Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 18, 2025 — Year C
Readings: Acts 14:21-27 / Ps 145 / Rv 21:1-5a / Jn 13:31-33a, 34-35
by Msgr. Michael McCarron, Guest Celebrant

Our gospel reading today is incredibly rich.  It’s also ancient, proclaimed in the Church’s lectionary since about the fifth century.  So once again, we’re in a part of the lectionary that allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants, as they say, our forebears in the Faith.  The reason that it’s here is that it is a pivot point.  This gospel serves as a hinge from the Easter season into the anticipation of Pentecost and the season that follows immediately after, with the great feasts and solemnities.

You’ll notice that in the first part of the season of Easter, we talked a lot about the Resurrection appearances.  We talked a lot about where our Lord was, what He was doing, what He was saying to His disciples who witnessed Him.  But now we’ve jumped back to another place.  It’s not Eastertide; it’s the Last Supper.  This is part of what is called the Farewell Discourse.  And it’s a part of the Farewell Discourse that follows pretty much the plan that John sees our Lord setting out:  His service to His people and then all of the great proclamations of His love for us that we can only do by the Holy Spirit, which is what we’re awaiting.  And so, the lectionary is pointing us towards Pentecost, which is only a couple of weeks away.

I would suspect that this gospel sounds a little bit difficult to understand.  I mean understand if, for no other reason, is all the “glorified”:  God is glorified in Him and God will glorify Himself and if He glorifies Himself, He will glorify Him rightly.  After a while, you say what’s the point?  But it’s a really big point, and it’s the point upon which the pivot happens because it says, “Now is the Son of Man glorified.”

Now this is the Last Supper and “Now is the Son of Man glorified.”  What’s happening now?  He’s about to be crucified.  That’s God glorifying Him?  That’s a very powerful statement.  You remember He’s at the Last Supper, and Judas has just gone out to betray Him, and Jesus says to the rest that now it’s happened and that the Son of Man is glorified by the Father.  And He’s doing it right now, right here in this room at this table and we would have a right to say, “It sure doesn’t look like a lot of glory.”  Especially to them.  We have the wonderful gift of reflection of two thousand years and know that a Resurrection is going to happen after this, but the people here did not know that.  It’s telling us something.  It’s telling us something about what it means to believe in the power of Easter, but also the wonder of Pentecost.

One of the great sins of our society — in fact, it’s the great heresy that grips our society — is cynicism.  Cynicism, which anybody over the age of about eighteen, or even younger than that, will be afflicted by, is a belief that things just don’t change.  Nothing’s going to change. The world’s always going to be this way.  I don’t change; this is just the way I am.  A lot of people, as we get older, just kind of shake our heads and say that these are habits I’m never going to break, on and on and on and on.  It really is out there, and it’s a very particularly serious heresy for Catholic Christians, because it robs us of hope.

Hope is the understanding that in fact what you see is not what you get.  That in fact what we taste is a better sign of what we’re going to get.  That moment when she says, “I do,” and our whole world just lights up with fireworks?  That’s a taste.  It’s not always going to be that way.  The fireworks will turn into a bonfire sometimes.  But the reality is that you knew then more truly than you’ve ever known.  I say to couples on their wedding day, you are seeing more clearly the truth right now, today, than you ever will.  Remember what you see, because sometimes it’s easy to forget you see.

When Jesus says He’s going to be glorified, He’s saying it in the midst of the understanding of a living hope that the evil which is about to capture Him and torture Him and bury Him is not the end.  He dispels and destroys any basis for cynicism.  If God can take the cross (the most horrible, obscene evil that human beings can ever do to each other, much less the Son of Eternal Father) and turn it into the greatest good that ever has been (the absolute power of life over death) so that the greatest  it’s-never-going-to-change death (which all of us feel when we lose somebody) is broken, what could He not do with us?  What sin in our past that nobody knows about that we think makes us unlovable can He not forgive?

The fact of the matter is, He knows us best, and He loves us the most.  The power of His love is to birth hope.  Hope that no matter where we are, whatever situation we’re in, however lackluster or lukewarm we’ve been in our faith, He births a hope so that the glory of God is revealed in the midst of our difficulty.  Why?  Because there in the midst of our difficulty, even at our desperation point, if we have hope, we’re seeing beyond it.  We’re seeing bigger than it, we’re seeing something more powerful.  If I look at that person that I’ve always had a low opinion of and begin to hope, I’m open to the possibility that there in that person, there may be something I can give to help them.  Or I could be helped by them by forgiving them for the ill they may have done me.  If I look at my children and begin to lose hope for their future, because the world seems so topsy turvy, perhaps I could remember what I understood when I held them first in my arms here or at the hospital, and realize I’d be willing to do anything I could to give them a future filled with hope.

Faith, hope, and love.  The greatest of these is love.  You know why that is, don’t you?  In heaven, we don’t need faith anymore.  What we had faith in we’ll see right before us.  Even in heaven, hope will at last be fulfilled: that thing which points us to a world that’s different, to a belief that’s different.  But we’ll still need love even in heaven.  Practicing that love now, as Jesus says, “God’s going to glorify Me in this,” but how will we see that glory?  By the fact that you love each other.   Because you’ve experienced My love, you’ve come to love each other as I love you.  How do I love you?  I love you the way the Eternal Father loves the Eternal Son.  In just a couple of verses He is going to tell us, not only do I ask you to love that way, I command it.  To love the way God loves.  You can’t be cynical if you have that kind of love.  You just can’t.  It’s not permitted, but it’s also not possible.

In the second reading, from the Book of Revelation, John says, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” and that everything that I thought was going to be here forever, it was gone.  There’s a whole new way of being a human being.  As that passage continues, the Lord says, “I am the Alpha and Omega.”  He says that I am the beginning and the end.  At the end of today’s reading, the Lord says, “Behold, I make all things new.”  Even you and me.

So, if there are patterns of hurt in your relationships that you don’t think you’re ever going to change, now is the time for God’s glory to shine.  If you haven’t had a great deal of respect or a good relationship with your parents, you can change today before you leave these doors.  With the hope and the power of the Eucharist itself, the love of Jesus Christ can make a husband and a wife see each other in all new ways, if we just let it.  We cannot be cynical because the only thing that is forever is God, and God is love, and His love is for us, and that means we’re forever in love with Him.

May Jesus Christ be praised forever.