May 21, 2012
Echoing Angelina’s generous welcome I too, on behalf of St.
Paul Cathedral and my brother priests would like to welcome all of you to this
great celebration. I am even more
eager to extend my heartfelt congratulations to the class of 2012! You are not quite finished, but you are
almost there! Just a little while longer and you will be high school graduates
and off to bigger and better things.
The first thing you have to look forward to is a great, long
summer. In fact, as I think about
my own graduation, it is the summer that followed it that stands out most in my
mind: it was one of the most fun, even blissful, times of my life.
Graduation means looking back on a great accomplishment that
is truly finished, and ahead to something truly new. And for the next few months you get to contemplate that and
celebrate it with friends and family.
As you look forward you can contemplate the promise of greater
independence and responsibility.
For many of you this means looking ahead to being away from home for the
first time, new friends, the exploration of new fields of learning. I think also that this is a joyful time
too because it is easy to imagine that you are leaving behind all that is
familiar and tiresome and beginning something new and exciting. I suspect that fuels at least a little
of the ecstatic feeling that goes with graduating from high school. I know it did in my case. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that
it is not altogether true, but I suppose your hard work at Oakland Catholic
entitles you to enjoy that thought at least a little bit.
It is entirely appropriate that we are celebrating your
great accomplishment in the context of the Easter season, the time in which we
behold the new life given to us by the Risen Lord. Easter is for Jesus’ disciples first and foremost a time of
joy and peace, enjoying the victory of Jesus. But it also a time in which they prepare for their own
mission. Jesus appears to his
disciples, forgives them, assures them of his peace, and prepares them for
their mission in the world. In
that time following the original Easter, the disciples, like all of you, stood
at a threshold. Behind them was a
time of being with Jesus, receiving his instruction. Ahead of them the mission given to them by the Lord to put
what they had received from him into action.
The mission that Jesus gives to his disciples is neatly
summarized in his own words spoken on Easter Sunday: “As the Father sent me, so
I send you.” And we see exactly
how Jesus is sent. He is sent into
a world that is good, that is blessed by God, but which is broken and
hurting. The brokenness of the
world is seen most graphically and tragically in its final response to
Christ. He comes proclaiming peace
and reconciliation, and in return he is rejected and abandoned, even by his
closest disciples. And yet he
clings faithfully to his mission to love and heal. When he is rejected, he forgives; in the face of curses, he
bestows blessings. He persists
unrelentingly in his offer of love and peace to an angry and hostile
world. This is his mission and he
accepts the sacrifice it demands.
This is how he is sent. And so when he says, “As the Father sent me, so I send you,”
we can know just what he means. We
are sent to bring to the world the healing that comes from Christ. This is the mission of the Church; this
is the mission of all Christ’s faithful.
To be risen with the Lord is to embrace the new life that comes from
him, it is to be converted to the newness of life of which the prayers of Easter
so often speak. The converted
person goes out into the world with the same healing purpose of Christ,
determined to embrace the world’s goodness by answering its brokenness and
confusion with love and patience, to respond to malice with mercy, to return
curses with blessings. This is
what we behold in Christ; this is what we behold in his first disciples on the
day of Pentecost and in their ministry that follows.
We see further that this ministry is centered on what the
Acts of the Apostle calls, “the breaking of the bread”: the celebration of the
Eucharist, to which we in our worship are about to turn. The Eucharist fuels their mission and
impels them to embrace the mission on which they are sent by Christ. The work of discipleship always draws
its strength from Christ. Christ
is with his disciples as he prepares them for their mission, and remains with
them as they carry it out. St.
Luke points out that in the midst of the Last Supper Jesus announces to his
disciples as they argue about which of them is the best, that he “stands in
their midst one who serves” (Lk 22:27).
In our celebration of the Eucharist we see that Christ still stands in
our midst as one who serves. Even
now, risen in glory, exists not for himself but for us: to nourish us, to
strengthen us, in order that we might conduct ourselves similarly, for others,
for their benefit. Even after
sending them as he is sent, he remains with them to inspire them.
As graduates of Oakland Catholic you have been given great
tools with which to bring Christ’s healing to the world. These are gifts given to you for
service. The continuation of your
development will lead you to fields of employment, to vocations within the
Church or to family life. Within
these endlessly varied contexts you will encounter joys and hardships,
successes and setbacks, opportunities and obstacles. You will experience in all times and places the world’s
goodness and its brokenness.
Your education has prepared you to engage these circumstances with a
healing purpose, to make better what is good.
This doesn’t mean that your education or any other aspect of
your life is not given to you for your own happiness. As Jesus prepares his disciples for their mission he
promises them a share in his joy, and in fact we hear him telling his
disciples, “to be of good cheer,” be happy!
They key to joy and happiness is taking up the mission that
Jesus gives to us. In one of
Jesus’ most famous parables, the parable of the talents, the master in the
parable congratulates his hard working disciples who have worked to increase
what was given to them. He says to
them, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over little; I will set you over
much. Enter into the joy of your
master…” These words indicate that
to enter the joy of the master is to take up his work, to take up his
mission. And this is exactly what
we see in Jesus’ disciples. The
men and women who fled in terror on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion now display
not only a supernatural courage in going out into the whole world, but even joy
as they face the opposition of the world to their Christian mission.
As Jesus prepares his disciples for their mission he prays
that the joy shared between him and his Father be in his disciples, and that
“their joy be complete.” The joy
of your graduation is great, but for all its greatness it is still
incomplete. There is more to
come. Your joy will be made
complete as you devote what has been given to you at Oakland Catholic to the
living out of a good, holy life; a life that embraces the goodness of the world;
a life of loving service to God and to neighbor.
