Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: The Church Year

  • Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

    Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

    Today’s readings

    This is it.  Today’s liturgy brings us to the place we’ve been journeying toward all during Lent.  These past forty days have seen Jesus tangle with the established religion, all the while healing the sick and preaching repentance.  We have participated in that by participating in the Anointing of the Sick Mass, in receiving absolution in Confession, and by our fasting and works of charity.  And so it seems quite fitting that our Mass today begins on a high note: with Jesus entering triumphantly into the city of Jerusalem.  But just three chapters later in Mark’s Gospel, all of his good work becomes his undoing as he is arrested, tried and put to death.  It doesn’t seem fair, does it?

    We know that’s how life is.  We offer our works of charity and fasting and prayer and we hope for a better life, but sometimes that’s not how it works out.  Sometimes we too end up denounced, the victims of gossip and calumny, and we have to take up that rough, heavy cross and travel to our own personal Golgothas.  And so perhaps today we find ourselves in all-too-familiar territory, and find it difficult to hear.

    The trouble is that the Cross is an in-your-face reminder that pain is part and parcel of our life of salvation.  Jesus did not come to take away our pain, he came to redeem it.  Not only that, he came to take it on himself.  Far from being embarrassed by our sin and pain, Jesus took it to the cross, redeeming our brokenness, and leaving us an everlasting promise that there is no pain too great for our God to bear and there is no way we can ever fall so far that our God can’t reach us.  Jesus took our every hurt, our every pain, our every sin, our every shame, our every resentment, our every emptiness, and left them all there at the foot of the Cross.  So if we find the Cross and Golgotha a difficult place to be, maybe it’s no wonder.

    I know there are many among us now who are carrying pain with them each day.  I hear it all the time, whether it’s the patient in the hospital who’s been away from the Church and estranged from their family and is facing death, or the young parent who wants to live a spiritual life but the demands of family and perhaps a job are all that he or she can accomplish in a day.  For some it’s very serious stuff: the diagnosis of an illness that is frightening, the loss of a loved one, the ending of a job or career, or even a marriage.  Broken relationships, upheaval in our lives, uncertainty in our future are crosses that are so very familiar to so many of us.

    But as horrible as those things are to deal with, and as dejected and frustrated and fearful as they may make us feel, the one thing we should never entertain is a feeling of loneliness.  Because for all of us who are hurting in any way, all we have to do is look at the Cross and realize that there is nothing our God won’t do for us.  No, it’s not pretty, and God may not take away our pain right away, but he will never ever leave us alone in it.  In fact, he helps us bear it, and ultimately, he will raise us up out of it.  As we enter this Holy Week, we are reminded gently that the cross, while significant, is not the end of the story.  Yes, we have to suffer our own Good Fridays; but we confidently remember that we also get an Easter Sunday.  And that is what gives us all the confidence to take up our cross and journey on.

    These are not ordinary days – they are absolutely not for business as usual.  I beg you all to enter into these Holy Days with passion, with prayerfulness and in faith.  Gather with us on Holy Thursday at 7:00pm to celebrate the giving of the Eucharist and the Priesthood, and the call to service that comes from our baptism.  On Good Friday at 3:00 in the afternoon, we will have the opportunity once again to reflect on the Passion, to venerate the cross that won our salvation, and to receive the Eucharist, which is our strength.  Finally, at 8:00 on Holy Saturday night, we will gather outside on the piazza to keep vigil for the resurrection we have been promised.  We will hear stories of our salvation, we will celebrate our baptism and welcome five people into our family, rejoicing in the victory of Christ over sin and death.  No Catholic should ever miss the celebrations of these Holy Days, for these days truly sustain our daily living, give us the grace to take up our little crosses day by day, and gift us with strength to continue the journey.

  • Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    Have you ever had to deal with people working against you?  Most of us have.  Most of us have experienced people spreading lies about us, trying to get others to work against us.  And today we find ourselves in good company.  Today’s readings find the prophet Jeremiah, king David and Jesus all in that same boat.

    A prophet’s job is never easy; nobody wants to hear what they don’t want to hear.  So for Jeremiah, things are getting dangerous: people want him dead.  The same is true for Jesus, who is rapidly approaching the cross.  David finds that his enemies are pursuing him to the point of death, like the waters of the deep overwhelming a drowning man.

