Fifth Sunday of
Easter
(C - cycle) May
2, 2010
In today’s reading, the church is in crisis. Up to this point, its membership had been almost entirely Jewish, Jews who recognized Jesus as their messiah. Never forget the deep Jewish roots of our church. Now scores of gentiles were joining their community, making it different from what it had been. The Jewish Christians hadn’t bargained for this. Many of them were bewildered. Was this sudden influx of gentiles a legitimate development, or was the church going off track?
At this moment of crisis, the community turned to two giants of faith, Paul and Barnabas, the men most responsible for the conversion of the gentiles. The reading tells us “Paul and Barnabas strengthened the spirits of the disciples and exhorted them to persevere in the faith.”
We could use Paul and Barnabas today. Every day, it seems, we pick up the paper or watch the tv news and have to face stories of corruption and scandal in the church we love. It never seems to go away. A friend of mine said, “There’s a golden age of the priesthood, and this ain’t it.” Almost a year ago, the pope declared a year of the priest and we were sent prayer cards to commemorate the event. I never put them out because under the circumstances it didn’t seem right to put priests on a pedestal. I think I will put them out next week because we need all the prayers we can get.
The situation today isn’t what any of us bargained for. Some leaders in the church seem to have made every mistake you can make in dealing with the crisis. But maybe out of all this some good can come. Maybe this crisis will teach us to be a humble church that admits its mistakes and learns from them, a church that listens as well as teaches, a church that repents of its sins. The Catholic church in the United States has made a great effort to make the church a safe place for children, and that must be an ongoing concern. We want to be a church where the vulnerable get protected, where predators get punished, where victims get justice.
The church 2,000 years ago opened itself to something new. Jesus said we can’t put new wine into old wineskins. That’s an ancient way of saying, “To keep on doing the same things and expect a different result is a form of insanity.” We need to do some things in a different way. Paul and Barnabas aren’t around anymore, but the most important character in the Acts of the Apostles who spoke through them is still with us, and that is the Holy Spirit. “Holy Spirit, strengthen us in this crisis, and give us the wisdom and the courage to do new things, to change what needs to be changed. Please!”