Florida Catholic | Sunday Word

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

The church is the people of God

April 20, 2008 :: Acts 6:1-7; Ps 33:1-2, 4-5, 18-19; 1 Pt 2:4-9; Jn 14:1-12

SISTER SALLIE LATKOVICH

I am a rock, but not an island.

On this Fifth Sunday of Easter, we begin to see the impact of the resurrection of Jesus. In the first reading from Acts, we hear: “The word of God continued to spread, and the number of the disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly; even a large group of priests were becoming obedient to the faith.”

Of course, the priests who are mentioned in the text were those ordained to make sacrifical offerings in the Jewish tradition. However, it may cause one to chuckle, as we pray for our own priests!

In 1 Peter, we hear an exhortation to become church: built into a spiritual house. We also recognize the reality of the great divide between the judgment of society, which rejects the living stone(s) and the pleasure of God, who chooses the living stone(s) as precious. Jesus is the cornerstone and we the living stones become the church. As Vatican II declares in The Constitution on the Church, “Lumen Gentium,” “the church is the people of God.”

The Gospel of the day is often used at funeral liturgies. Only recently, I learned that John chooses words for Jesus that are taken directly from the ritual of engagement for arranged marriages of Jews at his time. The fathers arranged the marriage of a young man and woman (as we’ve seen in “Fiddler on the Roof”). It was the practice that the young married couple take up residence at the home of the groom’s parents. A living space was added onto the home, so if the family had several sons, there would be several rooms.

At the engagement ritual of the couple, as they are formally promised to one another, the groom says: “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you may also be. Where I am going, you know the way.”

How intimate and tender is this reflection in John’s Gospel: Jesus uses marital ritual language to describe his relationship with us. For John’s community, there would have been great comfort — as in, “Do not let your hearts be troubled” — in the return of Jesus, the second coming.

The disciples, both Thomas and Philip don’t seem to get the message. And so, Jesus goes on to explain. They certainly must represent questions of the early community, and of ourselves as well.

The later part of the Gospel sums it up in the connection of faith and works: “Whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these.”

As we approach both the feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost, we realize that we are indeed living stones, cut from the same quarry as Jesus, our Christ. As such, we are commissioned to carry on the works of the Gospel.

In the words of Simon and Garfunkel, we are indeed rocks, living stones, called into the community of faith by our baptism. Thus, we are not islands, but members of the community called church, the people of God.

Sister Sallie Latkovich, Sisters of St. Joseph, is an assistant professor at the Blessed Edmund Rice School of Pastoral Ministry in the Diocese of Venice, a part of Barry University of Miami.

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