4th Sunday of Easter – Acts 13:14, 43-52; Revelation 7:9, 14B-17; John 10:27-30 - St. Joseph

May 8, 2022

Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 8, 2022 – Acts 13:14, 43-52; Revelation 7:9, 14B-17; John 10:27-30

How can you tell that there’s a gang of really faithful Catholics here? No one’s sitting in the front. I often dreamt of building a church that had only one pew, then one day I found one. I was visiting a Byzantine rite church in Ulster County. The church is built as a circle and there were benches all around three-quarters of the walls, and the last quarter of the wall was where the altar was hidden behind an iconostasis. But everybody got to sit up front and in the back at the same time.

1959 was a banner year for an otherwise obscure country western singer named Stonewall Jackson, named after the great Confederate general. At the beginning of the year he had a number one hit called “The Battle of New Orleans,” but later on in the year he made it into the top five, which means he sold several million copies of a song called “Waterloo.” And, if you remember the song, as maybe two or three people in the congregation might, the first verse went like this.

Now old Adam was the first in history
With an apple he was tempted and deceived
Just for spite the devil made him take a bite
And that's where old Adam met his Waterloo

Then the refrain goes:

Waterloo, Waterloo, Where will you meet your Waterloo?
Every puppy has his day [Why he didn’t like puppies, I don’t know, but …]
Everybody has to pay
Everybody has to meet his Waterloo

Interesting thing is that the verse encapsulates, in the simplest language, the basic about original sin. But the refrain completely contradicts Catholic doctrine about Christ’s redemption of the human race.

You know, that’s our battle cry today, isn’t it? Somebody’s gotta pay. Somebody’s gotta pay! I fell and hurt myself. Somebody’s gotta pay! I come out to the parking lot and my car was dented. Somebody has to pay! Four centuries ago, my ancestors saw Columbus enter the new world. Somebody’s gotta pay! We harbored slaves over 200 years. Somebody’s gotta pay! Somebody’s gotta pay for whatever goes wrong. We have a rise in crime. Build more prisons! Make longer prison terms. Re-energize the death penalty ‘cause somebody’s gotta pay!

And we think that that goes along with Catholic doctrine, ‘cause it sounds like what we think we remember about the sacrament of Penance. But what the sacrament of Penance says is that sometimes there needs to be restitution, which is different from “somebody’s gotta pay.” If something is broken, and we broke it, it is ours to fix if we can fix it. If someone has been wounded, and we have caused the wound, and it’s within our power to do so, we need to move to heal the wound. And, sometimes, we can’t fix what’s broken, and sometimes we can’t heal what’s wounded. And so, the sacrament of Penance allows us to vicariously move toward that kind of repair and reparation, by placing it in Christ’s hands.

But, you know, the church did not begin with the sacrament of Penance. That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to several things in this morning’s readings. The first one was the rationale that Paul and Barnabas give to the Jews for turning to the Gentiles. They quote Isaiah. Isaiah was speaking to the Jewish people when they were exiles in Babylon, at the lowest point in their national experience, when they were brokenhearted. He says to them, “You have been called to be a light to the Gentiles. To bring salvation to all the world. All the world. You prisoners. You slaves. You’ve been called to bring salvation to all the world. You can replace the word ‘salvation’ with any other word you want – reconciliation, peace, harmony, whatever – you’ve been called to do that for the whole world.” But they didn’t do it. When they finally got home from exile, they were so embittered by their experience of having to live with Pagan people that they vowed never again. And they closed their borders, and they closed their minds, and they closed their hearts to the experience of opening themselves to the world. Which was the vocation that Jesus saw for Himself. To fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah. And, because that was the vocation He chose for Himself, they crucified Him. But he could not stay dead.

That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to what the book of Revelation says about the great multitude. It says two things about them. They’re the ones who have “… washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb.” That’s the first thing. You know, every now and then, when I’m at dialysis, I get blood all over my shirt. I mean, really soaked. There’s nothing like Oxi-Clean. But ordinarily we don’t think of getting things white by dipping them in blood. It’s a paradox. Where does the paradox come from?

