Do Not Belong to the World

Gospel Reflection for May 12, 2024, the Seventh Sunday of Easter - John 17:11b-19

Holy Father, keep them in thy name whom thou has given me; that they may be one, as we also are.

While I was with them, I kept them in thy name. Those whom thou gavest me have I kept; and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition, that the scripture may be fulfilled.

And now I come to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy filled in themselves.

I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world; as I also am not of the world.

I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from evil.

They are not of the world, as I also am not of the world.

Sanctify them in truth. Thy word is truth.

As thou hast sent me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.

And for them do I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth. (John 17:11b-19 DRA)

The Solemnity of the Ascension, which took place last Thursday, is in many dioceses of the U.S., including my own, transferred to this Sunday. However, since my colleague Judson has already written an excellent reflection for that feast, I will focus today on the readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, which many, myself included, will not otherwise hear; it may be helpful for you to take a look at the other non-Gospel readings for today before reading my reflection.

The readings for this non-Ascension Sunday focus on a topic which is perennially important but perhaps never more so than today: the seduction of worldliness and the call to be holy. Jesus, in what is called His “High Priestly Prayer” excerpted in this gospel passage, addresses God directly as the High Priest of the Church, interceding on our behalf with His Father, as He soon will in His self-sacrificial offering on the altar of the Cross. Within the context of this “Farewell Discourse,” “the world,” a term with many meanings in this gospel and throughout the New Testament, refers in this instance to the fallen and sinful world of what Pope St. John Paul II called “historical man” or “the man of concupiscence.” This man, which includes all humans who have ever lived besides Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, lives under the burden of original sin, afflicted by what St. John describes in his first epistle as the threefold concupiscence: “the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life”. (1 Jn 2:16)

Instead of receiving Creation and one another as gifts from God, we seek to possess and use them for our selfish ends, and in this way we become “the servant of sin” (Jn 8:34) and lose the freedom that comes from offering ourselves as a free gift to others. Our hearts are divided by the knowledge of good and evil and darkened by the animal drives and ignorance which, through concupiscence, hinder reason from contemplating the truth, delighting in the good and ascending to the beautiful according to its nature. The concupiscence described by St. John is worldliness, the state of living in the ways of this fallen world, whose pseudo-prince is Satan (Jn 12:31) and which values only lustful desires, greedy possessiveness and the arrogance which places itself as the supreme authority of truth while acting as if God does not exist.

As described in the first reading from Acts, this is the worldliness which poisoned Judas Iscariot. As a thief and a zealot who could think only of worldly success and power, he could not grasp the otherworldly messianic mission of Christ, who came, as the new Moses, to lead mankind onto a new Exodus – not from slavery to political rulers but from slavery to sin, into the definitive Promised Land of Heaven. Unlike St. Mary Magdalene, the sister of Lazarus, Judas could not see that love of man must flow from love of God, as St. John made clear in his Epistle reading today: we must love our neighbor, but only for God’s sake, loving the image of God in him and serving him as Christ serves us. Judas wanted a kind of benevolent humanitarianism which may have pragmatic uses but cannot bring salvation, for even if poverty is eradicated and man lives in an earthly kingdom of justice, peace and prosperity, sin will still enslave his heart and lead him inexorably toward damnation without the saving grace of Christ. This is the demonic lie of the Prosperity Gospel, which Judas prefigured, that worldly success can ever equate to spiritual holiness.

In truth, the holiness Christ called us to is a participation in His own holiness, that is, to be “set apart” from the world, to be otherworldly and supernatural as He is, to live in God and not in the darkness of Satan which engulfs this world. This is why the world hated the apostles and it will hate all Christians who seek to be holy, as St. Paul wrote: “And all that will live godly in Christ Jesus, shall suffer persecution.” (2 Tim 3:12) The more we try to be holy, to “be not conformed to this world; but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God”, (Rom 12:2) the more the world, in obedience to its father the devil, (Jn 8:44) will hate us.

We must not be surprised by this, or fall into the Prosperity Gospel trap of doubting God’s Providence when we are persecuted, and we must remember that not only demons but those who serve them, knowingly or not, as well as our own flesh will conspire ceaselessly against us. Like the great martyrs throughout history, we must see this persecution as a consolation, a reassurance of God’s love, always striving to be holy, to fight concupiscence through self-mastery and to remain in communion with the Church, so that the grace of Christ given in the Sacraments can sustain us in spiritual battle and we may be sanctified in the truth.

Unfortunately, perhaps due to the great prosperity afforded by capitalism and democracy in the modern world, Catholics today are more prone to worldliness than ever before. Without the memento mori of past afflictions or the humiliation of poverty, under which most people in history have lived, today we tend to find God less relevant, to see His invisibility, which St. John mentions in his letter, as a sign of His disconnection from daily life. We thus deny the fear of God which instructed our ancestors, making us liable to fall into a lazy permissiveness which fails to correct sin and error, both in ourselves and others, forgetting Christ’s words: “But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven.” (Mt 10:33) And this denial is not only in apostasy or atheism but also in the permission of grave sin. Those in the Church who bless sin, who separate the procreative from the unitive meaning of the marital act, who “call evil good, and good evil”, (Is 5:20) who promote the murder of the unborn or who scandalize others with their false beliefs and sinful lives are slaves to sin and belong to this world rather than to Christ.

We must be ever vigilant against these temptations, all of which are so easy in the modern godless world, clinging instead to the Sacred Heart of Christ and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, so that we may be belong to the world for which we were made: the world of Heaven. In this way, through holiness and purity of heart, even in this life we may be able to see God, (Mt 5:8; Heb 12:14) if the divine love who is the Holy Spirit dwells within us.