25 May 2025 – 6th Sunday of Easter, Year C
25 May 2025 – 6th Sunday of Easter, Year C
1st Reading: Acts 15:1-2, 22-29
At this Council, the leaders made decisions with the consent of the congregation
Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to discuss this?
Then the apostles and the elders, with the consent of the whole church, decided to choose men from among their members and to send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They sent Judas called Barsabbas, and Silas, leaders among the brothers, with the following letter: “The brothers, both the apostles and the elders, to the believers of Gentile origin in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greetings.
Since we have heard that certain persons who have gone out from us, though with no instructions from us, have said things to disturb you and have unsettled your minds, we have decided unanimously to choose representatives and send them to you, along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.”
Responsorial: Psalm 66: 2-3, 5-6, 8
R./: O God, let all the nations praise you!
O God, be gracious and bless us
and let your face shed its light upon us.
So will your ways be known upon earth
and all nations learn your saving help. (R./)
Let the nations be glad and exult
for you rule the world with justice.
With fairness you rule the peoples,
you guide the nations on earth. (R./)
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you.
May God still give us his blessing
till the ends of the earth revere him. (R./)
2nd Reading: Revelation 21:10-14, 22-23
In his exile on Patmos, John paints a dazzling picture of the new Jerusalem
And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal. It has a great, high wall with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites; on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city has twelve foundations, and on them are the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. The angel who talked to me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width; and he measured the city with his rod, fifteen hundred miles; its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall, one hundred forty-four cubits by human measurement, which the angel was using. The wall is built of jasper, while the city is pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every jewel; the first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. And the twelve gates are twelve pearls, each of the gates is a single pearl, and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
Gospel: John 14:23-29
Our Lord’s words at the Last Supper, in view of his imminent departure
Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me. “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.’ If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe.
A goodbye
French vocabulary is sometimes more precise than English. “Goodbye” is a case in point. The French use Au revoir for those everyday temporary separations, while Adieu is reserved strictly for final departures; it means roughly “until we meet in heaven.” Life is a succession of Au revoirs and Adieus . The number of the latter grows with the passing years. Our hearts and memories are peopled with faces that once were dear to us. Some, like our parents, died. Others moved away out of our lives never to reappear again. If their names crop up in conversation we say, “I wonder what became of so-and-so.” They may say the same about us too. Life is a series of little deaths until our own death which for us will be the last great Adieu .
We are, as never before, a pilgrim people, on the move. We need faithful friends who travel with us. In today’s gospel, Jesus alerts his disciples to his imminent departure, his ascension into heaven. He doesn’t say Adieu but Au revoir . “I am going away, but I shall return.” We never really say goodbye to God, for God always goes with us.
Notice how immigrants who leave their families, friends, language and cultures and settle, often penniless and in a hostile environment, on the other side of the globe, begin by building houses of worship. Such was the case with the Irish in America or Australia. Such is the case today with immigrant Muslims building mosques all over Europe. God is what they cling on to.
God keeps his promise to be with us always. He will always keep his side of the bargain. It is up to us to keep ours. And when we come to the end of our pilgrimage here and have to make our last goodbye, it will be literally Adieu, “going to God.”
Listening and responding
Obedientia, the Latin for obeying, literally means to listen hard, to hold one’s ear to something. The first rule of the road that we all learned was “Stop! Look! Listen!” Before you cross the railway tracks, stop and listen. There may be a train coming.
“I am leaving you with a gift — peace of mind and heart.” What a beautiful promise, what a special gift. Peace is not the absence of war. It is the presence of something real and tangible. It is something I can experience, and it results from having my relationships the way they ought to be. I will deal in greater detail with this later.
We are all familiar with invitation cards that have RSVP on them. The person is looking for a response from us. Every word that Jesus speaks is calling for a response. A rule of thumb is to learn to listen, and then listen to learn.
My response must be practical; it must entail doing something. Believing something up in my head is nothing more than mental assent. Knowing that Jesus is God is not faith. Satan knows that. Faith is not up in the head; it is in the heart, and it eventually makes its way down into my feet. It is only then that I will be prepared to step out, and act on the direction given me by Jesus. The message of the gospel is simple, definite, and direct. There is not one “maybe” or one “might” in all the promises of Jesus.
