Ascension Thursday Sermons

As the Apostles were discussing this question of what Jesus would mean by, "Within a short time you will not see Me, and then you will see Me again," they did not understand possibly what that meant. Of course we can look back on it and see that it meant He was going to die and then He was going to rise from the dead. This part of the Gospel of St. John was prior to our Lord's death and so it was not a post-Resurrection situation. So what our Lord was telling His disciples is that they will indeed lose sight of Him; He was going to be buried, then they will see Him again. But because they did not understand what "to rise from the dead" meant they did not understand what it was that He was talking about.

That many (those who were worldly) in Jerusalem at the time rejoiced over our Lord's Crucifixion. The One who had caused them all kinds of difficulty was gone. He had been removed from their sight. He was not preaching in their streets or in their temple anymore. He was not causing any problems for them, and so they rejoiced momentarily. Until suddenly there was no one in the tomb, and then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord at the Resurrection while the others, of course, began to get upset.

Thursday May 24, 2001

Sixth Week of Easter

Reading (Acts 18:1-8)

Gospel (St. John 16:16-20)

Then He went on to tell them that they will mourn while the world rejoices, but that their mourning will be turned into joy. We can look at it from a different perspective. We know that is historically what happened. That many (those who were worldly) in Jerusalem at the time rejoiced over our Lord's Crucifixion. The One who had caused them all kinds of difficulty was gone. He had been removed from their sight. He was not preaching in their streets or in their temple anymore. He was not causing any problems for them, and so they rejoiced momentarily. Until suddenly there was no one in the tomb, and then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord at the Resurrection while the others, of course, began to get upset.

Now things of course are very different, we know what happened two thousand years ago. If we look at it in the modern situation we can look around and realize that when it comes to Jesus the world still mourns. They rejoice in the fact that they think they are being able to remove the Lord. Just look at what happens in our system in America. If you want to bring Buddhism into our schools, that is okay. If you want to bring the Muslim religion into the schools, that is okay. If you want to be New Age, that is okay. In fact if you want to bring satanism into the schools, that is okay. If you want to talk about Jesus Christ in our public schools, that is forbidden. We can look at many of the other laws. For instance I heard somebody talking last night, and they decided that for the Jewish people the menorah is the symbol of their religion. Consequently around Christmas time, which is the time of Hanukah for the Jewish people, there are menorahs all over the place in New York City. But they decided, the law decided, that the symbol for Christians is a Christmas tree, not a crèche. It is forbidden to have the baby Jesus, and Mary, and Joseph but it is okay if you want to put up a Christmas tree in your window. The Christmas tree has nothing to do with what we are all about, but they want to remove Jesus they want to make this purely secular. So we see that the same pattern is there and the world rejoices when it gets Jesus out of their sight. But we always have Jesus in our hearts, and we have Him in the Blessed Sacrament, and we rejoice in our union with the Lord. The fact of the matter is that they will never be able to remove Jesus.

The day will come when they will actually appear to have destroyed the Church. The Lord has made that very clear and the Church has made that very clear. And they will all rejoice when that happens. But Christianity, Catholicism will never be removed. Just as happened two thousand years ago at the Resurrection, when the Church appears to be dead, she will rise. And those who are with the Church will rejoice and those who are worldly will weep. We see that the same pattern is going to reoccur. What we need to do is to make sure that no matter what we keep our eyes on Jesus Christ. No matter what happens in the world, no matter how politically incorrect it is to be a Catholic, we need to maintain our Catholicism in its fullness. Do not water it down to try to make it more acceptable or palatable to the people in the world. It does not matter how watered down it is, Jesus will never be acceptable to people of the world. We simply need to live our faith. We need to embrace our faith in its fullness.

We have cause for rejoicing because we know that Jesus is risen from the dead. We know that He is ascended into heaven. We know that He is with us, along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, dwelling in our hearts. He is with us in the Blessed Sacrament. So for a short time His disciples did not see Him but then they saw Him again. For us He has never been removed from us. And if for a short time at some point in the future, it becomes a problem to be a Catholic in this society, it does not matter because Jesus in there. We will be with Him again, in this world and in the next. No matter what occurs, maintain your faith in Jesus Christ. Do not let anyone take it from you, and do not think that there is cause for weeping. As long as Jesus is in our hearts and as long He is with us in the Blessed Sacrament, as Christian people we should be filled with joy.

