Our People

Homily for Sixth Sunday of Easter 2008

Our Lady Star of the Sea Church, Watson's Bay

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
27/4/2008

In 1998 Pope John Paul II published Dies Domini, his Apostolic Letter on Keeping Sunday Holy. Amongst some wonderful instruction on the origin of the idea of The Day of the Lord in Old Testament Judaism, of The Day of Christ in Easter Christianity, of The Day of the Church in evolving Cath tradition, the Pope recalled Catholics to their duty to attend Mass every Sunday. He pointed to the idea of a Sunday obligation in the earliest Christian texts. In the New Testament, of course, we learn that the first Christians gathered faithfully each Sunday for ‘the Prayers and the Breaking of the Bread’ In the Third Century Didascalia the faithful were exhorted to “Leave everything on the Lord’s Day and run diligently to your church because it is your praise of God. What excuse could you make to God for not coming together on the Lord’s Day to hear the word of life and feed on the divine nourishment which lasts forever?”

Pope John Paul admitted that this obligation has often been imperfectly fulfilled by Christians. But priests and faithful have often fulfilled it, despite great hardship: the Church counts amongst her saints many who died for attending the Sunday Eucharist. During the persecution of Diocletian, for instance, when the Mass was forbidden under pain of death, 49 Christians of Abitina, in Proconsular Africa, replied to their accusers: “Without fear of any kind we have celebrated Lord’s Supper, because it cannot be missed; that is our law… We cannot live without the Lord’s things!” Of course, this was not peculiar to ancient Africa or to recusant England or Ireland; even today in various parts of the world Christian gatherings can be dangerous. And from those places our brothers and sisters say to us who are bound to attend Mass each Sunday unless there is a serious impediment: what keeps you from practicing that for which we have risked our very lives?

I remember when Pope John Paul’s letter came out, that I heard a priest say: “I’d rather only a few people attended Mass from time to time out of love, than that many attended every Sunday out of duty.” I guess what that priest had in mind was that he wanted people to come to Mass out of love for Our Lord rather than fear of hell, out of affection for the Church rather than terror of ecclesiastical sanction, out of genuine joy in the Word of God and sacraments rather than grinning and bearing it. An empty-hearted duty can mean there has been death in the relationship, that faith has dried up, that hope is fading, than proper sentiment was never there or has long gone. And it can be terribly hard to sustain fulfilling one’s obligations if there is not at least from time to time a sense of that passion which draws us to obey this law rather than that, to follow this Lord rather than that, to commit my being to this person rather than that or indeed to anyone at all.

Yet is it such a bad thing to do one’s duty, to keep the commandments of God, the Church, the just state? When soldiers marched on Lone Pine at Gallipoli or Hellfire Pass in Thailand or Villers-Bretonneux in Northern France; when an exhausted young mother gets up for the hundredth night in a row for a screaming child; when a spouse visits their beloved with dementia who does not respond; when we forgive our friends or leaders or employees or family members when they let us down; when we care for each other and receive no gratitude in return; when we pray and have no consolation in our prayer… is this out of romance, is it with a warm marshmallowy sentimentality in our hearts, or is it often more a case of teeth-gritting duty? And, if so, is such hard loving, less truly loving?

When people say that we don’t need organized religion with all its rules or marriage with all its vows and expectations or the state with all its laws, that all we need is love, do they really understand what love is? For true love, surely, makes its demands: lovers give their commands. Even if we no longer promise to love, honour and obey in marriage, every friendship requires obedience, compromising my will for sake of the other, for each other, for all of us. If sometimes I am dragging myself to Mass out of duty, is that so bad? Maybe that is a greater testament to love than that of the person who goes to Mass full of expectation of joy and returns full of consolation.

Much as we naturally want them, the warm feelings in our friendships, our works, our worship, come and go. And free gift though it is, love does make its demands, it is tested in fire, purified, matures, through perseverance when the loving gets hard. Love is a virtue, a virtus or strength, an excellence of character, a habit gained by practice. A practising Catholic is not just someone who goes to Mass each Sunday, though that is surely essential; not just someone who goes to Confession at least annually and probably more often, though that too is at the heart of things; but it is someone who habitually does what Catholics do, someone in the habit, the practice, of faith, hope and love.

When Christ says in this morning’s Gospel that “If you love me you will keep my commandments” he is not creating some new legalism, not imposing some new set of burdens on already over-burdened souls. No, as Christ explains today, if we love him, the Holy Spirit of Truth and Love resides with us, in us. Like any two lovers or fellow worshippers or true friends or brave soldiers or fellow workers in a great project, the more we are together, the more our wills coincide. We come to want the same things, and reject same things. Not always, of course, and not in everything; there will be differences, that’s part of our individuality and our imperfection too. But increasingly, in important things, we will agree.

The love-story of God and man consists, as Pope Benedict writes in Deus Caritas Est, in a “communion of will [that] increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God’s will increasingly coincide: God’s will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself.” So love and duty are not such opposites after all.

If you love me you will keep my commandments. If you love me that Holy Spirit who is the mind and will – ‘the Truth’ – of my Father, will become your truth, my commandments will be your will, says the Lord. Sine Dominico non possumus, we reply with the martyrs of old, “We cannot live without the things of the Lord!”