Words on the Word
3. Sunday of Easter: Confirmation
Acts 5.27-41: Obedience to God comes first.
Revelation 5.11-14: Then I heard all the living things in creation.
John 21.1-19: Simon, do you love me?
Dear candidates,
Well, here you are after a year’s preparation, ready to renounce evil, to profess your faith and to receive the sacrament of confirmation. Confirmation represents at once a gift and a commission. You receive the ‘seal of God’s gift’ in the form of the cross I shall draw with sacred chrism on the forehead of each; then you are sent forth as witnesses to the Gospel. From today you are no longer children in the faith, but responsible adults.
The business of ‘testimony’ may cause us to tremble a bit. A testimony is, in common parlance, a public statement. We think of witnesses called to testify in court cases. In a religious context we think of people who stand on soap boxes talking about Jesus, the way I saw a man standing, not long ago, on the market square in Trondheim one evening, out in the rain, passionately holding forth while no living soul paid attention.
Perhaps we do not envisage ourselves testifying quite like that? Does that mean we are unfaithful to our confirmation? Not necessarily. But let’s consider this matter a little more closely.
Above all: there are people called literally to heed the commandment to go out ‘into the highways and byways’ to call others in to God’s banquet (cf. Luke 14.7-24). Courage is required for such a task. And courage always deserves respect. A testimony can also find a different expression, however. It is said about St Francis of Assisi, whom even hardened heathens regard as an estimable human specimen, that he told his companions, the first Franciscans: ‘Preach the Gospel at all times! Use words when it is absolutely necessary.’
To be a credible Christian is not always a matter of spouting a lot of words. This has always been true: Francis lived 800 years ago. But perhaps it is truer now than ever before. We are bombarded with words from all sides, on TV, the internet, and social media. Others use words to persuade us to buy stuff, to support a given cause, to think in a particular way. We are suspicious of words. That, I think, is sensible. Words should be carefully weighed, both before we welcome them into our minds and before we speak them. Not to speak out of season, not to swallow everything others say: this is a mark of good sense.
We shall most effectively communicate to others what Christianity is about by the way we live, by the choices we make. What matters is to become a Christian, a new kind of human being.
But how to go about that?
The Gospel the Church gives us today proclaims Jesus’s resurrection. Faith in the resurrection is the foundation of Christian life. Without faith, death seems the surest thing about life. No one escapes death. Death stands for a definite end. ‘It is finished now’, people sometimes say when a person dies, as it everything he or she had ever done is henceforth immovably set, petrified like a fossil we might find on the beach. Jesus’s victory over death gives us a different view of things. It shows us that what seems to be a final ending may in fact be a beginning; that we carry within us a legitimate longing for everlasting, boundless life. The resurrection teaches us to hope.
Hope, more than anything else, distinguishes a believer from someone with no faith. What is hope? Hope is the certainty that what a thing, a relationship, an experience is now does not define what that thing, relationship, or experience has the potential to become. The encounter between Jesus, the Risen One, and Peter gives us an example.
Peter, as you know, had enjoyed Jesus’s trust. The two of them were firm friends. Peter had promised Jesus never to abandon him. Yet when Jesus was most cruelly exposed he denied him three times. When Jesus was nailed to the cross, Peter ran away to hide. He let his friend suffer and die alone.
I dare say most of us know from experience what we feel like when we know we have acted cowardly. It is damned hard to live with our disappointment in ourselves as we think: Now I have ruined something that can never be rebuilt. That sort of pain can turn into an open inner wound. If we’re vulnerable within we easily become insensitive, or violent, without. And so we find ourselves in a state of lonely stuckness and think: Is the rest of life really going to be like this?
When Jesus asks three times: ‘Do you love me’, he puts his hand right upon the wound inflicted by Peter’s three betrayals. Peter feels ill at ease, and humiliated. It hurts so much he thinks he is being punished. Then he sees that the opposite is the case. He realises that his relationship with Jesus is not defined by what has been; that reconciliation is possible. By the fact of touching and revealing his betrayal, Jesus enables the forgiveness of his sin. Thereby something bad turns into something good. Peter sees that the relationship he had compromised is made, through forgiveness, stronger.
The meeting between these two friends is like a parable of the sacrament of reconciliation, which permits us to leave things behind, to set out afresh.
That is an immense source of hope for ourselves and for others. For if my sin can be forgiven, so can that of others. Then no one is beyond the pale.
Dear friends, it is our Christian experience that it is possible to start afresh, that death can be turned to life. This experience has become rather rare in our faithless times. And so we see many signs that our world is brutalised.
If people don’t believe they can be forgiven, they see no reason to forgive others: they’ll rather just knife them. If people have no notions of mercy, they feel no responsibility for others who suffer: their concern will then simply be to keep these others away, so as not to be disturbed. If people don’t believe that life has an eternal dimension, and therefore is holy, they’ll see no sense in what they think of as unproductive lives: then they’ll have these put out of what they consider their misery.
We need courageous young women and men who can protest against such developments, who know what life is about and can testify to it. This is the testimony for which you are equipped today. By all means: use words when they are called for! But live as Christians, above all. That way you will be a blessing for yourselves and for many, many others.
By being forgiven, Peter is drawn anew out of storm chaos-waters to find a place in the boat. Lluis Borrassa, Peter Walks on Water, a painting now in the Rectoria de Sant Pere de Terrassa.