From the desk of the pastor — Homily on the Fifth Sunday of Easter
by Fr. David Ruchinski
You might not have noticed it, but we’ve been pretty busy around St. A’s these past few weeks.
In between all the live-streamed liturgies, meetings and talks…
While continuing to provide sacramental and pastoral care to the engaged, the penitent, the sick and the suffering…
Around our working on the endless forms, budgets, paperwork, and loan applications…
Before, after, and sometimes during the letter writing, email blasting and video posting designed to keep everybody informed and in touch about current and future plans for our parish…
we have have slowly and steadily been building our house.
The other day — while we were working on the new adoration chapel in Hurley Hall — one of our parishioners said to me, “Did you think when you were studying in Rome that this was the kind of thing you were going to end up doing as a priest?”
“I could only have dared to hope,” was my reply.
And I meant it too. No snark. No kidding. This was the best thing I could have hoped for — to be the father of a giant household and to be able to spend at least some of my time doing fix up projects around our house. I feel like such a dad.
Today’s gospel features one of my favorite verses ever — in fact, it comes from my very favorite part of the whole New Testament, the so-called “Last Supper Discourse” of Jesus.
Jesus says to his disciples:
“Do not let your hearts be troubled.
You have faith in God; have faith also in me.
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.
If there were not,
would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?
And if I go and prepare a place for you,
I will come back again and take you to myself,
so that where I am you also may be.”
What could be more tender, more consoling than the knowledge that God, our Father, has made a special place for us in His own house? That the Father’s house is our house and that we will always belong there?
Of course we know that God does not literally live in a house, so what does this passage mean? Where is this “house” where Jesus tells us He is going to prepare a place for us and will come back to take us to?
Jesus Himself gives us a clue to this mystery when He says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” But He is most explicit when He adds to that: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”
The dwelling place, the “house” of the Father as it were, is none other than the inner life of the Trinity itself. The Father’s house is that place of love of the Father for the only-begotten Son, the Son for the Father, and the Spirit who is the substantial and mutual love of the Father and the Son.
The “home” into which we are invited — to which Jesus Himself is the one true way — is, in the end, a loving family. When we reflect honestly and deeply on the nature of our own humanity, created in the image and likeness of God, should this reality surprise us at all?
Years ago — almost 13 years ago, now that I stop to think about it — I gave one of the first funeral homilies of my priestly life on this special and consoling text from John’s gospel. It was the funeral for my own grandmother, who had died right as I was about to return to Rome for my final year of theology studies. And in that homily I recalled all the little things that my grandmother had always done to make her house “homey:” the little nicknacks from vacations she and grandpa had taken with friends, the pieces of her great grandchildren’s artwork, the doilies on the tables and afghans on the couches, the always filled dishes of candies and snacks.
But all of these external things pointed to a deeper internal reality that what made grandma’s house a home was the love that dwelt there. Love, they say, is what makes a house a home. And when we stop to consider the nature of the Divinity in whose image we are created, should this surprise us?
God is love. And love is what makes this house our home.
May love ever abide in this house. Amen