Note:Father Altier does not prepare his homilies in advance, but relies solely upon the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

When We Feel Abandoned by God

May 9, 2002

Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Reading (Acts 18:1-8)

Gospel (St. John 16:16-20)

In the Gospel reading, Our Lord, in explaining to His disciples what He means by "In a little while you will not see Me and then in a little while you will see Me again," tells them they will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. They will grieve, but their grief will turn to joy. That is the pattern we have to understand. Of course, we know, as we look back at it, that He was telling them He was going to be crucified and buried and they would not see Him; then on the third day, He would rise from the dead and they would see Him again.

For us, now, it is to be able to look at the pattern and know that the way the Lord is going to work in our lives is in a similar manner. He walks along with us, just as He did with the disciples, and then as we grow in the spiritual life, there are times where the Lord will seem to no longer be there. We will look for Him and we will not be able to find Him internally. We will be left in kind of a chaotic state. The Lord will seem to have abandoned us, to have disappeared from within, but that is to test the faith; it is to purify and to strengthen us. As the Lord purifies things, we are able to say "yes".

When we look at it, we have to understand it is not saying "yes" as the apostles did at that point, because they did not say "yes" with faith when the Lord died. The only one who did was our Blessed Lady, and so it is to say "yes" with her: "Yes, I believe the Lord is still here, even though it feels like I have been abandoned, even though I am grieving in the depths of my heart because I cannot find the Lord; yet, I believe He is there. I know He loves me. I know that He is going to be back, that He is going to give me the grace I need, that He is going to fill my soul with His love." All those things we need to be able to hang onto because those are the promises He made and we know that that is there. But in the midst of our grief, the doubts creep in very quickly. We begin to wonder and we begin to doubt. We think that all the things we believed were for naught, and yet that faith stills needs to be there to keep saying, "I believe."

When we are able to survive that time, the Lord will then show Himself to us once again and we will be filled with joy. It is that joy He spoke of in the Gospel when He said, "No one will be able to take it from you," because it will truly be His joy. It will fill our hearts when we have been purified. It is not the joy of being able to know Him from a distance, which is indeed a great joy in itself, but it is the joy that is God’s own joy that fills our hearts when we are completely in union with Him, when we are perfected. It is a joy that cannot be removed by anything or anyone.

That is the way we can understand these words for ourselves. We grieve in the midst of our afflictions and of our purifications and of our seeming abandonment, but that lasts for only a little while, and then we will be filled with joy. Even if we look at it with regard to our salvation, the world rejoices now. Look around, they are all rejoicing out there. They think this is wonderful, but those are the ones who, without conversion, will grieve for eternity. Those who are followers of Christ grieve at what they see in the world, but that grief, too, will be turned to joy when we see the Lord face to face. Our grief will be turned, then, to eternal joy.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Thursday May 29, 2003

Sixth Week of Easter

Reading (Acts 18:1-8)

Gospel (St. John 16:16-20)

Our Lord, in the Gospel reading, told His disciples that in a little while they would not see Him and then a little while again and they would see Him once again. Obviously, given the context, they could not understand what He meant. If we were standing with Him 2,000 years ago and He spoke these words, we would not understand what He meant. It is so important to Saint John that he repeats the same thing three times within a dozen lines to make sure we understand that this is something which is critical for us. It, of course, deals with His death and Resurrection, which is the central point of our salvation, and that the Lord is going to be taken from them. He tells them that they will grieve and they will mourn while the world rejoices, but then their grief will be turned into rejoicing. And for the worldly, it will be just the opposite; their joy will be turned into grief. So when they were able to see the Lord again in His Resurrection, it was the fulfillment of this.

But for us as Christian people, it is more than just simply being able to grasp that the Lord was taken from them and then He was seen by them again. We have to grasp the concept that in just a couple of little lines this states our salvation, that the Lord was removed from us and He was given back. Really, it is not so much that He was taken from us; what happened is that we rejected Him and now we have accepted Him. And it is in that acceptance of what it is and what He has done that we are going to find salvation. So for Him to be able to say, “In a little while you will see Me no longer, and then a little while again and you will see Me again,” from their perspective, they would assume this is going to be permanent: “You will see Me no longer.” He did not say, “A little while and I am going to be gone for three days.” From their perspective, because they did not believe in the Resurrection, they assumed that it was going to be forever. But the Lord was telling them of His Resurrection.

