Saturday in the Fifth Week of Easter, May 4, 2024

John 15, 18-21

Jesus said to his disciples: “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you. Remember the word I spoke to you, ‘No slave is greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. And they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who sent me.”

How happy God would make us if we would let him!  This is the theme of the recent Gospel Readings from St. John’s Gospel.  But how do we let God make us happy?  In this Reading, Jesus tells us what allows God to make us happy: “Do not belong to this world”, and, “Remember the word that I spoke to you.”  If we set our hearts on the things of this world, we will be disappointed and made unhappy again and again because they do not last and hardly begin to please us before anxiety for them or desire for something better.  But we were made by God for himself.  We were made to live in Eden, out of which we came because of sin, but we yearn to go there, whether we recognize this or not, for it was there that God walked and conversed openly with us.  We live in a damaged world now and attempt to make ourselves happy with the damaged things around us.  We seek riches, but not eternal riches; we seek fame, but not of a reputation for virtue; we seek pleasure, but not eternal joy; we seek power, not service in the court of the great King.  Once we eschew the things of this world, the things that the people around us are killing the,selves to obtain, we allow God to make us happy.

“Remember the word that I spoke to you.”  We set the image of the Crucified Christ before our eyes and his words in the ears of our hearts and remember him who loves us beyond all reason.  Clearing our souls of sin and attachment to sin so as to do away with all obstacles between us and him, we put ourselves in a position in which God will make us happy, despite whatever suffering we might endure in the course of our lives or through persecution on account of our faith.  More and more through grace we shall become like Jesus, and following him more closely, we step through the moments of trial in this world to the rapturous eternity of the next.

The twenty-fourth article in our continuing series on the Holy Mass: The Agnus Dei

“Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.”  

This is the third of the hymns incorporated into the body of the Mass.  It adapts the words of St. John the Baptist in John 1, 29: “Behold the Lamb of God. Behold him who taketh away the sin of the world” which the priest will quote in the elevation before Holy Communion.  To these words is added two pleas for mercy and one for peace.  Pope Sergius I (d. 701) ordered the Agnus Dei to be sung during the Fraction of the Host.  It is fitting for this hymn to be recited or chanted during the Fraction, which signifies the Death of our Lord, because it recalls for us that the Lamb of God died for our sake: “He was offered because it was his own will, and he opened not his mouth: he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter” (Isaiah 53, 7).