    But all of them find their refuge in God.  Jeremiah writes, “For he has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked!”  David takes consolation in the fact that “From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears.”  And for Jesus, well, his time had not yet come.

    When we are provoked like they were, how do we respond?  Is our first thought to take refuge in God, or do we try – usually in vain – to solve the problem on our own?  If we don’t turn to God, we will sooner or later find those waves overwhelming us, because there is always a limit to our own power.  But if we turn to God, even if things don’t improve on our own timetable, we will always find refuge and safety in our God: there will be strength to get through, and we will never be alone.

  • Thursday of the Third Week of Lent

    Thursday of the Third Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    This week, the Scriptures have been warning us not to avoid the truth.  Today is no exception.  Today we see that the way we tend to avoid truth is often through obfuscation, trying to confuse the facts.  It’s a case of “the best defense is a good offense,” where we attack the truth wherever we see it addressing our lives and our mistakes.

    The prophet Jeremiah takes the nation of Israel to task for this in today’s first reading.  These are a people who have heard the truth over and over.   God has not stopped sending prophets to preach the word.  But the Israelites would not listen.  They preferred to live in the world, and to attach themselves to the nations and their worship of idols and pagan gods.  They had been warned constantly that this was going to be the source of their demise, but they tuned it out.  They “stiffened their necks,” Jeremiah says, and now faithfulness has disappeared and there is no word of truth in anything they say: a scathing indictment of the people God chose as his own.

    Some of the Jews are giving Jesus the same treatment in today’s Gospel.  Seeing him drive out a demon, they are filled with jealousy and an enormous sense of inadequacy.  These are religious leaders; they had the special care of driving away demons from the people.  But they couldn’t:  maybe their lukewarm faith made them ineffective in this ministry.  So on seeing Jesus competent at what was their special care, they cast a hand-grenade of rhetoric at him and reason that only a demon could cast out demons like he did.

    We will likely hear the word of truth today.  Maybe it will come from these Scriptures, or maybe later in our prayerful moments.  Perhaps it will be spoken by a child or a coworker or a relative or a friend.  However the truth is given to us, it is up to us to take it in and take it to heart.  Or will we too be like the Jews and the Israelites and stiffen our necks?  No, the Psalmist tells us, we can’t be that way.  “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”

  • Monday of the Third Week of Lent

    Monday of the Third Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    Why is the human heart so opposed to hearing the truth and acting on it?  I remember as a child I used to hate it when my parents would tell me something and turn out to be right.  If the truth be told, I probably still struggle with that a little today.  Who wants to hear the hard truth and then find out that it’s absolutely right?  The pride of our hearts so often prevents the prophet from performing his or her ministry.

    The message of Lent, though, is that the prophets – all of them – whether they be Scriptural prophets, or those who spoke the truth to us because they want the best for us – are speaking truth.  The prophets of Scripture speak Truth to us in an elevated way, of course.  And our task during Lent has to be to give up whatever pride in us refuses to hear the voice of the prophet or refuses to accept the prophetic message, and instead turn to the Lord and rejoice in the truth.

    The prophets of our native land – those prophets who are closest to us – are the ones we least want to hear.  Because they know the right buttons to push, they know our sinfulness, our weakness, and our brokenness.  That’s how it was for the people of Jesus’ home town.  But we also desperately want to avoid being confronted with truth.  Yet if we would open our ears to hear and our hearts to understand, then maybe just like Naaman, we would come out of the river clean and ready to profess our faith in the only God once again.

    Athirst is my soul for the living God – that is what the Psalmist prays today.  And that is the true prayer of all of our hearts.  All we have to do is get past the obstacles of pride and let those prophets show us the way to him.  Then we would never thirst again.

  • The Third Sunday of Lent [B]

    The Third Sunday of Lent [B]

    Today’s readings

    Most of us have probably experienced at least one time in our lives when it seemed like our whole world was turned upside-down.  Maybe it was the loss of a job, or the illness or death of a loved one, or any of a host of other issues.  It probably felt like the rug was pulled out from under us and that everything we believed in was toppled over.  Kind of like the table in front of the altar, like the story we just heard in the Gospel.

