Richard Bollman, S.J.

EASTER VIGIL HOMILY, 2008: "What Disciples Learn"

Matthew 28:1-10, 16-20.

A friend of mine in church work remarked once

"it’s not so difficult to baptize someone,

or even to teach them something about Jesus’ vision of life,

but how do you make disciples?"

That’s what Jesus asks: that we make disciples.

It makes me wonder what kind of a goal we speak of here.

What kind of person is a "disciple" going to be?

Essentially I think the disciple of Jesus is one who knows

that the course of learning is never finished.

You don’t graduate, you step into a friendship with God in Christ

that will always be with you.

Jesus as such, Jesus is the learning.

I think that’s what the women "got," in the Resurrection stories.

Suddenly Jesus met them,

and they were open to something surprising and affectionate,

a connection with Jesus no longer limited by geography or time.

So the course of learning is not over, it only begins now.

And those early believers found they were involved

in a connection to the Christ

that was way beyond their ethnic boundaries, just being Jews together.

Jesus claimed them, and they belonged to him,

as human beings of the world community.

They saw that, felt it, acted on it,

and actually seem to have heard it from his own mouth.

So disciples live in a big world, nothing is alien to them.

And yet it’s a world of daily recognition and intimacy.

Because the core of our prayer ritual is simply the command:

"Remember me always." Very Personal.

"Touch me every day at the table and in the common love you have.

Meet me every day in forgiveness, which is the work of God on earth.

And from this rootedness in me you will know how to proceed."

Discipleship. There it is, an inside reality. Learning Jesus,

so as to learn more who you are yourself and what to do.

I remember one startling phone call in my life

from a woman at a Jesuit Pastoral Institute in Manila.

It was 1989. I’d never met her, didn’t know the place.

But they needed somebody to kick off a sabbatical program

for church workers, lay and religious, from all over South Asia.

There’d be maybe 50 of them. She described the details a little,

a week’s course, and actually it was close to what I’d been doing at Milford, and I thought, "well, I have to say yes to this."

What goes on in a moment like that? "Having to say yes."

It was not an assessment of my interests, natural inclinations, or experience,

nor my love for the Church of Asia.

I’m not a natural traveler, and wasn’t exactly weighing possibilities.

It was something totally different: like I knew this was coming from Jesus,

it had all the earmarks, all the right timing, rested from the summer,

catching me, you could say, at a vulnerable moment of trust.

It’s a little like saying yes to a first date,

in a situation of complete uncertainty, with a lot of people’s needs at stake.

I didn’t know exactly what I’d do, but I thought even if I failed at it,

I should try doing this. It felt personal.

You know, later on I found that the person who recommended me

was Howard Gray, a very very brilliant man, teacher of Ignatian thought,

who told me he gave them my name because he believed

I could speak English slowly enough to be understood.

And I was basically optimistic.

That’s what these hard-working mostly third world

teachers and pastors and catechists need, a spirit of hope.

I learned a lot from his assessment.

When you actually get to know your gifts

they are so obvious and simple. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Discipleship is not the spiritual expertise or the books published

or the programs established, the buildings built,

it’s rather getting a feel for the inside Jesus, the one inside you,

and the enormous world of Jesus’ concerns

in which each of us is prompted to play a kind of small role. Which is great.

And it’s not the size of your influence

trying to build and control something,

it’s rather living toward the world, toward people,

in fundamental hope and concern together.

Just a little thing like speaking slowly for a Japanese nun,

listening with love to a Bangla-Deshi pastor.

Hope is not a political program, it is that instinct that whispers,

"Something wonderful is going on right here in front of me,

and something more wonderful is surely possible,

even if it will take a long time."

That’s why, classically, in the Christian Way,

the sight of hungry people prompts you to feed them,

and to find out why they’re hungry;

that’s why we trust that those who mourn will be consoled,

even if not by you or me. But it will happen.

Indeed, I have found that those who mourn ARE consoled,

and they console me

with the dignity and simplicity of what they have lost and gained.

So there it is, the empty tomb: the new moment. "Set out now."

And the mountain top where Jesus meets everybody again in this Gospel,

is yet another moment when he invites us all to go out,

to go down, down, down to where it is happening, to the deep water.

Indeed, in the Christian Way,

building your shrine on a mountain top is bad advice.

What matters is to live painstakingly day by day

in the world of what’s real and unfinished.

The Buddhists have a great take on this.

Our real spiritual goal cannot be just to shake off our own suffering,

but rather to start to see with undefended heart

the needs and hopelessness around us, because that’s why we’re here.

No need to be afraid of it. We are called to move "toward the turbulence,"*

the anguish, the hunger and thirst.

We do this because a searching openness of this kind

is also happening among other souls everywhere in the world.

We’re not alone, you and I, this little local church.

A few months back an American Buddhist women taught a weekend here.

Thank God one of my own women friends took notes.

The teacher is Joanna Macy. And she affirmed so insistently

that our world really is turning, a spiritual turning within.

The current rush to grow fast and measure profits by products,

this is caught in a self-destructive pattern, one quick killing after another,

and meanwhile something else is going on within people.

Stop whining, she said, and don’t be afraid.

And this is a quote: "When we open to the pain of our world," she said,

"we discover our interconnectedness in the web of life.

This is the gift of dark and dangerous times:

to find again our mutual belonging."

This is the gift, then, of our nation’s pain,

our church’s divisions, our children’s need for guidance,

our neighbor’s need for a job,

a working mother’s need for health care,

even the spasmodic outrage of long abused children,

or long exploited peoples.

All of it nothing new and nothing finished,

but a gift, finally, in which we find one another

and find how much we really do belong to our world,

and to our era in history.

We cannot shield ourselves from it,

nor can we turn it all around to the way things were.

Here we are. So as the women found, our fear yields to great joy.

And Christ is with us and in us.

_____________________________________

*An American Buddhist voice shows up here,

Pema Chodron, in a current collection called