Third Sunday of Easter
About two months ago, the priests of the Diocese of Lansing met to, among other things, talk about how to increase vocation to the priesthood. There were lots of ideas shared, some big, some small, some more helpful, some less helpful. But the advice of one of our senior priests really stood out: if you’re happy and you know it, tell your face. That was his pithy way of saying that happy priests lead others to consider the priesthood.
But besides being good advice for priests trying to encourage vocations to the priesthood, it’s good advice for all Christians, especially during this Easter season. If you’re happy and you know it, tell your face! We have been given the gift of new life in Christ, the opportunity to live for ever in heaven with God, the Blessed Mother, and the angels and saints. That’s good news! Sin has been defeated, and Christ has given His Church a way to forgive sins in His name and with His authority (remember that Jesus gave the apostles that authority in last week’s Gospel account). That should lead us to be joyful.
Joy doesn’t mean that everything is going to go right in our lives. St. Thomas Aquinas describes joy as a passion which is caused by love of being in the presence of that which is loved, or by the goodness of the thing loved that lasts. And, of course, spiritual joy, the fruit of the Holy Spirit, is caused by being in the presence of God and by the goodness of God that endures forever. Therefore, especially when dealing with the goodness of God itself and how much he loves us, joy and sorrow cannot be mixed up. We should, as St. Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians, “Rejoice in the Lord always.”
But, St. Thomas also admits that we do not always participate in the goodness of God, or recognize God’s presence, and that can cause us sorrow, because we don’t see the love of God active in our neighbor, or even active in ourselves. And we see that sadness in our Gospel today. St. Peter forgets that Jesus has risen. He has seen Jesus, but Jesus has gone elsewhere. And because St. Peter forgets about the abiding presence of the risen Jesus, St. Peter abandons his responsibility of sustaining the disciples in the faith, and decides to go back to his old life of fishing.
Now, when St. Peter recognizes Jesus on the shore, that joy returns, and so much so that he jumps out of the boat to swim to shore to see Jesus, rather than waiting for the boat to go ashore. It is then that Jesus asks St. Peter about his love, the threefold profession of love making up for St. Peter’s threefold denial that he even knew Jesus. And Jesus entrusts to St. Peter the role of feeding the lambs, tending the sheep, and feeding then sheep. St. Peter is entrusted with taking care of the flock that belongs to the Good Shepherd. And the joy of loving Christ is meant to keep St. Peter going.
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| A statue of Jesus at Peter at the Sea of Galilee |
St. Peter had that joy, maybe not always and not exactly as God wanted St. Peter to, but still, St. Peter had the joy of the Resurrection, and we heard about that in the first reading when St. Peter rejoiced “that they had been found worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name” of Jesus. Even though they were being persecuted, St. Peter (and the other apostles) had joy because they knew they were in the presence of God and that they were able to suffering for God in imitation of Jesus.
So how about us? Do our faces show that we have the joy of the Resurrection? As a priest in seminary once told us, this isn’t the smile of someone who just passed gas and then walked away. This is the joy that gives us peace through all of life’s circumstances, good and bad. If we recognize the presence of God in our life, then nothing can take that joy from us. God’s love is always active in our life and sustains us every day. Even when there is something sad or even horrendous going on in our life, if we know the love of God, then we can still have the joy that is the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
The martyrs are the best example of this. Throughout the centuries there are stories of martyrs who died very painful deaths, but had joy that they were laying down their life in imitation of Jesus. From the Apostles, to the early Roman martyrs, to the Japanese martyrs in the sixteenth century, to the North American martyrs in the seventeenth century, to saints like Maximilian Kolbe in the twentieth century, they didn’t enjoy being put to death, but they did have joy to suffer for Christ. And many of their writings testify to that. So for us, who probably aren’t being covered with tar and lit on fire, having boiling water poured over us to mock baptism, having our fingernails pulled out and our fingers chopped off, being crucified, or being given poison, then hopefully we can recognize the abiding presence of God and live in that joy of Easter. If you’re happy and you know it, tell your face!
