Sixth Sunday of Easter;( 25th May, 2025)

 The truth of Jesus is understood not by observing or studying it from the outside, with an objective and impersonal gaze, but by allowing ourselves to be involved in its event and in its experience. Happy Sunday!

 DOCTRINE AND FAITH 

 (Acts 15:1-2.22-29; Ps 66 (67); Rev 21:10-14.22-23; Jn 14:23-29: Sixth Sunday of Easter; 25th May, 2025)

In these Sundays of Easter Time, we are brought back, by the Gospel of John, to the events that immediately precede the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. The liturgy seems to want to lead us not only into the Cenacle, but into our own life, to the heart of our fears, hconfusion, and disbelief. If it is true that we believe in the risen Jesus, however, we so often experience his absence and the anguish that this distance causes in our lives. This is the atmosphere of the fourteenth chapter of which we read some verses today. Two traits characterize the spiritual climate of the discourses of the Supper; It is worth dwelling briefly on them.

 

The first feature is that these discourses are set in the context of a Supper, which becomes the symbol of a profound communion between Jesus and his disciples. The environment is intimate, interpersonal. We are thus reminded of a crucial dynamic of the Christian experience: the truth of Jesus is understood not by observing or studying it from the outside, with an objective and impersonal gaze, but by allowing ourselves to be involved in its event and in its experience. We know the truth if we are willing to let our life be introduced into a path, into a journey that leads us to know the mystery from within. It lets us know the truth, in the original sense of being able to savour it, enjoy it.

The second feature is the overall climate of these texts. It is marked by what John calls the disturbance of the disciples. The chapter opens with a strong invitation from Jesus: "Do not let your hearts be troubled" (v. 1). Towards the end, in the passage we hear this Sunday, Jesus forcefully repeats: "Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid" (v. 27). Several reasons contribute to creating disturbance and fear; in fact, the disturbances and fears that threaten our human experience and our faith are reflected in them. What we are most interested in observing is how Jesus reacts to the disturbance, the way in which he invites the disciples to overcome it. First of all, there is an appeal to faith: "Have faith in God, have faith also in me" (v. 1). These words resonate at the opening of the chapter.

Then, in our verses, the call to faith is followed by the invitation to remain in love. Faith and love are the foundations of the Easter experience. In an intertwining that is never divisible: faith leads to love and love nourishes faith. In John 14, many promises of Jesus resound concerning the future of the disciples: the possibility of carrying out the works of Jesus and indeed of carrying out greater ones; the gift of praying in the name of Jesus, certain of being heard and answered; the promise of the Spirit as another Paraclete who will remain with us forever; the promise of being able to welcome and remain permanently in the love of Jesus by virtue of his word that protects us if we in turn know how to protect it. The culminating promise, however, is the one we hear this Sunday: "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him" (v. 23). Here we really hear something surprising: the chapter opens with Jesus' promise to go and prepare a dwelling for us with his Father, but then the discourse ends by reversing the image: it will be he who makes our life a dwelling capable of hosting God's visit. "We will come to him and make our home with him." We are the ones who become God's place! Jesus prepares a place for us by making us the place, the dwelling of Trinitarian love, the temple of his glory.

 Describing the future Jerusalem, the Book of Revelation tells us that "it has no need of the sun or of the moon, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb" (Rev 21:23). We must await this future fulfillment, but savouring the way in which it is already beginning to be fulfilled in us. Our personal existence, that of our communities, is already the dwelling place of God, in which that light can dwell that offers us the possibility of seeing and judging the things of all time in a new way. We understand then how vain, foolish and senseless it is to base our faith and our salvation on external signs, such as the circumcision that the Acts tell us about (cf. Acts 15:1), or other signs that we continue to invent in our times, or on human works, such as the works of the Law. Jesus' Easter gives us much more, an incomparably more beautiful and fascinating good: to remain in his love and to allow his love to remain in us, until we become the dwelling place of God.

 

The liturgy of this Sunday does not make us read this chapter to the end. Therefore, we do not listen to the last word of Jesus: "Rise, let us go from here" (v. 31). A paradoxical word, because in fact no one gets up and Jesus continues his speech. What meaning does this invitation have then? Perhaps we can interpret it as an exhortation to get up (a verb of resurrection!) to emerge from our fears and disturbances, from our anguish and resentment... We can and must get up: while remaining in the world, we dwell elsewhere, in that love of Jesus that manifests itself mysteriously in the secret of our life.

