Category: Liturgy

Today's readings 

The story goes that one day, St. Theresa of Avila was wheeling a cart across a bridge over the river. At one point along the bridge's passage, a wheel of the cart got stuck in the planks, and St. Theresa had to wrestle the cart to get going again. In the struggle, the cart tipped over, and its entire contents spilled out and into the river. As she looked at all her stuff floating down the river, she said, "Well, God, if this is how you treat your friends, it's no wonder you have so few of them!"

Many of us, I would venture to guess, have had experiences in our own lives where it seemed like the contents of our carts were floating down the river. Certainly that must have been how Ezekiel felt in today's first reading. To be told, in no uncertain terms, at the outset of your life's work, that your work will be frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful might be a little too much reality all at once. You'll never see that reading quoted on vocation posters or seminary websites!

Jesus' experience in the Gospel reading was much the same. The people who knew him first and knew him best, people from his own home town, totally misunderstood who he was and what his ministry was sent to accomplish. These people saw the miracles he worked elsewhere and heard the words he preached, but were so offended by it that their lack of faith stifled his ability to do anything great in their midst, other than to cure a few sick people.

Today's readings are filled with contrasts as we read them. Let's first back up a bit – all the way to last week. Do you remember last week's Gospel reading? The faith of Jairus and the woman with the 12-year hemorrhage made possible two wonderful, miraculous healings. Jairus's daughter was literally resuscitated from death because Jairus had faith enough to come to Jesus in humility. The woman with the hemorrhage was cured because she had just enough faith and courage to reach out and touch Jesus' garment. Last week we were impressed with faith that overcame long illness and even death.

Today's Gospel, coming right on the heels of that celebration of faith and healing, is the complete opposite. Where last week there was faith, this week there is rejection. Where last week there was courage, this week there is fear and offense. Where last week healing abounded, this week there is hardly any mighty deed to be found. What's going on here?

In Jesus' time, there was a clear delineation of one's class based on where one's family fit into the social structure. To honor one's family, a person worked hard, within the parameters of his or her family's place, and didn't rock the boat. Where striving to better ourselves is a hallmark of the American ethic, in that time it was scandalous to try to rise above one's place in the social structure. It just wasn't done. So this is the basis at which the people of Jesus' home town took offense at him. They knew he was a carpenter, they knew his mother and relatives. His actions and words seemed to put him above all that, and for them, that was just intolerable. That explains their reaction, but of course, it doesn't make it a good reaction, does it?

Another huge contrast in today's readings is the faith of St. Paul over against the lack of faith of Jesus' neighbors in the Gospel. In today's second reading, St. Paul has plenty of reason for a lack of faith: a thorn in the flesh – whatever that was for him – afflicted him and would not go away. In addition, he put up with weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions and constraints. And yet, in all of this he did not waver in his faith: he put up with it all for the sake of Christ, proclaiming that when he was weak, it was then that he was strong. If Jesus' neighbors had just a little of that kind of faith, think of the many wonders that would have been accomplished in their midst!

The contrasts we have looked at in these readings show the range of response to the presence of a prophet in one's community. Everywhere Jesus went, his prophecy was met with wonder and awe – except in his own community, that is. In every other place, people came to him in faith and were healed of their illnesses and freed from their sins. In his own place, they were scandalized by him and wanted nothing whatever to do with him. That was just the kind of reaction that Ezekiel was promised in today's first reading. The people to whom he was being sent were "hard of face and obstinate of heart" but Ezekiel was sent to preach to them anyway, so that whether they heeded or resisted, they would nonetheless know that "a prophet has been among them."

The question for us, then, is how we will respond to the prophetic voices in our own lives? When we hear our parents, our elders, our Church or whoever it may be calling us to reform our lives, what will be our reaction? Will we become hard of face and obstinate of heart? Will we take offense at those who dare to speak to us, because we know who they are and where they came from? Or will we, like St. Paul, boast of our weaknesses and be content with all our afflictions, knowing that in all of that, the power of Christ will take hold of us and God will be glorified?

Because we all of us have days where our cart tips over and our stuff ends up floating down the river, don't we? St. Theresa could get away with taking God to task for that because her faith was unquestioning and her trust in God was central to her life. But what about us? Will we look at our stuff floating down the river and give it all up and turn away from the voices of those who strive to help us make sense of it all? Or will we hear the Word of the Lord speaking through the hard times and the crisis and the pain and respond in faith, knowing that God longs to collect the contents of our carts and restore them to us, sending us on our way to continue the journey over the bridge?

We have to see that what God is calling us to here today is a faithful response, and not necessarily a wildly successful one. Sure, we are going to have resistance to our best efforts. Yes, life will bring its share of hardships and obstacles. Some days we may be victorious over pain and evil and sin, and some days they may get the best of us. We may pray over and over and over again that God would deliver us from our thorns in the flesh, and we may get discouraged at the lack of results. But our response must always be a response of faith, letting God be God, and trusting in God for our salvation.

