Homily
for May 3, 2009
Liturgical Year B - Cycle I
4th Sunday of Easter
By Dcn. Ray Alcouffe Topic:
To Lay Down My Life
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“This is why the
Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up
again.”
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To Lay Down My Life
In today’s
Gospel passage we encounter one of the most beloved images of the risen
Christ, that of the Good Shepherd. Jesus’ self identifying as a
shepherd of his people has echos throughout the Bible of a good and
caring leader of the people of God. This has been carried forth to the
present day as an enduring image; the word pastor comes from the Latin
word for shepherd. But what also intrigues me in this passage is how
much Jesus emphasizes the laying down of his life and the taking up of
it again. It is here that I see a personal message. One that lies at
the foundation of not only being a good leader but also what the
process of living my life, such as it is, means in the plan of God.
Jesus is speaking about how our relationship with the Father defines
not only our life now but our life everlasting. And this being the
Easter season, our minds jump to the big event of Jesus’ suffering,
death, and resurrection. Yet what Jesus is saying also affects the more
mundane situation of my life’s struggle right now, at this very moment.
In the verse just preceding today’s passage, Jesus says: “I came so
that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” This more
abundant life is to be had by imitating Jesus and viewing our life as a
continual laying our life down and taking it up again. Another way of
saying that we lay our life down is to say that we surrender our life
to God. And if our experience is valid, it isn’t just one surrender but
a whole sequence of such surrenders that we have to do.
So we must surrender our lives to God. This is the exhortation of
preachers from the beginning of the Bible to now. But you know... there
are rumors that if you do that, it is going to hurt or be unpleasant in
some way ... so, be careful. This is like the message we hear from C.
S. Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia. In the Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe, Susan and Lucy ask Mr. and Mrs. Beaver to describe Aslan.
They ask if Aslan is a man. Mr. Beaver replies: “Aslan a man? Certainly
not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the song of the Great
Emperor-beyond-the-sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan
is a lion - the Lion - the Great Lion.”
“Ooh!”, said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he - quite safe? I
shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” “That you will,
dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “If there’s anyone who
can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either
braver than most or else just silly.” “Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you?
Who said anything about being safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s
good. He’s the King I tell you.”
And so it is in real life with our surrender to God. We know it isn’t
safe even though God is good. We only need to look at Jesus on the
cross, or to look at the saints. Because of this we are tempted to take
the stance that if we must surrender to God, we need to find the
minimum we can do and still be saved.
A good way for us to do a reality check to see how we are now going
about surrendering to God, or laying our life down, is to look at how
we approach God in prayer. I think you’ll see that much of the time we
come timidly with our fists tightly clenched around all aspects of our
lives, especially those that we aren’t very proud of. But in prayer God
wants us to open our hands and present to him everything there is about
us. Deep down we are afraid to do that so we keep a tight grip on our
life. We even cling to those things we find repugnant and hateful in
ourselves because for better or worse they are part of us. That is,
we’d rather hold on to what we know, than to risk losing ourselves to
some unknown. Basically it comes down to - we are afraid, even in the
presence of God. But then we hear the risen Jesus tell his disciples in
the upper room, ‘be not afraid, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid of
letting me into the most secret and remote parts of your inner self.
And if we do unclinch our fists and open our hands to this God who is
good, then is when we find joy in prayer - then is when joy comes
flooding back into our lives. And then is when we take up our lives
again - a life transformed, a foretaste of the new life with God. So
joy in our life is the proof that we are opening to God. It just takes
laying our life down, opening our hands and thus our hearts to God -
who even if he isn’t safe, is good.
We can describe events like these, in imitation of Jesus, as mini-
resurrections - a bringing of the resurrection of Jesus into our self,
into our present. It’s like the events a recovering alcoholic
experiences when addiction is controlled and they are sober one more
day. It’s like someone recovering from divorce and they achieve a state
of healing from the major hurts and the disappointments of failure and
betrayal. Or it is like someone experiencing a renewal in their
marriage - in a marriage that has gone flat and ordinary.
Such a thing happened to my wife Joan when we made our Marriage
Encounter so many years ago. We had been married for 10 years and just
had gotten our fifth child through adoption when we went on this
weekend. Joan was feeling overwhelmed with the hectic schedule of the
kid’s school and activities and keeping the household under control.
Amidst all this she lost a sense of herself, of who she was as a
person. And frankly I was little help being basically clueless. On the
very first talk of that weekend we were given time to explore our own
selves in the quiet of the facility - to write ourselves a letter while
being relieved of all the pressures of daily life. At the end of the
allotted time, Joan didn’t come back to the room. She was experiencing
a personal renewal and had lost her sense of time. When she finally did
come back after a search by the people doing the weekend, she was
radiant with enthusiasm and a new joy I hadn’t seen for quite a while.
She had opened herself up without fear of rejection and new life came
into her.
With all this, I see now why Jesus says, “This is why the Father loves
me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.” The
Father’s love is manifested in new life especially in us as we seek it.
To me this suggests a process. We come to the Father in prayer however
that may be. We relax the tight grip we have on various aspects of our
lives, we open our hands to God. We let go of our fear that God is not
safe by focusing on the fact that God is good. Thus we lay our life
down. We persist and then wait the moments, the days, or even the years
it takes for us to experience the joy of healing. This joyful outlook
is thus the life we take up again. And you know that if we do this
throughout our life in the here and now, it is this that will give us
our final hope. Then when the time comes to lay down our life for the
last time, we will be given the power by our Father to take it up again
as our enduring, everlasting joy. That my brothers and sisters is
something to celebrate!