Monday of the Seventh Week of Pascal Time [English]

Eustache Le Sueur, The Preaching of Saint Paul at Ephesus (1649)

The End of Our Illusions and the Anchor of His Peace

Mass Readings: Acts 19:1-8 ; Psalm 67/68 ; Jn 16:29-33

Yesterday, on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, we entered into the most precious secret of Jesus: His priestly prayer. The Lord raised His eyes to heaven to entrust us to the Father, promising us that we would never be orphans in this world. He prayed for our unity, for our protection, so that we might inhabit the world without allowing ourselves to be absorbed by its logic of fear and self-sufficiency.

Today, on this Monday, the liturgy immediately confronts us with the realism of our human condition: how do we live this truth when the enthusiasm fades? How do we react when our weaknesses and illusions burst into the open? The path of faith is not a heroic ascent that we lead with our own muscles, but a daily consent to a presence that goes before us and has already conquered everything that frightens us.

First Point: The Trap of a Faith Without Fire

In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul arrives in Ephesus and meets a small group of believers, and he asks them a question that should resonate in our conscience every morning: “When you became believers, did you receive the Holy Spirit?”. The response of these men is disconcertingly sincere: “We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit”. And yet they were disciples, they were trying to do well. Paul then asks them what baptism they received, and they reply: “John's baptism”.

Let us understand well what this means for us today. John's baptism is the baptism of good will, of moral conversion, of human effort. It can be summarized as the religion of someone who says to themselves: “I am going to make efforts, I am going to correct my flaws, I am going to obey the rules so that God will be happy with me.” Obviously, this is a noble approach, but it is terribly dry, because it produces tired, tense Christians who carry faith like a backpack filled with duties. To live one's faith solely as a morality of personal improvement, without the experience of the Holy Spirit, is to exhaust oneself building a well without ever touching the source of living water.

Paul then explains to them that John was preparing the way for Jesus. And so, as soon as they receive baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus and Paul lays his hands on them, the Holy Spirit comes down upon them: their lives are turned upside down; they begin to speak in tongues and to prophesy. The gift of the Spirit is not an option for elite Christians; it is the ignition of the engine of the Christian life. The Holy Spirit is precisely this sap that Jesus spoke of, this promised Defender who heals us from our orphan mentality. Without Him, we remain the artisans of our own holiness, and we end up discouraged in the face of the magnitude of our weaknesses. The spiritual life does not begin with what we do for God, but with our acceptance of receiving what God wants to do in us.

Second Point: The Mirage of Our Fervor

This transition from a faith based on our own strength to a faith received as a gift sheds direct light on today's Gospel scene, where the disciples hear Jesus speaking clearly, without figures of speech, and they exclaim with great confidence: “Now we know... this is why we believe that you came from God”. Indeed, they are sincere, they overflow with enthusiasm; they feel that their faith is finally solid and unbeatable, because they have understood intellectually and emotionally who Jesus is.

But Jesus' response is of a striking, almost ironic realism, yet imbued with immense compassion: “Now you believe! Behold, the hour is coming when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and you will leave me alone”. Jesus does not validate their fleeting enthusiasm because, indeed, He knows what man is made of; He well knows that our sensible fervor is like wax that melts before the fire, to use the words of today's psalmist. As long as everything is going well, as long as the presence of Jesus is consoling, it is easy to say “I believe”; but as soon as the darkness of the Passion approaches, this momentum will collapse and everyone will think first of saving their own skin.

The great danger of our spiritual life is to confuse the intensity of our religious feelings with the solidity of our faith. If our security rests on our capacity to be faithful, to be perfect, to always feel devotion, strong emotions... then we will go from failure to failure. Fortunately, Christ displaces us from this illusion; He shows us that our human faith is structurally fragile and inclined to dispersion. However, note the purpose of this warning: Jesus does not say this to make them feel guilty or to extinguish their joy; He says this to free them from the weight of having to be heroes. Our peace will never depend on our perfection in loving Jesus, but on our absolute trust in the fact that He loves us perfectly in the midst of our failures.