The power of relationship
John’s Gospel has a higher theology than the three synoptic gospels. But the remarkable fact is not its strong theological slant but how early in the Church’s history such a Trinitarian perspective emerged. By the time of St. John the idea of God linked the Father, Jesus and the Paraclete, the guarantor of the peace that Jesus has given.
Already we have hints that God is a community of relationships, that there is so much knowledge and love in God that the knowledge and love transform into distinct personages. This truth is revealed to enlighten our minds, not to provide theologians with raw material for speculations (nothing wrong with that), to dazzle us with the brightness of God’s glory, the power of God’s knowledge and the passion of God’s love. The use of the word “spirit,” a translation of the Hebrew Shekinah hints at a maternal aspect in God as the word is feminine and was used in Hebrew folk religion as the name of Yahweh’s consort. St. John hardly thought of this, yet the gender of the noun might well be part of the meaning.
Key Message:
Peace of Jesus is stronger than any challenge. Hold fast to it.
Homily:
One of the surprises from our Lord Jesus today is His gift of peace to us when He was just hours away from His suffering and death. When He was undergoing a major suffering, He was filled with peace and promised us peace from His very own lips. This is the kind of peace that our Jesus offers.
The world’s peace is weak. It breaks when our plans fail, when we lose someone we love, when health declines, or when anxieties grow.
But the peace of Christ? It is not the absence of trouble. It is the presence of Christ in the midst of trouble.
Testimony: Once I was facing many challenges. I was very sick, not having enough money to get treatment. I was the only earning member of my family. The whole world seemed pitch dark to me. I did not know anything I could do. But I was having an inner peace, that God my Father is looking at me. So I never felt I had no one.”
This same peace made our Lord Jesus to carry His cross and go ahead with victory.
The peace our Jesus gives is rooted not in comfort, but in communion with Him.
So whatever happens, think that our Lord Jesus is with you always. Repeatedly think – “My Jesus is with me”.
Can we enjoy peace when we are happy?
Testimony: “While I was doing my morning walk, I was praising my Jesus with my whole heart and enjoying the cool walk. I was very happy. Suddenly I remembered that God our Father walked with Adam and Eve, chatting happily with them. I immediately realized that my Jesus is also walking and chatting with me now.”
So His peace makes us experience His presence in our joys too.
Our Father is Almighty. Our Brother is king. But how do we live? Why are we starving when we are blessed abundantly?
It is because though we are showered with every blessing, we do not know how to receive them.
Few pointers to enjoy the gift from the lips of our Lord Jesus: The gift of peace
1. Daily prayer: Daily morning seek the face of our Jesus. Spend time with Him, till you feel filled with His peace.
2. Meditate on a promise: “Great have peace, have those who love your law; nothing can make them stumble”. Psalm 119:115. The Bible verse will encourage you. Will be your correct guiding light,
3. Let go, and let God take the lead: Peace comes when we stop trying to control everything and trust Jesus with the outcome. Say, “Lord, I don’t understand, but I trust You.”
4. Receive the Sacraments of Eucharist and Reconciliation: They will give you peace since they are encounters with Christ Himself. In the Eucharist, He feeds your soul with His very Body and Blood—peace in its purest form. In confession, He removes the burdens that rob you of peace.
5. Give and Forgive: “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Unforgivness is a heavy burden. You don’t need to forget, but you do need to release. Let mercy and charity be your peace.
Close your eyes for a moment.
Picture Jesus standing before you, His eyes full of love.
Hear Him say to you personally, “Peace I leave with you… My peace I give to you… Do not let your heart be troubled or afraid.”
Let these words settle in your soul.
Take them with you this week.
And when the storm rises, whisper to them again:
“Jesus, your peace is mine. I trust in you.”
The First Synod
In today’s Gospel Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth. How does the Spirit lead us? One way is an interior illumination, an inner witness: ‘The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (Rom 8:16). But another way, which the first reading reminds us of, is by the illumination and witness provided when we speak with one another and learn from one another. In the history of the Church the high points of such shared witnessing are the twenty ecumenical councils, beginning with Nicaea, the council summoned by the emperor Constantine in 325, 1700 years ago, and ending with the Second Vatican Council, which concluded 60 years ago. Both of these Councils radically transformed the face of the Church.