But, for us, it is to know that the Lord is always there, that once we have come to this point of conversion, once we have opened our hearts to be able to accept Our Lord, He is always present. Even if we do not recognize His presence among us, even if we cannot feel Him, it does not matter. He is always there as long as we are in the state of grace, and He dwells within us. This mystery, then, of the death and Resurrection continues within us in the spiritual life because there are times when He seems to be nowhere near and His presence seems a million miles away. Yet, as we have seen, if He did not leave He would not be able to be within us. And so He never leaves us unless we commit a mortal sin, and that is only because we tell Him to get out.

We simply need to keep our focus on Him. Even if we cannot sense Him present, it does not matter – He has never gone away. He is always present just as He was with His disciples. He never left them, but in their hearts they had left Him. Once the Resurrection took place, their hearts could be completely fixed upon Him. That is what He is looking for from us. He is always there. The question is not on His part; the question is always on our part. Even if we do not recognize that He is present, do we believe that He is with us? Do we know with the confidence of our faith that He is present within and that we will recognize His presence once again? But even if we cannot feel it, know that He is present because that mystery of the Passion, the death and Resurrection of Christ, has to be lived in each one of us; and if it is not, we are not true followers of Christ. That is why this is so important to Saint John, because what happened to His disciples is going to happen for each one of us and we need to have that faith, the faith that the disciples could not have yet because they did not understand. But for each one of us, we are without excuse. We know; we understand; all that remains now is for us to put it into practice, to remain faithful to Our Lord when He seems not to be present, and to await the day when once again we will see Him.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Thursday May 20, 2004

Sixth Week of Easter

Reading (Acts 18:1-8)

Gospel (St. John 16:16-20)

The Ascension has been transferred to Sunday in this diocese.

These words that we hear in the Gospel, of Our Lord telling His disciples that in a little while they will no longer see Him and again in a little while they will see Him, can be taken in a couple of different ways. Obviously, the context in which He intends it here is that He is going to be crucified and buried (when they will no longer see Him), and then He will rise from the dead and they will see Him again. For us, at the same time, we can look at it and say, “He is now in heaven. He has ascended to the right hand of the Father and we do not see Him; and yet He is coming again. He will take us to be with Him where He is and we will see Him.” Or, for those who are alive on the face of the earth when He returns, they again will see Him.

In the meantime, He tells us that the world is going to rejoice while His disciples grieve. What has happened is exactly that. The world rejoices because they have rejected God, and so this is their time for revelry. Just like in the camp when Moses was up on Mount Sinai and he heard the sound of revelry in the camp, he came down to see them worshiping a golden calf and getting into all kinds of unfortunate activities as they fell into pagan worship and all that went along with it. That is exactly what the world is doing. The world has rejected its God and has chosen false gods for itself. And with great abandon it has been practicing revelry, false worship, and all the unfortunate practices that go along with it.

In the meantime, anyone who wants to be a true Christian person has, on one hand, been grieving, not because the Lord is not present – because He is – but grieving because the souls of so many are being lost. As Our Lady told us at Fatima: Souls are falling into hell like snowflakes because they have no one to pray for them. That is where the grief comes from. Imagine the grief that Saint Paul felt, for instance, when he went into the synagogue at Corinth, preached Sabbath after Sabbath, and the people rejected the message that he was preaching. So he turned to the Gentiles and they accepted it. But his heart must have been heavy because his own people, the people for whom Our Lord came, had rejected Him. We recall those words from Saint John’s Gospel: He came to His own and His own accepted Him not. He came as the light in the darkness, but men chose darkness rather than the light. None of that has changed. The difference now is that with paganism very much on the rise in the world, and Christian people falling from their faith, one has to wonder: Are we falling into that same pattern? The very people who have accepted Our Lord, those for whom He offered His death, have rejected Him. He came as the light in the darkness, but we have chosen darkness over the light. And what grief this must bring to those who truly believe. Parents whose children have fallen from the Faith know this grief very well. Having taught their children the Faith and having passed everything on to them, their children have turned their backs on Christ and walked away. They understand that grief of someone who has rejected the Lord. We understand it very well as we see all these people leaving the Church.

Yet, at the same time, the Lord tells us that our grief will be turned to joy. There is joy in people who are coming into the Church. There is joy when the children return. There is joy in knowing that Our Lord is here with us. But, of course, the fullness of joy will be when we behold Him face-to-face, when we are with Him in heaven, when we are able to be united forever. That is going to be where the joy is complete. That is when we will see that everything that has happened is part of His Providence, that He has allowed it for whatever wise reason which right now we do not understand and which right now causes us a great deal of grief; but the day will come when that grief will be turned into joy. And it is a joy that no one will be able to take from us, Our Lord tells us. That is the promise He makes.

