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Homilies
Fifth Sunday of Easter – John 14:1-12
Philip said to him, “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
A small boy fills his backpack with Twinkies and juice boxes and prepares to leave the house. His mom says, “Where are you going?” The boy answers, “I am going to find God.” So off he goes. He ends up in a local park and sits on a bench next to a homeless woman. He takes out a Twinkie and a juice box and starts to unwrap them. The woman watches and smiles at him and he laughs and offers her a Twinkie and a juice box. They both eat, talk, laugh, and enjoy each other. Soon the boy says goodbye and sets off for home. The woman leaves and goes off to find her friends. When the boy gets home his mother asks, “Did you find God?” He says enthusiastically, “Yes, and God is a woman!” The homeless woman meets up with her friends and says, “I met God in the park today—and he is a little boy!”
We may be meeting God everyday in the park and not even know it. God creates with only something God knows and loves. It is pretty hard to think or even to reason that God would make something totally unlike God, or un-God-like. If God is beauty and goodness, then creation will contain beauty and goodness, or at least hints of those two. Let’s call them attributes of God. What ever strays from those two attributes of God become less God-like. One might even say sin is our drifting from the attributes of God. Evil isn’t something, evil is a lack of the goodness and beauty of God.
Let’s add three more attributes of God, truth, justice, and love. Moving towards these attributes of God would make us more like God. Those attributes pretty well describe Jesus Christ, especially love. Jesus said to Thomas in response, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” If we try to follow Jesus on the way and take on the attribute of truth and live as Jesus lived then we cannot help but become more like Jesus through his divine attributes.
Let’s just take the attribute of beauty and unpack it a little more. Dr. Kenneth Craycraft in his article, No Atheists In Art Galleries, wrote, “I would ask for a show of hands of those students who agreed with the statement, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ In most cases, every hand went up, even from the most devout students. And my reply would be, ‘I didn’t realize I had a room full of atheists.’ I would then ask how many agree with the statement ‘There is no such thing as beauty.’ Inevitably, not a single hand would raise, to which I would respond, ‘Well, it looks like I have a classroom full of either confused atheists or misguided Christians.’”
Expressions of beauty and morality are both participations in the mind of God and cannot exist separately from one another. If one rejects the reality of beauty, one necessarily rejects the reality of morality. A corollary of this is that beauty, like moral truth, leads us toward God, who is its source. Just as we cannot affirm belief in God and deny objective beauty, neither can we affirm the reality of beauty and consistently deny the existence of God. Beauty, like morality, implies order and purpose in the world; and that order and purpose can only have one source: God.”
Human beings seem to have an awareness of what is more beautiful. Plato was convinced of the divine character of beauty itself and believed that human beings not only had a desire for it but also had the capacity to behold it and be fulfilled through it. He also intimated that the achievement of beholding absolute beauty betokens immortality and points to human transcendence of a soul.
“Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.”
Beauty can change a life in an instant, and that is the genius at the heart of the Catholic Mass. At its very center, Jesus Christ is lifted up for all to gaze upon Him in the Hose and in the Chalice. All of the beauty in the music, the prayers, and the sanctuary surrounding Him attend to the beauty of His presence. No other gaze in the world can change a life so swiftly.
Each and every one of us is a beautiful creature, made in the image and likeness of God, with a heart that cries out to be filled with His presence. He draws us with beauty so that He can satisfy us with Himself.
“Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,”…has seen beauty, goodness, truth, justice, and love!
Scripture Studies
Scripture Studies on PAUL -
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Prayer
As a followup to my talks on Prayer, below is an example of Birdwatching as a form of prayer.
Enjoy!