Obedience born of love

Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter
18 April 2010
St. Lawrence Catholic Center

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We are hearing this weekend on the 3rd Sunday of Easter from the very end of John's Gospel. John's Gospel doesn't have a long Pentecost narrative. No fires of tongue or great wind. No dramatic birth of the Church. No great commission - go out into the whole world, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them everything I commanded you, knowing that I am with you until the end of the world. No, the great commissioning in John's Gospel is a breakfast meeting after Jesus is raised from the dead. It ends up with a private instruction to Peter, wherein he is asked to confess His love, and then to follow Jesus wherever He may lead.

Peter receives at the end of John's Gospel the same invitation he heard when he first met Jesus. Follow me. Two words. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is discipleship - to be a follower of Jesus. It is a discipleship born of love. It is obedience born of love. We follow Jesus because we love Him. Christianity in the end is not a philosophy, a morality, an ideology or a culture. It is anot a recipe or instruction manual. It is a decision to follow a person, Jesus, and to follow Him together as His bride, the Church. It is a decision to love a person Jesus, so much so that even when our discipleship costs us more than we could ever imagine it would, still the sacrifice is easy for us, so rich is our love. So deep is our friendship and our communion of love with Christ, that discipleship even when it looks hard on the suface, is easy for us.

In John's Gospel, there is no great distinction between discipleship and apostleship. They appear on the surface to be distinct. A disciple follows. An apostle is sent. A disciple is obedient, going only where the teacher goes, saying only what the teacher says. An apostle is sent out as a representative, going to new places where the teacher has not been and meeting people the teacher has not met. Yet in John's Gospel, the apostles, those who would go out into the whole world and tell the good news of Jesus' Resurrection, receive the same commissioning through Peter that they received when they first became disciples. Follow me.

The way John handles the end of his Gospel will be important for us to remember as we transition in this Easter season toward Christ's Ascension and Pentecost. It is important to keep in mind as we read through the amazing Acts of the Apostles, like we did in today's first reading. The apostles, buoyed by their experience of the Risen Christ, and inflamed by the Holy Spirit, will begin to go out to the end of the world to proclaim the Good News of redemption in Christ Jesus, and their successors will eventually gather greater crowds than Jesus Himself ever gathered. The apostles will fulfill Jesus' prediction that they will do greater things than He Himself did. But in all of this, we must never forget that the Jesus who sends them also goes before them. Even in going out to new places after His Ascension, they are still fulfilling Jesus' command to follow Him, and they are being led by Him to places where alone they would never choose to go. What we see in the apostles is a radical obedience to Christ, doing only what He tells them to do, nothing more and nothing less. It is an obedience born of personal love for Jesus. Being an apostles is an imitation of Christ who came not to do His own will, but only what He saw the Father doing. Jesus said to his disciples only what He heard His Father saying. In the same way, in going out to the end of the world, the apostles say only what they hear from Jesus. They do only what they see Jesus doing within them. In love they are one with the Lord, just as in love Jesus Himself is one with His Father and the Holy Spirit.

There is a certain collapsing in John's Gospel between discipleship and apostleship. On the outside, they seem distinct. There was a time when the disciples listened to and observed Jesus. There was a time after His Resurrection when they began to build the kingdom themselves. But on the inside, there is never such a distinction. They are always being obedient to Christ. The great commission to be an apostle is in the end a challenge to be the best disciple one can be.

Today we hear of career fisherman taking fishing instructions from a carpenter. At least by way of career training, Peter and his fellow apostles would have more expertise in fishing than Jesus. Yet both before and after Jesus' Resurrection, Jesus the amateur tells the pros where to cast the nets. And bingo - they catch a lot! We see in today's Gospel, that in taking up our mission to make the redeeming love of Christ more present in the world, and to make His light shine through the darkness of sin and death, so that man might have life and have it in greater abundance, the most important thing for us is to be the best disciple we can be. It is not up to us eventually to tell Jesus what we are good at, or how we can help Him the most with His mission. Jesus called fisherman and tax collectors, guys who were the least qualified, to establish a Church that would last until the end of time. It is Christ who will provide the fruitfulness of our lives. Do we believe this? Do we trust this? Do we know this because of our love for Christ? The question for us is whether we trust Him enough to dare to go where we would not go. The question if whether we love Him enough to allow Him to call us to a vocation that we would not choose for ourselves. Or if we are in a vocation, to be more faithful to that vocation than we ever thought we would be. Or better said, the question is whether we will allow Him to love us enough to call us to feed his sheep.

As vocation director for the Archdiocese, I know how complicated vocational discernment can be. For most guys, for example, it takes years, if not decades, to overcome their fears of being called to be priests. Yet today's Gospel helps us to boil it down to what is essential. Do we love Jesus enough, when He asks us personally if we love Him, to follow Him? If we can be a disciple, it is easy to be an apostle.