 + John I Okoye 

5th Sunday of ordinary time, 9th February, 2025

 The encounter with Jesus is always personal and requires us to leave the anonymity of the crowd to meet him face to face. Happy Sunday!

Doctrine and Faith

(Is 6:1-2a.3-8; Ps 137 (138); 1Cor 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11; 5th Sunday of ordinary time, 9th February, 2025)

In Nazareth, the rejection of men is unable to stop the journey of the word of God which in Jesus continues to be fulfilled elsewhere. Luke's story, which we listen to today, describes to us the effective fulfillment of this word in the life of Peter and the other disciples, who, unlike the Nazarenes, welcome the word of Jesus and give it credit. In fact, they have the poor heart of those who recognize themselves not only with empty nets, but even as sinners, as Simon Peter does. Or as Isaiah does, who-encountering the holiness of God-cannot help but confess his own impurity: «Alas! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips" (Is 6:5). On the contrary, the Nazarenes, we remember, had revealed the hardness of a rich heart because it was full of demands towards Jesus. And those who demand do not know how to trust.

The text that Luke offers us this Sunday is not just a story of vocation; it is the dramatization of what happens when the word of God releases its transforming power in the lives of those who know how to welcome it with faith. We can in fact divide the passage into three small scenes, connected by a common thread whose protagonist is the word of God which becomes flesh in Jesus. In the first scene, Jesus announces the word of God and the crowds listen to it. People crowd around his word, because they understand that it is not like other words, but is capable of giving authentic meaning to life, redeeming it from any illusion or emptiness.

In the second painting the evangelist takes us deeper. From the anonymous and impersonal face of this crowd some faces and some names emerge. The encounter with Jesus is always personal and requires us to leave the anonymity of the crowd to meet him face to face, letting him call us by our name so that we in turn can call him by his name. In particular, for Peter this personal encounter takes place through a different relationship with the word of God. Until now he has listened to it, like the others, confused in the crowd; now this word demands from him a personal and responsible decision, which only him, in his freedom and in the first person, can and must make: "At your word I will cast the nets". Jesus had used a plural: "cast your nets"; Peter responds in the first person "I will cast the nets" (see Luke 5:4-5). Now for Peter it is no longer a question of listening to the word of Jesus like the crowds do; now this word involves him personally and asks him to become the ultimate criterion of his discernment, his judgement, his action. Peter decides to trust Jesus' word and in this way he will be able to see its effectiveness: the nets, previously empty, are filled with an immense quantity of fish. Our relationship with the Lord becomes personalised, and we emerge from the anonymity of the crowd to meet him face to face, every time his word becomes for us a criterion of judgment and action, the foundation of our life; in addition to listening to it, we decide on it, even when it appears useless, ineffective, contradicted by our experience. However, Peter's story does not end at this point, there is a third scene, very short, in which the words of Jesus still resonate, which take on a new and further aspect. From a criterion of judgment and action, it becomes a powerful word that transforms Peter's life, calls him to conversion, promises him a different future, for which it offers itself as the only guarantee: "from now on you will be a fisher of men" (v. 10). After having noted the effectiveness of Jesus' word in the sign of fishing, Peter will have to find it in his own life. Just as that word transformed empty nets into full nets, so it will transform Peter's life: from a fisherman he will become a fisherman of men.

What Peter experiences is an Easter passage. It is being born into a new life; it is the passage from night to day, from empty nets to full nets, from being a simple fisherman to becoming a fisherman of men. Luke also uses the Greek term zōgreus, which means "he who captures the living", and perhaps we can understand: "he who captures men to return them to life". In the Bible the sea is a symbol of death and of every other evil that threatens the life of man. Peter's mission will be to tear men away from this sea which evokes all that is darkness, anguish, negativity - to return them to that fullness of life and joy that only the encounter with the Lord can bring about in the existence of every person. Announcing to the Corinthians the resurrection of Jesus and his revelation to the disciples, Paul goes so far as to exclaim: "By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me was not in vain" (1Cor 15:10). Meeting the Risen One, living the experience of Easter means precisely this: allowing his new life to transform our existence. The grace of Easter always fills our empty networks. We have the responsibility to welcome this gift and make it mature as disciples of Christ. The Christian life, as a vocation, is much more than the simple response to a word that calls us. It is welcoming and making effective in us the ever new grace of Easter. 

+ John I Okoye