It comes from the passage in John’s gospel where, after Jesus has died, a Roman centurion pierces His side with a lance, and what comes out? Blood and water. And that’s not surprising from a medical point of view, because the way people die in crucifixion is they die by suffocation. Their lungs fill with water because they cannot breathe out. And so, if you pierce their side right after death, the water that’s gathered in the lung will spill out of the torn lung, along with it will come blood. It’s only natural. But St. John saw there an image of the only two sacraments that ever existed in the early church, Baptism and Eucharist. Once you were baptized, because you were baptized as an adult, everything you had done that was sinful in all of your life was forgiven. It was simply assumed that you would never sin again. And your sinlessness was endorsed, emphasized, strengthened, and celebrated every time you gathered for the Lord’s Supper.

But then the unthinkable happened. Christian people sinned again. There were scandalous adulteries within their community. During the brief periods of persecution neighbors ratted out other neighbors to the Roman soldiers in order to save their own necks. The question arose, can these people ever be forgiven again? This is a dreadful sin. Their sins were not things like gossiping about your neighbor or taking a candy bar from the counter while no one’s looking. Their sins were huge. And the answer came back from the Christian community, “If the crucifixion meant anything, it meant that Jesus died for all sinners, for all time.” That’s why the book of Revelation also says that, “God will wipe every tear from their eyes.” ‘Cause where do tears come from? Tears come from our brokenness for what we have done to others that breaks our hearts and for what others have done to us that breaks our hearts. And sometimes the tears just never stop throughout all of our life, do they? But God, through Jesus and His crucifixion, will wipe those tears away. It’s so important a concept that next week, in the reading from the book of Revelation, they’ll say it over again, “God wipes every tear from our eyes.”

And that’s why I asked you to listen to what Jesus says cannot happen to the sheep. They can never be snatched from His embrace. They can never be snatched from His embrace.

So, if it’s true that Jesus died once and for all. And if it’s true that He Himself explained the meaning of His death by saying to His disciples, “Receive the Holy Spirit. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven them.” If that’s true, and if all the Christians there ever were were in the upper room when He said that, why do we have a sacrament of Penance? Because people do sin again. And, in order for us not to be snatched from the arms of the shepherd, there has to be some sort of remediation.

The history of the sacrament of Reconciliation or Penance has a checkered beginning. At first, as I said, it was unimaginable that people would sin again. But when they did, the church had to figure out how to tell them they were forgiven. And the church went through a series of experiments with Reconciliation before we finally got to the form in which we have it today, where people quietly and privately tell a representative of Christ what they have done.

And what happens in the sacrament of Reconciliation? Three things. The first is that the gospel of forgiveness is proclaimed to you. In case you had any doubt that it is actually true that Jesus died for you, not just for all of you out there, but for you. The second thing is that, if you don’t think you are sorry, God can fix that for you. What did John Denver say, “Most of all, I’m sorry for myself.” And we are sorry for ourselves. Because, after we’ve messed up, we are hurting as much as the people we have hurt are hurting. If we have a serious disagreement with someone, and we no longer have their companionship and their friendship, who’s hurting? Not just them; we’re hurting too. And we can’t fix it, because we broke it. And so, the sacrament of Reconciliation take what we call ‘imperfect contrition’ and makes it into perfect contrition. Something that, through Jesus, allows us to love again. And the sacrament of Penance strengthens us against doing that stuff again. Those are the three purposes for it.

So we are left with sort of a puzzle. In our civic life, in our private life, we keep hearing the refrain, “Somebody’s gotta pay!” But, what our faith tells us is that somebody did pay. His name is Jesus. And all we need to do is pay it forward.

Church of St. Joseph

Wurtsboro, NY

4th Sunday of Easter – Acts 13:14, 43-52; Revelation 7:9, 14B-17; John 10:27-30