7th Sunday of Easter (Year A)
Acts 1:12-14 | Psalm 26(27):1,4,7-8 | 1 Peter 4:13-16 | John 17:1-11
It is a blessing for you when they insult you for bearing the name of Christ, because it means that you have the Spirit of glory, the Spirit of God resting on you. (1 Peter 4:14)
Mahatma Gandhi never said this:
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.
But these 16 words have a surprising connection to us Catholics. Obviously, they coincide with St. Peter’s words for today, but their underlying thread also links intimately with our Christian lives.
More on that later.
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St. Peter tells us that it’s a blessing to be persecuted as Christians, as indeed many of our spiritual ancestors were put to the test of faith.
But what if the opposite happens to us, and the above observation never gets past its very first stage? What if our Christianity were completely ignored?
What if we did not stand out from the crowd?
The crowd who pays no heed to the tired elderly who need a seat?
The crowd who treats the service personnel around us with disdain, or even as menial servants?
The crowd who berates the hospitality ministers at church, when their parking instructions conflict with our desire to be gone before the final blessing at mass?
The crowd who treats the Body of Christ as just a wafer, blatantly ignoring the frequent exhortations to first make peace with God in the Sacrament of Reconciliation?
We can be better Christians than that.
We must be better Christians than that.
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Back to Gandhi.
He coined an intriguing term for his unique political vision: satyagraha. It’s a philosophy of nonviolent civil resistance that inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. during the years of the Civil Rights Movement in America, as well as many other social justice movements in the past decades.
Satyagraha literally means “holding firmly to the truth”.
Brothers and sisters, are we holding firmly to the Truth that is God’s love for all mankind, the love that we are commanded to share with our fellow beings?
When we hold firm to this Truth, when it becomes our moral and spiritual bedrock, when it truly becomes part of our daily lives, the words in Fr. Peter Scholtes’ famous hymn will come true:
Then they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love,
Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.
Amen.