Ordinary of the Mass
Latin Mass Text-3rd Sunday
English Mass Text-3rd Sunday
“Amen, amen I say to you, that you shall
lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice:
and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
Our Lord spoke these words to His
Apostles just a few hours before His passion and death on the Cross. There
are at least three ways to interpret them.
Most obviously the Apostles would
lament the events of the next day or two as Jesus was given over by the
chief priests of the Jews to the Gentiles to be cruelly scourged and put to
death as a common criminal on the Cross. Certainly, His enemies among the
Sanhedrin rejoiced while His Apostles lamented. But then, Easter Sunday
morning, their sorrow would be turned to joy with the knowledge that Jesus
had risen from the dead. Their joy would continue for over a month as Jesus
went about in Jerusalem and around the Sea of Galilee, being seen by
hundreds of “the brethren.”
But then, on Ascension Thursday, our
Lord was taken up from them to the heavens. While this was probably nowhere
as traumatic as the crucifixion, it did leave the Apostles again alone,
without Jesus, who had always seemed to be in control of every situation
they encountered. The Acts of the Apostles tell us two significant
things. The Apostles returned to the “Upper Room,” the site of the Last
Supper, and there they “persever[ed] with one mind in prayer with the women,
and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.”
The Apostles prayed what today we would call a “novena” in the actual
presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We should all learn that prayer to God
through His Blessed Mother is the most perfectly effective means of turning
lamentation into joy.
It is also significant that during
this novena they selected someone to replace Judas, who had betrayed our
Lord and then took his own life. With the selection of Matthias, the number
of the Twelve would once again be complete. Anyone who has ever attended
the Consecration of a Bishop can tell you that seeing the Church thereby
strengthened brings a great feeling of confidence in divine providence. The
infant Church must have felt much the same.
Their lamentation was turned into
joy on Pentecost Sunday, sometime before 9:00 AM as they received the Holy
Ghost, and were able to speak to the crowds and be understood by each person
in his own language, and “They therefore that received his word, were
baptized; and there were added in that day about three thousand souls.”
“Amen, amen I say to you, that you shall
lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice:
and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
There is a third way in which these
words of our Lord can be understood. And that is in the daily living of
every Christian life. And this is addressed to each one of us, equally as
it was addressed to the Apostles. Today we heard Saint Peter’s words that
the “Gentiles”—those who are not of the Faith—would “speak against
you as evil doers....”
We see Saint Peter’s words fulfilled so often in modern society. Those who
are in charge speak of Christianity as though It were responsible for the
evils of the modern world. The Gentiles of today would have us believe that
most wars are the fault of Christians; that the unwanted children of the
world exist because of the Church’s “defective” moral teaching; that women
are kept in “subjugation” by the Church and denied the “health care” they
need; that it is the Church that inspires bigotry against those who elect
to live an “alternative life-style”; that Christianity is wasteful and
destructive of the planet; they even blame us for the weather.
Saint Peter does suggest a way to
turn this lamentation into joy: that these Gentiles may, “by the good
works which they shall behold in you, glorify God in the day of
visitation.” Apart from prayer, the most powerful means of converting the
unbelieving is to show them good example. Very often, having the truth is
not enough to convince—even speaking the truth with great eloquence is often
not enough to convince those who have been raised in their errors, and who
have lived in their errors, and who have enjoyed the temptations of their
evil. Often the unbelieving can be reached only by seeing what they have
always believed to be impossible, the living of a holy life—and particularly
the living of a holy life by someone with a smile on his face.
Some of you have heard me quote
Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard in the past. Cardinal Suhard was the Archbishop of
Paris during World War II, and he could include Adolf Hitler and the Nazis
among the “Gentiles” who spoke evil of his Church. He took Saint Peter’s
advice and expressed it in a way that I have always found to be positively
elegant:
To be a witness does not consist in engaging in
propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living
mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not
make sense if God did not exist.
There is a sort of inescapable logic
in this. Our earthly sorrow can be turned into true and permanent joy only
in heaven. So it makes sense that, at every opportunity, we do the will of
God in this life. It makes no sense for us to adopt the ways of the
unbelieving, for that can only threaten and detract from our permanent joy.
Only by living this life that “would not make sense if God did not exist”
can we be assured of eternal joy—only by living this life that “would not
make sense if God did not exist” can we be assured of “glorify[ing] God in
the day of visitation.” It certainly makes sense that the best way to win
over the unbelieving is to glorify God by doing His will, presenting them
with the irrefutable argument that such a thing is not only possible, but
leads to eternal joy, and to a good deal of joy in this life.
In the liturgical sense, the risen
Christ is with us throughout the Easter Season. In a little over two weeks
we will celebrate His Ascension into Heaven, a commemoration of that time
before Pentecost when the Apostles waited “in prayer with the women, and
Mary the mother of Jesus.” Remember that such prayer changes lamentation
into joy—particularly for those who are a “living mystery,” those who live
the “life that would not make sense if God did not exist.”
