Third Sunday of Easter - Sunday, May 5, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Third Sunday of Easter - Sunday, May 5, 2019

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)
Revelation 5:11-14
John 21:1-19

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

+ In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen. +

Our attachments will destroy us.

Whatever we cling to becomes a kind of rope to bind us and bring us before the judge, as surely as Paul did the early Christians. It’s easy to see how we make idols of our fear, our pain, our desire to have what we want, when we want, as we want. But our so-called “good” qualities can just as easily, and much more subtly, become links in the chains that bind us. Our desire to be good, to be right; our sense of justice and our outrage and injustice; our striving for spiritual gifts; even our love of the people and places that form the foundations of our lives—all these and more can numb and paralyze us, lock us into place like thicket of brambles.

Peter and Paul, the two great pillars of the early Church, and, for that matter, of the Church today, learned what we must all learn if we are truly to become Christians. We must, to paraphrase Tolstoy, learn to renounce the fantasy of a freedom that is not real and to embrace a dependence that we do not feel. Or, as Dorothee Sölle so beautifully put it: we must learn to be empty in a world of surplus.

We could all live the rest of our lives as good, loving Christians, which is to say as people who profess the name of Jesus and avoid at all costs the demand that name makes on them. Or we could consent to our total dependence on the one whose very name is Love. And we could allow that One to guide, correct, empty, and fill us however and whenever we need to be guided, corrected, emptied, and filled.

Part of the problem for those of us who call ourselves Christians today is that the story is too familiar. It doesn’t often blind us with its radiance. It wasn’t familiar for Peter, and it wasn’t familiar for Paul. And so they have something of an advantage on us.

Walking down the road to Damascus, on his way to persecute more of the early followers of Jesus, Paul was overcome by a light so bright it revealed the blindness in which he had been living. He knew he must change his life. And so he did, never turning away from that light again, so that he could write to Timothy, “I am already being poured out like a libation. […] From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give on that day, and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.” (2 Tim 4:6-8)

Peter had denied his friend and lord three times before that friend’s brutal death. And so his joy at Jesus’ appearance colors around the edges with regret and longing and a love so poignant we can’t help but be swept up in its wake. He’s so overcome that he loses his sense and puts his clothes back on before lunging into the water to touch Jesus. He, too, knows that he must change his life. And he does, never again denying the One who fed him bread and fish on the shore of the lake, witnessing to the transforming love of the Resurrected One, even in his own death on a cross.

In their encounter with the Risen One, both of these men recognized that their entire lives would have to change. But still they consented to those changes. They still said their “yes.” And they renewed that yes every day of the rest of their lives, until they could, when it counted, pronounce their greatest “yes” and die in witness to the love of the one who had already died and risen for them.

And how could they lay down their lives? Because they had already given those lives back to the one who had given them in the first place and who had renewed them day by day.

All this talk of death may seem somewhat macabre, but it isn’t. Surrender to God, the willing return of one’s life to source of life is the consummation of the greatest love story we know. This death and the new life in the spirit it enables begin and end in love.

Father Alan Whittemore, perhaps the greatest mystic our Order has produced, had much to say of this topic in an essay he wrote on the real reason for becoming a monk or a nun. I quote at length:

The real reason, the only truly sufficient reason, for becoming a monk is to be crucified. That is what happens. The religious life is a contrivance of the Divine ingenuity whereby the soul may be crucified with Christ. The vows are the nails with which we are nailed to the cross. Incidentally we may spend many years in the religious life before the full significance and the dreadful pain of these nails is brought home to us.

That all sounds very grim. But it is true. Do not attempt to become a monk or nun unless you intend from the bottom of your heart to surrender yourself wholly to Jesus, to hang up with Him on His Cross in perfect submission to the will of the Father and on behalf of the souls of [all].

Still, there is a beautiful secret which I have saved to the last and which makes all the difference in the world. It does away with the grimness and renders of the religious life the dearest, sweetest, blessedest thing in all the world. The religious life is a love affair.

All souls are invited to become the brides of Christ. But the religious does not wait for the life beyond the grave. He steals a march on the others. 

Earlier in this chapter I gave several reasons for becoming a monk or nun. Did you notice that I omitted that which many folk outside the religious life imagine to be the true one? I have the feeling that most people think that monks or nuns were “disappointed in love.” 

Perhaps some of them were. God has many means of drawing souls to Himself. All I can say is that, though I have known a great number of monks and nuns very intimately, I never have happened to strike one who came to the cloister because he or she had been disappointed in love. 

On the other hand, I have known very many—please God, it is true of all of them—who were successful in love beyond all dreams or imagining. For they have heard in their hearts the whispering of the perfect lover. And it has been their deepest passion and their joy to surrender themselves to Him unto death, even the death of the Cross.

What Father Whittemore has to say of the monk or nun is equally true of all who would bear the name of the Crucified and Risen One. Bound up into the great love affair with God in Christ, we find that the choice to surrender all our lives to the one who poured out his life for us, who pours it out still, is not dreary after all. It is the most beautiful way we could live, the best and, really, the only way, to enter the flow of divine love within and all around us.

It is, finally, only love that enables our response of love. Jesus comes to each us in the most ordinary and the most extraordinary moments of our lives, reach out his scarred hands to embrace us, and says to our souls, “Yes, I love you more than these. I love you more than your fear. I love you more than that your joy. Now come, follow me.”