Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A
A shout-out to our Australian readers: happy Feast of Mary, Help of Christians, Patroness of Australia (celebrated on the twenty-fourth of May, or this year on the twenty-fifth)! This feast is also celebrated in various places around the world, especially in Italy and Latin America.
And to those Americans and Canadians and others who live where the feast of the Ascension is moved from Thursday to Sunday, happy Solemnity of the Ascension!
There is a happy coincidence in these feasts.
The first reading for the Sunday describes the life of the disciples after they returned to Jerusalem after the Savior’s ascension:
When they entered the city
they went to the upper room where they were staying,
Peter and John and James and Andrew,
Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew,
James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot,
and Judas son of James.
All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer,
together with some women,
and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.
St. Luke’s Gospel and his Acts of the Apostles are twin works, the first presenting the substance of Our Lord’s work, the second the first flowering of his Church. Luke is the evangelist and chronicler of the Mystical Body of Christ, first in the head and then in the members of the body; first in the gospel, then in the history of the apostolic Church.
And in both works Our Lady, Mary the Mother of Jesus, is the lovely link between the two—as she always has been and shall be. She is the mother of the head, in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Passion, and she is the mother of the members, both queen of the apostles from the cenacle at Pentecost to come, and help of Christians by her prayer with them and for them, as she magnifies the Lord and obtains the outpouring of the promised Holy Spirit upon them.
St. Bernard, among others, compares Our Lady to the neck that links the body to the head, or an aqueduct for the waters of life; and these images are somewhat helpful. However, she is not just a conduit or connection in the body’s different parts. She is the other of the whole Christ, and thus her role pervades the whole the mystical body, Christ and us.
Her work is thus one of unity: she is mother of the whole person of the Church, we might say, just as our own mothers are mothers of our whole selves. This is why she is so closely identified with the Holy Spirit, whom St. Luke reveals as overshadowing her in the gospel and as being the first fruits of her prayer with the apostles and disciples at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of unity in the body of Christ, the heart of love that binds us together—as the apostle says, “The love of Christ has been poured out in our hearts through the Spirit, which has been given to us.”
The visible, historical agent of this maternal role of unity in love is Mary, the mother of the Church. Her feast, in the ordinary form of the calendar, was established by Pope Francis for Pentecost Monday, the day after the feast. And so just as we have the feast of Mary, the Mother of God on the octave of Christmas, the birth of the head, so we have the feast of Mary, Mother of the Church, right after the birthday of the body of his members.
There are many diversions that afflict the Church today, the result of errors in doctrine, moral and liturgical abuses, vainglory and ambition, the neglect of prayer and penance. These are all the sources of disintegration; they are many. But to make it easy for us, there is only one source of unity in the Church: Love, which is a person in the Holy Spirit sent by the Father and the Son, through Mary, the mother of Christ, the spouse of the Spirit and mother of the Church.
This sweet “Help of Christians” will help us wherever in our lives we find a lack of love or the inevitable divisions that we encounter in our families, friendships, work, and world. Let us fly to her for her help as we look above awaiting the coming of the Spirit of love, of divine charity. This Love makes of any day a feast of the Holy Spirit’s descent and of any soul a friend of Christ and his Blessed Mother!