Homily for the Sunday Mass of May 3, 2026

Sunday, May 3, 2026
5nd Sunday of Easter – Year A

Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

1st reading: Acts 6,1:7-XNUMX
Psalm: 32 (33),1-2,4-5,18-19
Second reading: 1 Peter 2:2,4-9
Gospel: John 14,1-12

“Lord, we do not know where you are going. How could we know the
path ? "
Almost 2000 years later, this question is gradually becoming clearer. And for Saint
Thérèse of the Child Jesus, there is no hesitation: Jesus leads us towards the
A true homeland, towards Heaven, towards the Kingdom. And that is enough for Thérèse to
to desire this Kingdom.
A few months after the death of her father, Louis, Thérèse, who was at the Carmelite convent, wrote
to her sister Léonie for New Year's greetings. She told her:
Dear little Sister, don't you agree with me that the departure of
Has our beloved Father brought us closer to Heaven? More than half of
The family now enjoys the sight of God — that is, the mother
Zélie, Louis, and then the four little ones who died very young: Joseph-Louis, Joseph-Jean-Baptiste, Hélène, Thérèse-Mélanie, which makes six, and she
said: and the five exiles from the earth will soon fly away to
their homeland. This thought of the brevity of life gives me
Courage, it helps me bear the fatigue of the journey. No matter.
(said the Imitation) a little work on the land… we pass and
We have no permanent home here! Jesus went ahead
in order to prepare a place for us in his Father's house and then He
He will come and He will take us with Him so that where He is we may be there
Let us also… Let us wait, let us suffer in peace, for the hour of rest
approaching, the slight tribulations of this fleeting life
produce in us an eternal weight of glory… (LT 173 January 1895)
If we lose sight of Heaven, if we lose sight of the purpose of life for all
man who is to share in the life of God for eternity, who is to be clothed with
the glory of God, to become holy as God is holy, that is, to become
entirely love, just as God is entirely love, if we lose sight of the
At the end of the road, the road no longer has any meaning. And that's what many people experience.
Our contemporaries… Life has lost its meaning. But this vision of Heaven, this
Our aspiration to Heaven does not distract us from what we experience on this earth.
Because there are no two different lives: life is life. Life on this earth
affected by death, the life of the Resurrected One, over whom death no longer has any power,
It's first and foremost the same life. And what we experience on this earth prepares us for
the fullness of life. There is no reason to despise what we experience here below.
hoping for the life of Heaven: there is this life to be lived here below in order to go to Heaven. The fact
that we have been called by Christ to be with him, the fact that through baptism
The Father has placed us with Jesus, and in confirmation, he has filled us with
The fullness of the gift of the Spirit is that the Lord gives us a place on
this land, in the mystery of the Church.
As we heard in the first two readings, the Church needs to be
organized. Saint Peter speaks of it as a spiritual dwelling of which we
We are the living stones. Saint Paul will specify that Christ is the stone
The cornerstone of this construction, and he will also say that the architect is Christ.
The apostles have full legitimacy to organize the Church community, which we...
Let's see what's done in the Acts of the Apostles, with the creation of the Seven who evoke
The deacons to come. The bishops, successors of the apostles, are today all
perfectly legitimate to reorganize, in order to better proclaim the Gospel, the life of their
diocese. And many of our dioceses in France are undergoing reorganizations in
in order to be better disposed to proclaim the Gospel to men
and women of our time. It is therefore a matter, like living stones, of making ourselves
available to the architect to occupy the space that is rightfully ours.

Saint Teresa seeks this place for herself, even though she has entered the
Carmel eight years earlier, and you could say she had found her place.
On the anniversary of her solemn profession in 1896, she lived a very quiet retirement.
tormented because, in fact, her desire to belong entirely to Jesus is multiplying… She
she would want to be everything: she would want to be a missionary, she would want to be a soldier for
the papal troops, she would like to be a priest, she would like to have been
A missionary since the beginning of the world… she has immense desires.
And even in the first text of her offering to Jesus, she says “desires
"Infinites," but that's not enough for her; she digs. She digs in the Saintes
Scriptures, particularly in the First Letter to the Corinthians by Saint Paul and
She finally exclaimed:
Yes, I have found my place in the Church, and this place, oh my God,
It was you who gave it to me… in the Heart of the Church, my Mother,
I will be Love… (Ms B Folio 3, v°)
In a way, what Thérèse experiences there sheds light on each of our lives, because
It is indeed love and charity that give value to everything we do. And
In a way, we can all express ourselves like Thérèse, in
saying: in the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love,
But perhaps in a more concrete, more down-to-earth way, two other
Thérèse's statements are precious to us. One of them is found at the very beginning
from manuscript A where Thérèse tells us:
Perfection consists in doing God's will, in being that
that He wants us to be… (Ms A Folio 02, v°)
Oh, when we gaze at the flowers in the garden, when we gaze at the
Fruit trees, for us it's obvious: an apple tree that wants to put
Giving strawberries would seem a little strange to us. What we expect from a
An apple tree is one that produces apples, and there is a wide variety of apples.
and apple trees.
What the Lord expects of us is not that we be like others
or like that person we might envy: he wants us
Let us be ourselves, let us be ourselves, let us be that person
unique, which he created in his own image and likeness, with particularities,
natural talents, which he enriched with spiritual charisms so that we might have a
a unique place in the world and in the Church.
A little over two months before her death, in a letter to Léonie, Thérèse wrote:
The only happiness on earth is to strive to always find
How delightful is the portion that Jesus gives us. (LT 257 of July 17, 1897)

No, the grass isn't always greener on the other side of the fence; that's where we've been.
It is through planting that we can bear fruit. It is according to our own grace, our
The Lord wants us to bear fruit in our own temperament.
But we need our brothers and sisters to discover who we are.
We need the gaze and the words of our brothers and sisters so that they
reveal who we are, so that they may reveal to us the talents that are
ours, so that they may reveal to us the charisms that are ours. For what we
We know how to do it, we imagine that everyone knows how to do it, and we need
that others point out to us that such a capacity, such a way of doing things,
This way of being is unique to us and is a richness that we must cultivate.
A gift from God. And God's gifts are always given to us for others.
to enrich the mystery of the Church and this great family that is humanity.

Yes, the Lord is going to prepare a place for us in Heaven, for that is where our
Our true homeland, that is where we are expected. But the fact that the Lord
Just because we are preparing a place for ourselves in Heaven does not mean that we have nothing to do here below.
There is no room here below. In a way, it teaches us to receive this
Heaven's place while living on this earth, by accepting the place He gives us
in this world. And to understand and know the place it gives us in
In this world, we need the Church community to better understand it.
to understand, to live it better.
May each of us, during this Easter season, ask the Holy Spirit for the grace to truly reveal himself to us, not only in our hearts but also through our being.
our brothers and sisters in our Christian communities, the wealth that we
are, to show us the place that God gives us, so that this dwelling
spiritual that Christ builds with the living stones that we are no
not only be beautiful, but reveal to the world that its only Savior is Jesus
and that every human person is called, awaited by God, because he
was created out of love and for love

Amen.