    You may have heard the interpretation of this rather shocking Gospel story that says that this is proof that Jesus got angry, so we shouldn’t feel bad when we do.  That sounds nice, but I am, of course, going to tell you this interpretation is flawed.  First of all, there is a big difference between the kind of righteous indignation that Jesus felt over the devastation of sin and death that plagues our world, and the frustration and anger that we all experience over comparatively minor issues from time to time.  It might make us feel better to think that Jesus acted out in the same way that we sometimes do, that he felt the same way we do about these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

    So feeling better for being angry isn’t the theme of this reading, or the intent of today’s Liturgy of the Word.  And I do think we have to take all of the readings as a whole in order to discern what we are being invited to experience.  Our first reading is extremely familiar to us all.   The ten commandments – we’ve heard them so often, violated them on occasion, perhaps we don’t even think they’re relevant any more.  But the mere fact that they are read at today’s Mass tells us that the Church says they are.  And while every one of them is certainly important, one of them stands out as having top billing.  And that one is the very first commandment: “I, the LORD, am your God … you shall not have other gods besides me.”

    That one commandment comprises the whole first paragraph of the reading, a total of thirteen lines of text.  I think that means we are to pay attention to it!  It’s the commandment that seems to make the most sense, that it’s the most foundational.  We have to get our relationship with God right and put him first.  But this commandment is rather easy to violate, and I think we do it all the time.  We all know that there are things we put way ahead of God: our work, our leisure, sports and entertainment, and so many things that may even be darker than that.  Don’t we often forget to bring God into our thoughts and plans?  Yet if we would do it on a regular basis, God promises to bless us “down to the thousandth generation!”

    Saint Paul is urging the Corinthians to put God first, too.  He complains that the Jews want signs and the Greeks want some kind of wisdom, but he and the others preach Christ crucified!  We are a people who want signs.  We almost refuse to take a leap of faith unless we have some overt sign of God’s decision.  And we are all about seeking wisdom, mostly in ourselves.  If it makes sense to us and it feels right to us, it must be okay to do.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  We get tripped up in our own wisdom and sign-seeking all the time, then we wander down the wrong path only to end up several years down the road, wondering where it all went wrong.

    And then we have the really challenging vignette at the end of the Gospel reading.    Jesus knows how long it took to build the temple.  But he wasn’t talking about the temple.  He was talking about his body.  His body is the new Temple, and that was the Temple that would be torn down and in three days raised back up.  Because Jesus is the new Temple, none of the money changing and animal selling was necessary.  It was all perfectly legitimate commerce for the old temple worship.  But worshipping the new Temple – Jesus Christ – would require none of that, and so he turns it all upside-down.

    It’s not easy to put God first.  It’s not easy to glory in Christ crucified.  What a horribly difficult and unpopular message to have to live!  But that’s what we are all called to do if we are to be disciples of Jesus, if we are to yearn for life in that kingdom that knows no end.  Glorying in Christ crucified, putting God first, that’s going to require that some time or another, we are going to have to take up our own cross too, and let our entire lives be turned upside-down.  God only knows where that will lead us: maybe to a new career, maybe to a fuller sense of our vocation, maybe to joy, maybe to pain.  But always to grace, because God never leaves the side of those who are willing to have their lives turned upside-down for his glory.

    There’s no easy road to glory.  You don’t get an Easter without a Good Friday.  Jesus didn’t, and we won’t either.  Our lives will be turned upside-down and everything we think we know will be scattered like the coins on the money-changers’ tables.  But God is always and absolutely present to those who pray those words the disciples recalled:

    Zeal for your house will consume me.

  • Monday of the Second Week of Lent

    Monday of the Second Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    Aren’t the Lenten readings challenging?  They’re supposed to be.  They speak of what it means to be a disciple.  We have to be willing to have our whole world turned upside-down; to do something completely against our nature; to let God take control of the life we want so much to control.

    “For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”  I don’t know about you, but that scares the heck out of me.  Because there have been plenty of times when I’ve failed to give someone a break.  The measure I sometimes use ends up being a bar set pretty high, and I would sure hate to have to leap over that bar myself.  But that’s what Jesus is saying will be our measure.

    Because the measure of compassion is the compassion of God himself.  He is our model, He is who we are to strive for, His example is how we are to treat each other.  But when we do that, it means we can’t judge others.  It means that we have to see them as God does, which is to say that we have to see Jesus in them and to see the goodness in them.  And that’s hard to do when that person has just cut you off in traffic, or has gossiped about you, or has crossed you in some other way.  But even then, we are called to stop judging others and show them the compassion of God.

