baptized with the Holy Spirit, they will become temples of the Lord.  “To dwell in the house of the Lord” then becomes a turnover, as the Spirit comes to dwell in them, and “the loveliness of the Lord” will fill them.  They don’t know or understand that as yet; the descent of the Spirit on Pentecost will make it known.

The words of the psalmist speak to us, too.  The Church at large is experiencing in these months an absence of the Lord—unable to gather for the Eucharist, in many cases unable even to access our churches for adoration and other forms of private prayer.  We religious have been much blessed in having our Eucharistic Lord always accessible.  But we hear so much about how the Catholic faithful long for that deeper connection of coming to the Lord and having the Lord come to them sacramentally.

Even we who have had Mass and Eucharistic services in our communities have a longing.  For the Sacrament is a foretaste, an anticipation, of the heavenly banquet, of our  “dwelling in the house of the Lord all the days of [our] life,” eternal life.  It’s becoming common to speak of deceased Christians going “to the house of the Father,” to that heavenly home that Jesus has gone to prepare for us:  “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.  If there were not, would I have told you that I’m going to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I’ll come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be” (John 14:2-3).  So much more than even the psalmist could imagine; it’s our intense longing, the “one thing I ask of the Lord” (Ps 27:4), the one thing necessary that Mary of Bethany sought as she sat at the feet of Jesus (Luke 10:39).

Those who study the Psalms discern a change in tone in the 2d half of Ps 27, beginning with “Hear, O Lord, the sound of my call; have pity on me, and answer me” (v. 7).  Now the psalmist is in trouble and requires the Lord to rescue him again.  So it may be with the apostles and the others in the upper room, feeling lost without Jesus and nervous about their situation so soon after the Lord’s passion and death, so physically near his foes.  So their prayer is for the Lord to fulfill his promise of the Spirit.  It’s our prayer too, that we might persevere in seeking the Lord, in recognizing his indwelling presence even as we continue our pilgrimage thru an often hostile world toward the place that Jesus has prepared for us.