To say that Constantine was an impressive figure would be a huge understatement. Recently I contemplated the reconstructed colossu (colossal statue) of Constantine in the gardens of the Capitoline Museum in Rome. His extraordinary face and eyes are those to a man entrusted with a visionary mission to save the Empire and to save the Church. He had lived amid civil war for a long time and has just defeated his last enemy Licinius the year before. Finding the clergy engaged in bitter dispute about the divinity of Christ he recognized a threat to the peace and unity of his empire and intervened decisively to put a stop to it. The Council thus had geopolitical as well as theological importance. Its creed defined the divinity of Christ as fully equal to the divinity of God the Father, who is the sole source of the Son’s divinity. The Son is not brought into being by an act of the Father’s will, which would make him a creature, but is born from the very being of the Father, and so intimately connected with the Father that he can be called one in being with Him. The Council also affirmed that this same divine Son of God became flesh (Joh 1:14) and became human. In the second ecumenical council of 381, the faith of the people of God had sufficiently matured to produce an equally decisive account of the Holy Spirit, “who proceeds from the Father, and who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.”
John XXIII, who summoned the Second Vatican Council, used a revolutionary buzzword to express what he wanted: aggiornamento, or updating. Many conservatives at the time saw no need whatsoever of updating and even imagined it to be incompatible with the majestic identity of Holy Church. The image of John XXIII flinging open the windows of the Vatican and letting the Holy Spirit in became the way his role was celebrated. The pope prayed for A New Pentecost, and the Belgian Cardinal Suenens wrote a book with that title in 1974, prefaced by Paul VI (the pope who finished what John XXIII had begun) in which he rejoiced in “the marvelous effusion of charisms of the Holy Spirit in the world today.” (The pope was speaking during the full tide of the Charismatic Movement, which washed over the Church just at this time, with Cardinal Suenens as its foremost supporter in the hierarchy; 50 years ago, though it feels like yesterday to me.) This reminds us that it is not only at ecumenical councils that we fling the windows open to the Spirit, but wherever Christians gather in prayer. Pope Francis revived some of the joy generated by Vatican II, but also urged the fuller use of synods at every level in the Church. Synod and synodality are rather unprepossessing expressions. Another buzzword of Vatican II, namely “dialogue,” should have been used more, in place of the unwieldy “synodality.” The first reading today describes the first major assembly of the newborn church (apart from Pentecost itself), namely the Council of Jerusalem, which managed to resolve the quite bitter tensions between on the one hand those like St Paul who wanted to fling the Church open to Gentiles, not imposing on them the Jewish Torah which all Christians up to that time had carefully followed, since they were all Jews by birth and formation, and on the other hand the conservatives, who did not want to change their world by letting undisciplined Gentiles run rife among them.
The account of the synod of Jerusalem is full of instruction for all future generations of Christians as they seek to update and develop their teachings, boldly yet prudently, as the Spirit prompts. The synod arises against a background of complaints and disagreements, leading beforehand to “no little contention and discussion” and to “great contention” in the synod debate itself ; the question is submitted to the apostolic authorities; some bear witness to the joy and the spiritual gifts they experienced when they opened the doors to the uncircumcised, Gentiles ignorant of the Torah. Taking everything into account and not blocking anyone from letting their opinion being heard, the assembly produces what is no doubt the first collective document of Christianity (later documents include the Nicene Creed, the Nicaeo-Constantinopolitan Creed, the definition of Chalcedon in 451, and all the other conciliar statements down to Vatican II). It is interesting to see that quarreling church leaders are found worthy of being described in Sacred Scripture (in the work that is the second half of Luke-Acts, sharing the limelight with a Gospel). All the quarrels before and after the Council of Nicaea, which are often mocked by secular historians, might equally deserve our reverence, since the Spirit was at work in them, leading us by a bumpy road “into all truth.”
Just as Vatican II discerned a ray of the divine truth in other religions and saw the Spirit moving in all hearts, so Peter rejoices in having seen the Spirit falling upon the Gentiles and purifying their hearts by faith. In this milieu of open discussion, Peter is remarkably frank, saying that “neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear the yoke” of the Law (of course his speech may be a later Lukan composition). We should imitate the boldness and honesty of the apostles, their parrhesia, and the respectful silence with which they listen to the reports from Peter, Paul (still called Saul), and Barnabas about the wonderful things God has done among the Gentiles. Neither constricted taboos nor animated noise have a place in the genuine synodal process.
Excellent, Joe@2, thank you. How I wish we had homilies of this calibre in my/our parish(es).