Always Distinguish(ed).

Second Sunday of Easter, Vespers II. Preaching on 1 John 5: 1-6.

Think back for a moment to Good Friday think especially of the empty tabernacle. If we meditate on this for a moment, we will know how so many people in our secularized culture might often feel: profoundly empty. Like them, when we see the empty sanctuary, we can be suddenly overwhelmed: the bare altar, the sanctuary lamp extinguished, the doors to the tabernacle flung wide open€”our innermost sanctum has been violated. It’s an empty religion that fills the world…

While for us, as believers, those sad days have passed over and now we celebrate Christ’s presence among us again, much of the world remains in that emptiness. In the glory of Easter, Christ sends us out to preach his mercy to the suffering and sinful world. The task can seem daunting turning to an empty world of sin and a culture of death, we might lose hope.

Often it seems that so many men and women have received the Cross of Good Friday, yet never heard the good news of Easter Sunday. Ours is a world of a cross without Christ, without the Resurrection– turned in on itself in individualism, anger, guilt and sin.

St. John tells us this world must be conquered, and it can only be through the truth of Jesus Christ who reveals the mercy of God his Father. In his teachings, John Paul II once said that truly, the key to understanding reality is that Original Sin seeks to destroy Fatherhood. Today, we see a profound emptiness in our culture, an absence of God the Father, and an equally despairing absence of fatherhood in the human family. We might rather quickly come to the conclusion that this means a lack of order, justice and appropriate examples for young men. But, an even worse result of this absence is the lack of Mercy. Without justice, there can be no mercy no forgiveness of sin.

In a letter to a young seminarian, St. Therese of Lisieux once wrote about a father with two sons, both equally mischievous and disobedient. When the Father discovers their bad behavior in his justice, in his love, he comes to punish them. One brother trembles, and runs away from his father in fright, knowing in the bottom of his heart that he deserves to be punished… the other brother, however, throws himself into his father’s arms, and through his tears says that he is sorry, that he loves him / and that he will never do it again. He asks his father to punish him with a kiss. St. Therese writes that the father, even though he knows that the boy will fall back into these same faults, is forever ready to forgive him, provided that the boy always clutches him by the heart.
We are all daily confronted with our sins and struggles… of hatred (even self-hatred), along with daily failures, illnesses, fears, and suffering at the hands of others, and so many temptations—without the Risen Christ, without a merciful Father, we are left overwhelmed, emptied out, and defenseless… we cower in the corner, awaiting only judgment and condemnation. We are too afraid to ask for mercy for ourselves, and even less likely to give it to those who ask mercy of us.

As disciples of Christ, and especially as Dominicans, we must take the empty tabernacle of the suffering world… and turn it into the empty tomb of the Resurrected Christ. In a world interested only in the ideology of progress and comfort, Christians are forced to do battle. The world fights this battle with guns, bombs, stimulus packages, pills, therapy, condoms and master’s degrees. But for Christians our only shield is God’s mercy, our only weapon is Christ’s truth. Who indeed is the victor, John asks, but the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God?

When we stand dumbfounded today before the Risen Christ… when we drop to our knees like Thomas, before the wounds that poured out water and blood, mercy and truth, will we restore the truth of God’s mercy to the empty tabernacles of the hearts of men and women? Will we receive the Spirit who testifies, and on fire with that Spirit, will we preach forgiveness, truth and mercy to a world that cries so bitterly, so angrily, before an empty throne? This throne, for so many poor souls, should be a Mercy Seat… but to them it seems to be only a Judgment Seat. Many who suffer from their own sins are not in need of judgment they, like the other son who ran away from his father, know in the bottom of their hearts the truth about their sinful actions and choicesinstead, they are looking for someone to tell them that truly they can be forgiven, that their father wants to punish them with a kiss.

Take courage, brothers and sisters, do not be afraid, we are children of a merciful Father. The empty world has already been conquered and is even now being filled with the mercy of God.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Jesus Christ, preaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.