Third Point: The Anchor of Victory at the Heart of the Battle

And Jesus concludes today's Gospel with this phrase which is the beacon of our Easter season: “I have told you this so that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have suffering, but take courage! I have conquered the world”. It is here that the prayer of the previous Sunday is realized. We are in the world, and Jesus is concrete, He hides nothing from us: in the world, there is suffering, tribulation, pressure to make us fit into the mold of anxiety and rivalry. Christ is not a salesman of illusions who promises us an anesthetized life without problems.

The peace, therefore, that Jesus offers us is of an entirely different nature: it is a peace that is lived “in Him.” The Peace of Jesus is not the absence of a storm on the outside, but the Presence of an invisible anchor on the inside. Jesus says: “I am not alone, for the Father is with me”. This is the secret of His peace, and He shares this secret with us. And we can well claim this peace because indeed we are baptized in His Name; and because the Holy Spirit dwells in us, loneliness is conquered: we are no longer isolated individuals who must defend themselves against a hostile world! Christian peace is the quiet certainty that Christ has already passed through and conquered everything that tries to destroy us today.

And when Jesus says “I have conquered the world”, He uses a tense that means His victory is definitive, permanent. To us, Jesus wants to recall that the prince of this world is already judged, death is already struck down. The sufferings, then, that we encounter in our daily lives — family tensions, professional fatigue, inner doubts — are not signs that evil is winning, but the death throes of an enemy who has already lost. The Holy Spirit that Paul invokes by the laying on of hands upon the Ephesians is precisely this strength of victory: He gives us the courage not to remain silent, not to flee, but to inhabit the world with the dignity of kings. We do not fight to obtain victory; indeed, we fight from a Victory already acquired on the Cross and manifested on Easter morning.

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Conclusion and Application for Our Day

The Word of this Monday invites us to a profound spiritual simplification. It calls us to lay down our burdens as orphans to receive the strength of the children of God. I propose three points for your journey of faith:

• First, let us renounce the religion of solitary effort. Look at your life today and ask yourself: are there areas where you are exhausting yourself to be perfect by your own means, like the disciples of Ephesus with John's baptism? Whether it is in your marriage, your work, or your prayer life, stop and invoke the Holy Spirit before your activities and before making decisions. Say to Him: “I stop wanting to manage everything on my own. Come take over, come be my strength”. Allow grace to go before your muscles.

• Second, do not let yourself be discouraged by your own scatterings. If today you find yourself distracted, fragile, or if your fervor has cooled, do not panic: Jesus already knew that you would be scattered; your fragility is not a surprise to Him. Do not look at the poverty of your faith, but fix your eyes on the faithfulness of Jesus. Shift the center of your security, that is to say, step out of the illusion of your strength to anchor yourself in His mercy.

• Finally, inhabit the peace of the Victor. In the face of bad news, the anxieties of the day, or the provocations of the world, repeat this phrase like an internal refrain: “Take courage, He has conquered the world”. This certainty must give a total freedom to your choices, your words, and your smiles. You have nothing to prove, nothing to lose, because you belong to the One who guides history toward its fullness.

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Prayer

Lord Jesus, I thank You for the truth of Your Word which frees me from my own illusions. I entrust to You my desire to be strong, my fragile enthusiasm, and my tendency to want to save myself through my own efforts, in the manner of John's baptism. Come visit my moments of discouragement and spiritual dryness.

Holy Spirit, breath of life and fire, come upon me today. Open my mind and make me attentive to Your presence. Do not let me live like an orphan who must carry everything on his shoulders, but remind me at every moment that I am a beloved child, inhabited by Your strength.

Father, I rest in Your holy dwelling. I know that in the world, I will have to suffer and cross storms, but I refuse to tremble. I anchor myself in the victory of Your Son. May His peace, which the world can neither give nor take away, guard my heart and my thoughts in the joy of the Risen Lord. Amen.