7th Sunday of Easter Year A 2023

As mentioned last Thursday, when so many parts of the Catholic-sphere celebrate today as Ascension, the 7th Sunday feels useless. Nevertheless, hanging around is not nothing. The Eleven with Mary and some others gathered, as instructed by the Lord Himself, in their usual hangout to wait for the Holy Spirit. The Gospel, however, brings us back to the time when Jesus was still preparing for His Passion and Resurrection. His prayer to the Father comes at the tail-end of His Farewell Discourse and He will be arrested after this.

What Jesus offered, amongst other things, is Him glorifying the Father and vice versa. The act of glorification is achieved through setting His disciples apart from this world. They are indeed in the world but they do not belong with it. This setting apart feels almost like a double existence but it is precisely in straddling the City of Man and the City of God that makes Christianity a force to be reckoned with.

“In the world and not of the world” expresses the true character of the Incarnation. He came into this world but He did not belong to this world. From a certain perspective, we can say that He was way ahead of His generation and time. Even though the social norms were restrictive but Jesus was never afraid to break many of them. He ate with sinners, touched lepers, forgave an adulteress, healed the servant of a Roman official, associated with tax collectors and spent time with in a Samaritan village. All His actions sprang from a source that has a deeply scriptural basis. “Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves”. Jesus valued people because each person has been created in His image and likeness. His behavioural pattern characterises a man not of this world.

Perhaps the theme of this year’s World Communications Sunday can help us reflect further on the balance between being in this world while not belonging to it. “Veritatem facientes in caritate”, that is, “speaking the Truth in love”. How can we do that?

Perhaps, we should start with disabusing ourselves of or with debunking a common notion of who Christ truly was. Firstly, He prayed for the unity of those who followed Him and as such, He consecrated His followers so that they could be united by a love which holds both the Father and the Son together. This idea of unity is certainly appealing when all around us we experience fragmentations and divisions. People are at each other’s throats. Worst of all is that truth is now decided by who possesses a greater media presence—broadcast, digital or print. In this age of media power, a lie told one time too many tends to become “truth”, and this can happen because there are players that control the narratives. The experience of Elon Musk and Twitter shows how Big Tech functions tweaking algorithms to corral our thinking. Whoopi Goldberg who has a media presence uses God to justify gender altering surgeries for children.

One of the misguided truths about Jesus that flows from the ability to platform such a view like Whoopi’s is that Jesus was nice without qualifications. He covers our multitude of sins simply because He is merciful. Yet the most glaring exception is found when dealing with the woman caught in adultery. Jesus was incredibly gentle with her but He was also firm: “Go and sin no more”. This is the real Jesus that we need to proclaim. Having a God who is loving and kind is of course something we all want. We want a Jesus who understands and accepts us unconditionally. In reality, the truth who Jesus Christ is can both unsettle and disturb us. Yet, we should never shy from communicating the truth that has its foundation in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The unenviable challenge is to proclaim Jesus. While His truth must always be proclaimed with mercy with regard to the human condition, the question is how we should balance a kind Jesus with accepting differences while not tolerating perversion. Every encounter with someone from the fringe, the Samaritan woman, Zacchaeus or Matthew, both tax collectors, concluded with them entering into the fold of Jesus. Truth is always humbly attractive rather than thoughtlessly heavy-handed. The fact remains that while Jesus accepted all, He was uncompromising in the salvation of souls. This fact is important because “nice” seems to suggest that Jesus tolerates perversion. No matter how perverse one’s sins are, yet each experience of Jesus was always an encounter of faith and conversion. Hence, the virtue of compassion that we crave requires truth. Without truth, it is not compassion. In fact, without truth, compassion is wicked.

We can see that the entire ministry of Jesus was an acknowledgement that He lived in this world. What He did not do was to live “LIKE” this world. It makes sense that He prayed for unity. He prayed for His disciples to be united because unity is fostered by embracing the truth which is taught in the gospels and translated into action. Thus, unity requires that we speak and act in truth because the choice to live in truth has an effect on society. Civilisation can only change when we change. It begins one choice at a time.

Truth is therefore not a matter of right or being right. Rather it is an ability live truthfully that makes our speech compassionate, yet convincing and compelling. Our challenge these days is that the faculty of communication has been co-opted by an ideology that is set on dismantling the structures of racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity. It seems that these oppressions are obstacles to a freer and fuller expressions of human existence. In other words, woke ideology has compelled both speech and communication to virtue signal to the world that one’s opinion and belief stand on the “correct, right and safe side of the truth”. Think of the recent advertising fiasco where a man who identifies as a woman was put forward to be the spokesperson for Bud Light Beer because the VP for Marketing felt that the brand should keep up with the changing fads and feelings. And now Adidas seems to have jumped into the same bandwagon because it uses biological males to model women’s swimsuits.

In this age of woke virtue signalling, one must be outraged by people who are racists or behave in a patriarchal way or try to restrict created genders to basically male and female. It is as if our communication must broadcast that we are freed from racism, patriarchy or the bondage binary genders. This is the new political correctness that communication must obey if one were not to incur the condemnation of bigotry, hate speech and prejudice.

The truth to be communicated is more than just freedom from racism, patriarchy or binary restriction. It is true that any form of communication that serves the truth requires open dialogue, fraternal charity and freedom from coercion. Most of all, we should never forget that we have been set apart with a duty to present to humanity, our brothers and sisters, with the full array of what it means to live truthfully in this world but always with eyes set on another world to come.