So we need to pray that people will open their minds to the truth, that they will turn to the light and reject the darkness, that they will accept the One Who came into this world to die for them, that they too will be able to save their souls from hell so they too will be able to go to heaven. We must work at turning our own grief into joy. The way that can be done, even in the immediate, is to pray for souls, to bring them from the grip of the devil and restore them to unity with Jesus Christ. In that, even in this world we will have joy. When we are in union with Jesus in prayer and in action, and when through our prayer and sacrifices we bring others to the Lord, then just as there is in heaven so can there be on earth: There will be more rejoicing over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine people who have no need to repent.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Thursday May 5, 2005

Sixth Week of Easter

Reading (Acts 18:1-8)

Gospel (St. John 16:16-20)

Our Lord tells His disciples in the Gospel today that they will weep and mourn while the world rejoices, but then their mourning will turn into joy.

Now we know, of course, that was the case with regard to the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. It was also the case with the fact that they had to live their lives in this world for a number of years after the time of Our Lord’s Resurrection and then finally they could be put to death and then raised to life and brought to eternity in heaven. But it is also a pattern that we see over and over again in our own lives.

In the first reading, we can look at what Saint Paul was doing. He was preaching the Gospel to the Jewish people in Corinth, and when they did not want to hear it he went to the Gentiles. Imagine Saint Paul – who was such a staunch Pharisee – it must have broken his heart that people did not want to hear the truth. They did not want the Lord. Yet, at the same time, imagine the joy he had when the Gentiles accepted the Lord. We know that in our own lives it is the same pattern. There are things that happen which bring us great sorrow, and then on the other side of it there are things that occur which bring great joy. At the same time, these things can happen simultaneously. There may be one thing that is bringing a great amount of joy to our lives, while at the same time there is something else that brings a great sorrow. Some things are very brief and some things are very long, but the fact is the pattern remains.

What is necessary for us is simply to keep our focus on the Lord because that is where all of our hope comes from, and, consequently, it is where all of our joy can come from. The joy the world gives is brief and it is passing. There is nothing that lasts, as far as the world is concerned. If something happened today that was a joyful occurrence, then it is over and you move on to the next thing. When something happens with the Lord that brings joy, it does not just pass immediately; it is something which remains for a long time. We can look back at it and we can still have great joy even a long time after the event. We recall that Our Lord told us that the joy He would give is not the kind of joy the world gives, and He told us it is a joy that will not be able to be taken away. So if we want that true joy, that deep joy, it is going to be found only in the Lord – not in all the material things around us, not in anything that the world has to offer, but only in God.

We will weep and mourn as long as we are in this world because we are watching things spiral completely out of control. By itself, that would be fine, except that there are people who are being taken up in it. There are children being swept away by all of the filth and all of the nonsense. They have thrown themselves into this unfortunate mess, and they think that they like it. So there is much cause for grief, much cause for mourning. Let the world go where it is going to go because we know who the prince of this world is, but we need to pray for those souls who are being swept up in it. But even while the world goes down the tubes, we can still rejoice because we have the Lord. In the midst of all the unfortunate things that happen, Jesus is right there with us.

And so we can look beyond all the stuff of the world and we can still be filled with joy. That is what this world needs to see. And the people who are swept away in the tide of unfortunate things this world has to offer, it is what they need to see. They need to see joy because we know that in our country there are very few people who exude any joy at all, let alone a deep, abiding kind of joy. So while we mourn what is going on with our children, with our families, with our friends, with all the people we can see going down, we can still be joyful because we have the Lord and because others are turning to Him as they recognize the emptiness of what this world has to offer. If we continue to be faithful to Him, then eventually when our day comes we will be granted a joy that is beyond anything we have ever known, a joy that will never lessen, a joy that will never be taken away, because we will enter then into the face to face vision of Christ, the One upon Whom we have kept our focus in this world. On that day, that joy will never be taken. We will be filled with the joy that is Christ Himself. That is what is being offered to us. On that day, the world will mourn and grieve – not us. Now we can mourn and grieve but we can still be filled with joy, to keep our focus on Jesus, to know the joy of Christ, and to look forward to the joy that will never end.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

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