We've all heard the famous serenity prayer, written by the protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

But maybe you haven't heard the rest of that prayer. It goes like this:

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

We are a people drenched with the imperfections of the world, and yet called to a resilient faith. The psalmist today puts it well and sums up our experience of life by saying that we are "more than sated with contempt … with the mockery of the arrogant, with the contempt of the proud." But even suffering all of that, that same psalmist makes a case for faith and models what should be our response to it all: "Our eyes are fixed on the Lord, pleading for his mercy."

Today's readings 

God did not make death,
nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.

I had finally gotten around to writing out some Christmas cards a few days before that great feast last year. I was still at school at Mundelein, and we didn't get out for Christmas break for a day or two. We had been doing the kinds of things you do before Christmas: the guys on my floor had gone out with the Rector for pizza. There was a little snow falling, which meant that there were some accidents here and there and bad traffic, but we all got back to the seminary safe.

Well, my heart wasn't really in the writing out of the Christmas cards – I'm just terrible at that. But the alternative was studying for a test, and well, my heart wasn't in that either. Besides, the test was after Christmas break, so it could wait. I was about halfway through the address book, I think, when I got a page from the fire department I worked for. Usually the pages didn't apply to us, and I wasn't on call that night, but this one got my attention: Chaplains needed for fatal accident involving a child.

Of course, all the emotions you'd think someone would experience hearing that went through me. I called my friend who was on call that night, and he was getting information from the department and said he'd call me back. He called a couple of minutes later and said if I wanted to come along, he could probably use the help. The family had their own clergy with them, so they didn't need us; we waited at the station for our people to come back so we could talk to them. Eventually, we were joined by another of our chaplains, which turned out to be a good thing.

The call was handled by our department and another one nearby. The other department could not reach their chaplains, so I went with one of my friends to the other station. We waited for their guys to come back, and after they had emptied their ambulance, we were able to sit down and talk with them. In all my time as a fire chaplain, I never had a more significant conversation. These guys had been through a terrible situation, trying to save the life of a child, and the child had died on the way to the hospital. We talked for over two hours as they told us all the details and all of the emotions they were feeling. Fire and medic personnel almost never get to the point of freely sharing their emotions, so this was a pretty awesome talk.

One of the men was Catholic and he was the one who had the task of extracting the child from the car. His enduring question was, why did this innocent child have to suffer and die? There was no answer for that question, but my fellow chaplain was able to give some meaning to it all when he pointed out that the child died in front of Marytown, a Franciscan monastery near our seminary that provides 24 hour exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. He pointed out that he died near the physical manifestation of Christ's own body, and that Jesus was always letting the children come to him.

Today's readings bring this whole question back for me in such a poignant way. Why do people have to suffer? Why do good people and innocent children suffer? Why do people have to die? These are ever-present questions for us, I think, and this is where the rubber meets the road as far as our faith goes. Some people take great comfort in their faith when they have to deal with suffering. Some people even find their faith as they work through the pain of it all. And some people lose their faith, asking how God could let them suffer, or let a loved one suffer, if God loves them so much.

God did not make death,
nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.
For he fashioned all things that they might have being;
and the creatures of the earth are wholesome…

These words from today's first reading may bring up more questions than they answer for us. If God did not make death and if he made everything to have being and wholesome life, why does that plan go so often awry? Why are the living destroyed? Why is our world so often far less than wholesome? The Wisdom writer gives us a hint at an answer:

But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world,
and they who belong to his company experience it.

The author is not saying that the person experiencing suffering and death did something to deserve it, and that's why they're suffering. That was, actually, a long-held belief in Jewish theology. But this reading represents a break from that kind of thought. The author is merely acknowledging that there is evil in the world, and that evil is the root of sin, suffering and death. All you have to do is flip on the evening news to know that's true.

But suffering never seems to make sense for us. We may never get the answers to all our questions this side of the kingdom of God. Ask the woman with the hemorrhage in today's Gospel reading. She put up with her condition for twelve years – twelve years! In that society, such a condition made her ritually unclean, and so she could not take any part in the ritual or social life of the community. How awful that must have been for her. And to make matters worse, she was treated by doctors who not only did not cure her, but also took advantage of her, leaving her penniless.

How many of us can identify with that woman? How many of us are here today, suffering from some illness that never seems to get better, or going through a family crisis that never seems to go away, or living with depression that seems to have no end? How many of us have worked long and hard on problems in our life or with our health with little success? How many of us have been left bankrupt – spiritually or emotionally, at least – in our attempts to put an end to our pain?

Perhaps if we identify with the woman with the hemorrhage, we can also imitate her. In a great act of faith, she reached out to Christ, who not only cured her illness, but freed her of her social stigma and ritual impurity. Her touch of faith – which was a totally taboo thing for her to do, because it would have made Jesus ritually impure if he chose to acknowledge that – that touch of faith was rewarded with a new life.

That can be hard for us to hear, when we don't really have that same opportunity. We can't see Jesus walking by and reach out and touch his robe. And maybe all of our attempts to reach out to him seem to have gone unrewarded. I'm not going to tell you that one act of faith will make all of your problems go away.

