A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter
Readings: Acts 6:1-7 1 Peter 2:4-9 John 14:1-12
Question: What does the Catholic Church know about God?
Answer: Not much.
I may have just ruined my chances to speak at a Catholic commencement ceremony, yet with more than 20 years of teaching at Catholic colleges and universities, I cannot retrieve anything I heard in a graduation address.
I am not being critical of the speakers. On the rare occasion that someone says that she liked a homily of mine, even last week’s, I am at a loss to remember it. And in defense of teachers and preachers, education is not about recalling what you have learned. Almost all of that will be forgotten and will require retrieval—if it is even needed. No, education is about learning how to learn. And, parenthetically, preaching is about learning how to pray.
So what is this about the Catholic Church not knowing much about God? Again, I am not being critical. The church says this herself. No less a Catholic authority than St. Thomas Aquinas said that concerning God, we can only say that God is. After that, “we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not” (Summa Theologica I, 3).
At the heart of the Catholic faith is a great and necessary admission, and you can find its parallels in Judaism and Islam: God is a grand mystery! To say that there is a God is to say that the universe is purposeful, but when we attempt to explain that purpose, or the mind behind it, we falter.
When philosophy speaks of God, its results are both enormous and empty. If the universe is purposeful, then the mind behind it must be greater than our own. So we can say that God is truer, better, more one, more beautiful than we are. That’s enormous but a bit empty because you still have that great “if.” Yet at least philosophy trains us to reject idols, intellectual and cultural, that are less than God. As another great Catholic authority, St. Augustine of Hippo, put it, “If you can comprehend it, it is not God” (Sermon 117.5).
What about the primordial religious question, which might be put like this: What am I supposed to do with my life? Do I have a goal, a purpose, beyond my own determination?
Having been chastised by the burning bush for seeking the divine name to exercise some control over God, Jews employ a tetragram, four unspoken consonants that stand in for the mystery. We Christians use the word “Father,” but it designates a mystery we cannot comprehend. We employ the analogy because our Christ addressed the mystery as such: “Abba.”
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are Western religions of revelation. We believe that God has addressed us, revealed God’s self to us through historical events. For Islam, that historical event was quite literally the production of its sacred scripture, the Qur’an. It was dictated by the angel Gabriel because God is too mysterious to appear before us. Again, note the unknowing at the center of the known.
For Jews and Christians, God’s actions reveal God’s identity. The Scriptures themselves are not a revelation—according to tradition, they were written by human authors with the Holy Spirit—but they do testify to it. For Jews, God blesses and liberates Israel. For Christians, God becomes Israel in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He is God’s blessing, God’s liberation, God’s revelation of self. Fundamentalists, in all religions of revelation, mistake their personal grasp of texts for God’s own revelation.
So much for religious answers. What about the primordial religious question, which might be put like this: What am I supposed to do with my life? Do I have a goal, a purpose, beyond my own determination?
Why would you ask such a question? Because you hope that you are not alone in the universe. If you are alone and there is no one to answer your question, then any purpose you assign to your life has no more validity or duration than the span of your days. Your deep aspirations are only sketches in sand.
There is so much not given us to know. Yet there is so much given us to do.
Thomas puts this very question to Jesus, and he does so in terms the master himself employed: If life is a journey, where are we going?
“Master, we do not know where you are going;
how can we know the way?”
Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.
If you know me, then you will also know my Father” (Jn 14:5-7).
Thomas might accept this as an answer. Jesus identifies himself with the mystery. But not Philip! He protests that his teacher did not answer the question. “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” Enough mystery. Call in the clarity!
Jesus responds:
How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own.
The Father who dwells in me is doing his works.
Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me,
or else, believe because of the works themselves.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever believes in me will do the works that I do,
and will do greater ones than these,
because I am going to the Father.” (Jn 14:9-12)
Here is the heart of the Christian faith, the answer to these pressing questions. It is not given to us to know God. With due apology for the awkward construction, we are to do God. To do the work of the Father just as Christ, the blessing and liberator, did.
The meaning of the universe is denied to us, but how could it be given to us? Our minds must then be greater than the universe, not members of it. Yet the meaning, the mind and heart behind the universe, invites us to collaborate in its construction. There is so much not given us to know. Yet there is so much given us to do.
Question: Why is faith necessary? What purpose does religion serve if it does not serve up answers on demand?
Answer: Religion restrains and reveals. It restrains us from making ourselves the measure of all things, and, in doing so, it reveals an opening for something beyond ourselves.
