Msgr. Peter Magee, St. Matthew’s Cathedral - Washington, DC -10.00 am Mass, Sunday May 18, 2003

I suppose at some time in our lives we have all felt cut off from the Lord – because of some problem, some suffering, or some sin. Of course, problems and suffering do not really cut us off from Him (they only make us feel that way), unless we allow them to become occasions of sin. Sin is the real cut-off point since it attacks the roots of our insertion into Christ. With sin, there is perhaps at first an exhilarating feeling of liberation and freedom from a law-decreeing God, a God who dares to limit us! We exploit and explore that new found freedom, feeling good about life and about the good things of life. This can go on for a short time or for a life-time, but, if we are honest, the sense of abandon does not take much time to become a sense of abandonment; freedom turns to fear; exhilaration to anxiety and to a guilt that can paralyze the heart. Sooner or later we realize that the God who commands us is none other than the God who loves us and that without Him we shrivel up, we are, and we can do, nothing. In the midst of this experience of distance from God, somewhere deep down, our heart complains: where are You, my loving God? Where are You, the One whom my soul seeks to obey and adore? For indeed the deepest roots of our hearts can only be rooted in God if we are truly to be who we are, if we are to love or to do anything of value at all.

The human spirit seeks freedom, love and truth more than anything else. We want to be free to love and to love to be free because that is the way the good Lord has made us. The part we find difficult is to be free in loving the truth and to love true freedom. Truth: “What is that?”, Pontius Pilate cynically asked the criminal Jesus. The anticipated response of the divine criminal was: “Anyone who is on the side of truth listens to my voice.” The Jesus of love, the Jesus of freedom is the Jesus of truth. And what else can Truth do but command love and set free? Indeed, without obedience to the Truth of Christ, we can know neither true love nor true freedom. Real religious obedience is not a begrudging conformity to an external authority imposing itself on my freedom and limiting it. Rather, genuine obedience is the response of a loving heart to the Truth which flows from the very being of the Beloved God. Obedience is the joyous acceptance of God as He reveals Himself to be, without trying to impose terms and conditions. Our religious relationship is not an insurance contract!

“Remain in me,” is the command of Jesus we heard today. It is the command of a Lover: what can be more intimate than wanting someone to remain in you? Not just “with you” but “in you”! It is our faithful obedience to His Truth that enables us to remain in Him, to enjoy His love and His freedom and His Beauty and to discover the fullness of our own personal truth, freedom and beauty. The image of the Vine is so majestically and brilliantly apt. By baptism we are grafted into that Vine, or we sprout from it like new branches. The Vine bears the fruit that becomes wine, symbol of love and total abandon in the Beloved. The Vine is a living thing: love, freedom and truth, too, are living realities for the simple reason that God Himself is love, freedom and truth.

Obedience to the Truth of Christ should not result in a kind of regimented, square-headed arrogance. As the Truth is alive and active, so obedience ought to enliven and activate us. We should not obey simply to calm our conscience, or to growl in self-righteous disapproval of others, but because we are in love with the Truth and with the divine freedom the Truth gives us. To be credible witnesses in the world of today to the living power of the Risen Christ, our understanding of the truth, our obedience to it, our speaking of it need all to be on fire with His love. Do we need laws and rules in the Church? Perhaps you’re hoping I’ll say “no. But of course we do! Otherwise there would be chaos in both faith and discipline. But it would be, oh, so pitiful to reduce our life as members of the living Body of the Catholic Church to a kind of strait-jacketing of ourselves to codes of behavior. For the one who is in love with the Truth of Christ, observance of the rules of the Church ought to be spontaneous, second nature, since those rules exist to ensure that we find our way to Him and to one another.

The laws, regulations, directives, norms, codes that the Church gives could be likened to the pruning of the Vine mentioned by Jesus in the Gospel. Sometimes they seem to hurt or constrict, but if we would just be patient and trust, we would discover that they eventually enable us to believe more sincerely, to love more passionately, to hope more boldly. They help us bear more, indeed, much fruit for the glory of the Father of Jesus.

You may be familiar with the word “orthodox” which means holding the right or accepted views in matters of doctrine or teaching. Being orthodox means having the deepest roots of our hearts and souls firmly embedded in the Truth of Christ. Sometimes people regard orthodoxy merely as a monolithic block of doctrine and might well try to hit you over the head with it if you disagree with them! But this is a very poor understanding of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is certainly acceptance of the full content of the doctrine of the faith, but it is a living reality, dynamic, organic, alive.  Orthodoxy means making the faith your very own, interiorizing it, letting it penetrate and circulate in every cell of your being. Making it your own does not mean you change the truth to suit yourself (“I agree with the Church’s teaching on the Trinity, Father, but not on human sexuality …”): on the contrary, it means that you yourself become transformed into that Truth, into Christ Himself. Just as, when we receive Communion, we are in fact more received by Christ and become transformed into Him, so as we receive the Truth of Jesus we become transformed into that Truth – whole and entire! Not unlike the function of oxygen in the body, orthodoxy is the breath of the life of truth in the Body of the Church. As Jesus puts it so simply: “He who believes in me, has eternal life.”

If the faith is taught with rigidity and arrogance it only closes hearts and sometimes breaks them. That is hardly bearing the fruit Christ desires. When the faith passes through our ears and into our minds and hearts, then it will inspire words and actions of love, truth and freedom and it will communicate itself as an attractive, life-giving witness to those around us. The Vine-Dresser will be satisfied that we are producing an abundant harvest, for the sap of the Vine itself will have passed through us to reach the hearts of others and graft them into the Vine.

We pray the Lord Jesus grant us humble joy in being part of the Vine and in knowing the fullness of truth in Him. We pray Him too that our very lives be alive with that truth and that we may witness to it with loving conviction, with humility and with unfailing fidelity.