3rd Sunday after Easter 21 Apr 2013 Sermon

3rd Sunday after Easter 21.4.13 Making Christ known


Being a disciple of Christ carries with it certain responsibilities – one of which is that we are obliged to give good witness to our neighbours; to present to them the face of Christ; so that they will see in us something that would attract them also to become disciples.

This is what the apostles and disciples did after Pentecost. They showed forth the power of the Holy Spirit; they lived the Gospel; and so made many converts.

The epistle today tells us we must do the same thing.

We must be good, for its own sake, and for the glory of God; but also to win people over to join us.

We might protest that we are not as good as those first disciples and it is hard enough for us to be good even as individuals, let alone to be so good as to win over our neighbours.

Plus we have to push uphill in overcoming the scandals which are so much publicised.

Plus further the neighbours we are supposed to convince are generally a very hard-headed lot, very sceptical and hard to impress.

So we need lots of grace to cope with all this.

If we were better disciples; if there were a lot more of us – it would be easier to make the momentum that would win people over.

We started with an explosion of holiness at Pentecost but have never been able to recapture that. There have been many saints along the way, and many movements of renewal but it has never been enough to establish the true faith in all the world.

It sounds a hard thing to be better than we are. We know we ought to be better; we probably want to be better. But it is not so easy to become better.

However, fortunately, we can make progress in small steps. If it is hard to get to the top of a mountain it becomes easy if we have a chair-lift. Grace is that lift for us. Through grace we are made able to do things we would never be able to do otherwise.

We do not have to do everything all on one day. We can make great progress just by getting the next thing right; and then the one after that, and after that, and so on.

Any task becomes easier if broken down into small enough bits. And the quest for holiness follows the same principle.

We don't necessarily have to turn ourselves inside out; just get the basic things right. Avoid obvious sins; do the things we are meant to do and do them as well as possible. Offer everything to God, asking Him to bless and increase it. Modify anything in our lives that needs to change, like bad habits.

We want to set the world on fire, but we need only to strike the match from which the larger fire can come.

So if we cannot convert our neighbours by the holiness we presently radiate, we can win them over by another method: by this faithfulness to little things, attentiveness to duty. This will bring about an increase in the grace of God, which will then act on others. Without ever saying a word by way of a sermon or instruction we might still bring them to conversion. Cf.  Wives can convert their husbands without a word being spoken (1 Peter 3,1).

St Paul said to the Corinthians that he did not use philosophical arguments to win people over. He just showed them the power of the Gospel – by working miracles (1 Cor 2,4).

We would do that if we could, and maybe we will rise to that point. But in a quieter way we can already ‘show them’ by the sincerity of our lives.

We must be lights on the hilltop, whether alone, to give hope to others; or better still be part of a whole hillside of lights, when others have joined us.