But what I will say is this: as I have walked with people who have suffered, those who have reached out to Jesus in faith have not gone unrewarded. Maybe their suffering continued in some way, but in Christ they found the strength to walk through it with dignity and peace. Maybe Jesus won't always stop the bleeding of our hurts and inadequacies and woundedness. But through his own blood, he will always redeem us. We who are disciples need to make those acts of faith if we are to live what we believe.

We come to the Eucharist today with our lives in various stages of grace and various stages of disrepair. At the Table of the Lord, we offer our lives and our suffering and our pain. We bring our faith, wherever we are on the journey, and reach out in that faith to touch the body of our Lord. We approach the Cup of Life, and whatever emptiness is in us is filled up with grace and healing love, poured out in the blood of Christ. As we go forth to love and serve the Lord this day, all of our problems may very well remain unsolved. Our suffering and pain may very well be with us still. But in our faith, perhaps they can be transformed, or at least maybe we can be transformed so that we can move through that suffering and pain with dignity and peace. And as we go forth, may we hear our Lord saying to us the same words he said
to the woman with the hemorrhage: go in peace, your faith has saved you.

 "Who do you say that I am?"

Many have reflected on the importance of this question both for the disciples, and for ourselves. We might do well to think about it ourselves on occasion. But as I was preparing for today's Liturgy, an aspect of that question stood out in a way that it hasn't before.

Certainly, it's an important question, and it called for a statement of faith from Peter. His faith was well-placed and well-articulated. So well, in fact, that Jesus gave Peter the all-important keys to the kingdom, and the power to bind and loose sins. This power has been appropriated to the Church through apostolic succession. So when you receive absolution in sacramental confession, it is because of Peter's faith that you receive it. That's a beautiful thing, I think, because it connects us to Jesus through the apostles as handed down through the Church.

But here's the thing that stood out for me last night: it wasn't so much what Peter and the apostles said about who Jesus was that constituted their statement of faith, and their answer to Jesus' question. The answer really came from the way they lived their lives.

Peter was, as Scripture shows us, an impulsive man. He often said and did the wrong thing, but just as often said and did the right thing. One minute he was walking on water, the next minute he was overcome by the wind and waves. Today he's professing his faith in Jesus, but a few verses later and Jesus is telling him to get behind him. He's nowhere to be found at the Cross, having denied his Master three times, but later professes his love for Jesus and accepts the responsibility to feed his sheep. But though it all, he was a man of conversion, and finally gave his life for Christ, suffering martyrdom under Nero in about the year 64.

Paul, as we know, was a Jew, and a strict one. He went so far as to persecute Christians for their faith, and even took part in the martyrdom of St. Stephen. But Paul, too, was a man of conversion and completely changed his life on the way to Damascus, becoming a great apostle, theologian, and missionary. He, too, was martyred, ending his life in Rome.

Both of these great apostles answered the question "Who do you say that I am?" by living lives of conversion, following Christ, and laying down their lives for Christ. They are examples to all of us, who also are asked to answer the question "Who do you say that I am?" So how have we been answering that question? What answer do our lives give?

There’s a commercial I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks that I like. It shows little vignettes of people having near miss accidents, who are saved from those accidents by other people. So a woman on the way out of a restaurant moves a coffee cup on the table of a man whose elbow might knock it over at any minute. A man stops to yell to alert a truck parking that it’s about to run into a motorcycle. There’s a whole bunch of them showing people doing little things to help other people. The announcer says something like “when it’s people doing these things, we call it responsibility.”

Have you seen that commercial? I like it, but I think they have the premise wrong. Because I think that when it’s people doing things like that, we ought to call it love. Sure, it’s not the same kind of love that you might have for a spouse or family member or even a friend, but it’s the kind of love that helps us go outside ourselves and work for the good of others.

Today, we celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Jesus’ love for us knows know bounds. In today’s Gospel, we see that not even death could limit his love for us. As he hung dying upon the cross, his love for us never wavered. And even after his death, the soldier’s lance helped blood and water to pour from his side. The blood that poured forth from Jesus’ side is the same blood we will be able to partake in this morning in the Eucharist. A blood that nourishes and strengthens us. A blood that cleanses us from our sins. The water is the same water you dipped your hand into on the way in today: the waters of baptism. That water washes our sins away and brings us into the body of the Church. The blood that poured forth from Jesus’ side as he hung on the cross continues to make his love present to us in the Church.

One more way that the love of Jesus is made present in the Church is through you and me. We have to, as one of my professors used to tell us, love what Jesus loved as he hung on the cross. And that means that we are called to love each person we come in contact with, whether it’s our own friends or family members, or even a complete stranger. When we love each person in little or small ways, then some measure of the love that Jesus had on the cross for that person, the love which poured forth from his Sacred Heart, is poured forth upon our world yet again. The love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus isn’t meant just for us to hoard: we are meant to share it, so that that love may grow and abound and spread through all the world.

May the love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus draw you in today and be in your heart and in all that you do.