Q: How can a pregnant woman tell that she's carrying a future lawyer?
A: She has an uncontrollable craving for baloney.
Q: What do you call a smiling, courteous person at a bar association convention?
A: The caterer.
Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a trampoline?
A: You take off your shoes before you jump on a trampoline.
Now that I’ve offended any lawyer or law student out there, let me explain why I mention these. I received these as I was heading to Washington DC to study canon law, the law of the Church. Much like regular lawyers, canon lawyers often get a bad rap among priests, and I guess my friend wanted to remind me not to let my studies go to my head.
There was one joke that he sent which especially caught my attention.
Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and God?
A: God doesn't think he's a lawyer.
Now, for any lawyers in the room, the fact that they are in church is probably a pretty good indication that they don’t think they’re God. But that punch line – “God doesn’t think he’s a lawyer” – is that true? You might think, "Of course, it’s true." But if you know your Bible, you might actually start to think it’s not. You might say that God – or more precisely, Jesus – is a kind of lawyer. Let me explain better what I mean.
Throughout the Scriptures, the Bible uses imagery to explain the relationship between God and humanity. A lot of these images we are familiar with, and a lot of them come from Jesus. There’s the vine and the branches, the Good Shepherd and the sheep, the Master of the House and the servants who await his return, the owner of the vineyard and the tenants who work it. You can go on and on.
But there’s another imagery often used in the Bible, and that is legal imagery. The images of the law – judge and trial and sentence – are used especially in the Old Testament to symbolize what it is like when humanity falls astray. As the people of God, we are in covenant with him – bound to him in a heavenly contract, if you will – and when we sin, we violate that covenant, and we are held accountable before the law. We stand before God, guilty of our sins, and we deserve the punishment that is our due. God is infinitely merciful – but he is also infinitely just, and so he must hand down the sentence that the law prescribes.
But today, in the second reading, we heard something very important. In his first letter, the apostle John says, “My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one.” The word “Advocate” there is deliberately chosen: it means “helper” and “intercessor,” but it also has a legal connotation. Jesus, it seems, is a kind of lawyer.
Now, we like to poke fun at lawyers, as I did at the start of the homily. But if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that lawyers are actually very important. They perform very important, very helpful tasks. For one, they interpret the law – judges and legal scholars tell us what the law means and how it applies in our lives. And other lawyers represent us when we run afoul of the law – these attorneys, or advocates, stand on our behalf to argue our case.
When St. John says that Jesus is our "Advocate", he means precisely that. Jesus stands before the Father on our behalf, arguing our case. As we will hear in the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer today, Jesus “defends us and ever pleads our cause” before his heavenly Father. He does so because he himself is righteous – that is, in the eyes of the law, he is blameless, without sin. We are not – we have sinned – but because a Righteous One takes up our cause on our behalf, we are made righteous too. Once guilty, we are shown mercy because of the righteousness of Jesus. Though we deserve to receive a sentence, we are made innocent instead.
The analogy goes even deeper. Jesus the Lawyer not only has made us innocent; he has himself borne the weight of the Law’s penalty on our behalf. Imagine a legal counsel who willingly accepts the punishment his client rightfully deserves – even the best lawyer would never do that! But Jesus has freed us from the sentence of the old law of sin and death and has written a new law within our hearts: the law of charity, the law of sacrificial love – his Law.
What does God ask in return? Faithfulness, and to be a witness to his great love. In today's first reading, Peter invites the people of Jerusalem to recognize that by their own sins they were responsible for the death of Jesus; but God has shown them mercy by raising him to new life, and so now he calls them to be a witness to this transformation by turning away from sin, embracing the new life that comes from the Resurrection, and bearing witness to the love God has shown us in Jesus.
James Tissot, The Appearance of Christ at the Cenacle (c. 1894)
In the Gospel we heard, the Risen Jesus appears again to his disciples. They are frightened at his coming: unsure perhaps of how he can be alive again, unsure of whether he will hold their past abandonment against them. Instead, he wishes them "Peace." He reminds them that all has happened according to the will of God – of how all that the Scriptures once foretold has at last been accomplished through his rising from the dead. The disciples, he says, are “witnesses of these things.”
So, too, does the Risen Jesus call us to be his witnesses in the world. To do so, we need to stand apart from the sinfulness we see around us. With our Advocate with us, made righteous by his free gift, we must be holy to such a degree that others take notice and are inspired to make Jesus their Advocate as well. That is the mission he has given to us. We should never let the times that we fall short from this calling discourage us from turning back to him – to trust again in our Advocate, who restores us to righteousness so that we can be good witnesses once again.
My friends, in this Easter season, we remember that we have the universe’s best Advocate in our corner. Even the greatest defense attorney in the world would never do what Jesus has done for us, for he has borne our sentence on our behalf, and restored us to righteousness in the sight of God. But Jesus’s assistance didn’t come to an end with his Passion, Death, and Resurrection. He continues to aid us each and every day – indeed, every moment – interceding for us with the Father, pouring out his Spirit to us, sending us heavenly gifts of grace to inspire us to holiness. The Risen Lord has changed the world; he has changed our hearts; and he continues to lead us – and we are witnesses to these things. And that, praise God, is not a joke.
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