Current Homily

Rectoría San Juan de Dios

V Sunday of Easter, Cycle B

Acts 9, 26-31; Ps 22; 1 Jn 3, 18-24; Jn 15, 1-8

Fr Dante Gabriel Jiménez Muñoz Ledo

Let Us Communicate Life

            Last week we saw Jesus as “the Good Shepherd.” Today we again hear a pre-Easter text in which Jesus defines Himself and us: “I am the vine and you are the vine shoots.” This episode takes place at the Last Supper when Jesus is saying good-bye to His disciples. He defines the true disciple as someone who lives through Him, attached to Him, and who is destined to bear fruit and to be a communicator of life.

            It seems that Jesus is concerned about the degree to which His disciples will be able to pass on the life that they have received from Him through His death and resurrection.

            We today can read this text from the perspective of our encounter with the Risen Jesus. Those of us who have rejoiced at the Passover of the Lord are full of the sap, of the life of the Risen One that courses through our being like the sap that runs through the vine shoots. For that reason, we can describe ourselves as communicators of life.

            This is the idea that can help us, during the week to advance in the purification of our Christianity. We can ask ourselves, how much life am I communicating to others? How much of the life that comes from Christ am I communicating to others? It is a good time to think about the persons who come into the different facets of my daily life—my profession, my job, the family, etc—and whether they leave my presence with a communication of life or of death. How much life are we communicating? This is an important question because as Christians we are born into this dynamic of the life and love of the Risen One.

            To be communicator of life, we can try these three proposals:           

         1-Let us dare to return from death.

            St Paul, as we heard in the first reading, dares to return from being a communicator of death in the persecution of the Church, and begins to live his conversion in all truth. He dares to be a communicator of life. It is also like the branch on the vine that appears dead in winter and, just when it looks as if nothing will emerge from it, it comes to life

            St Paul goes from a life of a lonely pursuer of Christians to a communal life in the primitive Church of Jerusalem. He is protected by the disciples and dispatched to Tarsus on behalf of the nascent Church because his life as a convert and communicator of life was in danger.

            Many today can discover their own deaths: whoever feels unworthy of the full life of God; those who are now advanced in age and are often depressed, believing that there is little that they can do…Each person can discover today where his spiritual winter or his own deaths are and dare to return from death.

            2-Let us love through our works.

            That is to say, let us practice charity. It is almost certain that we have all acted from love. We think of the times that we have rescued someone by giving him the gift of our person, even our material help. Can you remember a time when you did something good for another person? What do we experience when we have been of use in rescuing someone? Do you remember the signs of his gratitude? When this has happened, the first thing we understand is that it was not because of our own merits. We can contemplate in full color the fruit of the love of Christ that has passed through us.

            We must dare repeatedly to love through our works because in that way we are being communicators of the life of Jesus. Our conscience will be satisfied and we will grow in humility.

            3-Let us accustom ourselves to being vine shoots.

         Because if we don’t do that, pride will lead us to occupy the place of God, to believe that we are the vine. But as we have heard, Jesus is the vine and we are the vine shoots.

            To be a shoot of the vine is not easy but it is all a spiritual plan. It means to confirm from time to time that the life that we are communicating is not ours, but the life of Jesus. To confirm that we remain in Him and He in us is the way that the purity of our being Christians can be measured.

            To be a vine shoot means to experience the life of Jesus that flows through our spiritual veins and is capable of changing lives and producing much fruit.

            To be a shoot of the vine means “to accept the pruning” so that we can bear more fruit. Have you been pruned lately? Spiritual pruning hurts us because it seems as if something of ourselves dies, but it is good because what dies in us we do not need for salvation.