Easter V 20 April 2008

Homily for Easter V Year A Sunday 20 April 2008 Today we have another- and perhaps the most well known- of the “I am” sayings of Jesus that occur in St John’s Gospel. Last week we talked about “I am the gate”, this week we need to think about “I am the way, the truth and the life”. We need to try and see how these three things- the way, the truth and the life- are interrelated and what they mean. You see, when Jesus says “I am the Way”, he is saying two things at once really, because he is saying, in response to Thomas’s exasperated question “how can we know the way?”, that he is the way, he is the messenger and the message all in one, he is both the truth and how to find it, the truth and how to live it. What does it mean for us, this idea of living the truth? That is what I would like to reflect on with you today. Back in the 1990s, the last Holy Father, our beloved John Paul II, wrote an encyclical some of you may remember, called “Veritatis Splendor”, the splendour of the truth- it was about the Church’s moral teaching, and this week I found myself looking at it again. It begins by quoting the first Letter of St Peter, where it says that we become holy by “obedience to the truth” and straightaway Pope John Paul admits that this is a very hard thing for us to maintain, because as human beings we are always being “tempted to turn (our) gaze away from the living and true God”- we know the truth, we know what Our Lord teaches, and what the Church, interpreting the mind of Our Lord in every generation, expects of us, and yet, on the whole, we would rather go off and do something else- what difference will it make anyway? This attitude that we so often fall into, is summed up by St Paul in the phrase we find in Romans- “exchanging the truth about God for a lie”. We have seen before, in many reflections we have shared on the Gospels, how that exchange, which we are always so eager to make, is a con trick, an illusion, that leaves us empty-handed at the end- think of the prodigal son, squandering everything on pleasure and still starving at the end, still unsatisfied. How can we maintain that obedience to the truth that will make us holy, how can we keep to the way and have the life, life- as we heard in last week’s Gospel- that Our Lord wants us to have “to the full”? The Servant of God John Paul gives us the answer in this document in a memorable phrase: he says “the good of the person is to be in the Truth and to do the Truth”. We have got to do the Truth. Do the Truth! We find a similar phrase in the gospel of St John- “he who does what is true comes to the light” (Jn 3:21). It is up to us- God has given us brains, and he expects us to use them! We can think- we can use our reason to work things out, to weigh up the sides of an argument, to make choices and decisions, and we have our consciences, the basic knowledge of right and wrong that is written in our hearts, that we are all born with. These are the tools, and then it is up to us. This is how God made us, and how he expects us to operate- he wants us to work things out and make the right choices in our lives by ourselves, of our own free will. As it says in the Book of Sirach “it was he who created man in the beginning, and he left him in the power of his own inclination. If you will, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice” (15:14-15). To follow Our Lord, what we have to do, and keep on doing every day, is make choices. This idea of life being about choices, and the importance of our being free to make choices, was especially dear to the heart of that French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre- another John Paul, but rather a different one! He was obsessed with the idea that human beings could only be happy if they were what he called “authentic”. You couldn’t be authentic if you were always trying to fit in with what other people expected of you, he said. That is why he famously said “Other people are hell”- his idea was, you had got to make sure other people had no influence on you whatsoever, because only then would you have any chance of being free, and only then could you choose who you wanted to be and how you wanted to live your life. This is an attractive message, especially when you are young and wanting to rebel against all the adults in your life, which is why so many students back in my young days fell under his spell. But it is nonsense actually. We can never be a blank page, to write on what we want- we can never entirely free ourselves from the influences of our home and family, of our education and upbringing, of what has happened to us in our lives. We are stuck with all that, whether we like it or not, and what we have to do is a much harder, much more subtle task- we have to make our choices in life not by cutting loose from our background, not by re-inventing ourselves, but by absorbing what is there in our lives and making sense of it as best we can, by aligning ourselves ever more closely to the life of Our Lord, who has gone through every aspect of the human condition ahead of us and shown us the way. Not by shunning other people, so that they can make no demands on us and have no effect on our precious identity as a free agent, but by embracing them, and accepting and dealing with their demands on us, will we find our authenticity, our true selves. Because we know that all those paradoxes are true- it is in giving that we receive, in losing our life that we find it, and so on. Only when we stop worrying about our own happiness and our own tick-list of what we must have to be content, and think of the happiness of those around us and helping them to tick a few boxes, do we find that, to our surprise, contentment and peace have come to us. Jesus, help us make the choices day by day that keep us close to you for you have said “whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself”. Help us to recognise the truth, to do the truth, and never exchange it for a lie; for the truth will make us free and to serve you is perfect freedom. Amen.