4
Easter B #50
Acts 4, 8-12
Ps 118
1 Jn 3, 1-2
Jn 10, 11-18
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
April 26, 2015
Deacon Tom Cornell
It’s
over! Suddenly it was over, that long,
hard winter. Then, just as suddenly,
winter made a reappearance: hail on Thursday, snow squalls on Friday. But be reassured. The earth is coming back to life. Nature does her hardest work this time of
year. Everything is coming up. Life is good.
Jesus rose from the dead to assure us of life,
eternal life, life everlasting. God
created man a little lower than the angels, the Psalmist tells us, but when the
Eternal Word of God took flesh in the Virgin Mary’s womb, God elevated man
above the angels. The Apostle John tells
us that now we are sons and daughters of God, but what we shall be, in the
Resurrection, what we shall be has not yet come to light, but when it does, we
shall be like God for we will see Him as He is.
Try to take that in! We shall be
like God! We shall see Him as He
is! If we really believe this wild
horses could not keep us from Sunday Mass every Sunday, to meet Jesus in
breaking open the word of the Gospel and in the breaking of bread! And why should we fear death if we can
believe this? As we age and one bodily system
after another fails us, we fear death not for ourselves but for our children
and theirs. That is the most terrible
loss. But even then, God is good. God is merciful, compassionate. He suffers with us.
“There
is no other name,” Luke tells us in Acts, no other name by which we are to be
saved. Jesus is the only savior, the
sole mediator between God and humankind.
There is no other. Does that mean
that non-Christians cannot be saved?
There was a time, before the Second Vatican Council, when some people
might say so, as hard is to imagine today.
I’ve told this story before but some
of you might have missed it. It happened
at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, in the office of Abraham
Joshua Heschel, the most influential rabbi of his generation, in the spring of
1967. Heschel had been asked by Cardinal
Bea in Rome to go to the Vatican with a team of Jewish leaders to help prepare
for the Council. That was a first. No Jew had ever been asked to help prepare for
an oecumenical council of the Catholic Church.
When they gathered, at a private meeting with Pope Paul, Cardinal Bea asked,
“What would the Jews hope to see come out of the Council?”
They were astounded. This is how I remember Heschel
answering. “This is what I told
them. ‘We Jews face very extinction. There are four threats. First, the Enlightenment hit our people
unprepared so that in a generation’s time the observance rate fell precipitously. With non-observance comes inter-marriage;
that’s factor two. That means children
lost to Judaism. Three, we lost one out
of every three of our people to the Nazi Holocaust. Four, the State of Israel is in a precarious
position surrounded by enemies. On top
of all that, you people are trying to convert us! How would the Church understand it, and how
would you take it personally, Your Holiness, if the religion that Mary taught
little Jesus in their home in Nazareth were to disappear from the face of the
earth?’ The answer: ‘I never thought of
it that way. But we’re going to!’ ”
The result of this consultation was
the document Nostra Aetate, In Our Age, on
the relation of the Catholic Church to Non-Christian religions. The Council Fathers condemned all forms of
anti-Semitism and repudiated the view that all the Jews of His time or their
descendants are guilty of Jesus’ death.
They held that God’s covenant with the Jews stands and has never been
withdrawn or revoked. The Church honors
the truths that can be found in all religious traditions, but she recognizes
the special and unique relationship we have with the Jewish people, as wild
olive branches grafted onto the good root stock of Israel.
The Council called upon people of all
faiths to put aside past hurts and to work together for the common good, for
justice and for peace. We recognize and
honor the truths found in all religions.
But Jesus remains the sole savior, the One who saves not only Catholics
and Christians but Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and even those who
claim they have no faith but seek truth and goodness with a sincere heart.
God’s greatest gift to us is our
faith. Can you believe that at last we
will be like Him for we will see Him as He is?
If that is so, we can stand up to anything, as the 41 Coptic martyrs did
only a few weeks ago in Egypt. They were
given the chance to renounce their Christian faith, but they gladly died with
the word Jesus on their lips, Jesus, Jesus.
“I do believe, Lord. Help Thou my unbelief!”