    “Lord, do not deal with us according to our sins.”  That is the prayer of the Psalmist today.  We are given the promise of forgiveness, but we are also warned that if we do not forgive others, we will not be forgiven either.  The measure with which we measure will in turn be measured out to us.  I don’t know about you, but I’m going to look really hard for a small ruler today.

  • The Second Sunday of Lent [B] – Children’s Mass

    The Second Sunday of Lent [B] – Children’s Mass

    Today’s readings

    This weekend’s Gospel is a little strange, I think, maybe a little hard to understand.  We have Peter, James and John go up with Jesus to the top of the mountain, where Jesus is changed in appearance.  He becomes radiant and his clothes become dazzling white, like the garment here on the rock in front of the altar – only more radiant.  Moses and Elijah are suddenly with him, and Peter, James and John are astounded.  They don’t know what to think.  And I think we don’t either!

    For Jesus’ friends this story is a very special, defining moment.  They have seen Jesus do great things: heal the sick and raise the dead; and his words have been very inspiring.  There is a little bit of a movement behind Jesus now: the ministry is just getting started.  But right before this awesome sign on the mountain, he starts talking about how he is going to die.  And the disciples don’t want to hear it.  They’ve given everything to follow him, and now he’s doing this crazy talk about dying.

    But up there on that mountain, they find out that he’s right.  That in order for Jesus to accomplish what he came to do, he’s going to have to die, and rise from the dead.  And the vision on the mountain gives them a sneak-peek at what that’s going to look like.  They get to see Jesus as he is going to look right after he rises from the dead.

    Jesus didn’t just come into the world to say nice things and do mighty deeds.  Those are great, but that wasn’t his whole mission in the world.  He didn’t come to make everyone feel good about themselves and go with the flow.  He came to turn the world upside-down and to make everything new.  There was going to be lots of change that would make people uncomfortable and even mad.  And then they would kill him, and then he would rise from the dead.  That’s how it had to work, that’s how he had to pay the price for our many sins so that we could live forever with God.

    The other great story we have in our readings today comes from the first reading.  Abraham and Sarah have been praying to have a child all their lives.  Now they are very, very old, and God promises to fulfill his plans for Abraham that he would be the father of many nations.  And so, Sarah, in her old age, gives birth to a son, Isaac.  They are of course thrilled at how blessed they are.  But now, with Isaac growing up, God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to prove his faithfulness to God: “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to thelandofMoriah.  There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you.”  So now Abraham has to weigh his trust in God’s promises against the loss of his only beloved son.

    Now again, we know the end of the story: God did not allow Abraham to harm Isaac, but instead provided a lamb for the sacrifice himself.  It wasn’t that Abraham had to prove his faithfulness to God; instead God turns it all around and proves his faithfulness to Abraham – and us!

    There is a whole part of this story that was cut out in the reading we have today.  What we miss is the conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way, which, as you might imagine, is a pretty sad conversation.  At one point, Isaac, who is carrying the wood and the torch for the sacrifice asks his father, “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the holocaust?”  Can you imagine how heartbroken Abraham was in that moment?  But he answered out of his faith in God: “Son, God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.”

    And Abraham was absolutely right – God himself will provide the lamb for the sacrifice – the perfect lamb, Jesus Christ.  This whole reading is a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death and our salvation.  God provided the Lamb – his only Son – to die for us, to pay the price for our sins, to lead us to everlasting life.

    The world never looked so bright as it did on that Transfiguration day on top of the mountain.  But that’s not the last glimpse of that kind of light.  That light was just a tiny sample of the glory of the Resurrection.  And the Resurrection was just a sample of the Glory of God’s heavenly kingdom, for which we all yearn with eager anticipation as we muddle through the pains and sorrows of this present life.

    This is a chance for us all to see in Christ what Peter, James and John did.  It’s a chance to see what Abraham did up on that mountain.  God did what he asked Abraham to do – he offered his only Son.  To take all our sins away.

  • The Second Sunday of Lent [B]

    The Second Sunday of Lent [B]

    Today’s readings

    You know, that last line of today’s Gospel reading always gets me thinking, “well what did they think ‘rising from the dead’ meant?”  Of course that’s easy for us to say, with the eyes of people who have some idea of how the story ends; but Peter, James and John didn’t have that vision quite yet.  When you think about it, up to this point, they’ve been basking in the glory of Jesus’ fame.  They are caught up in the whirlwind.  They too have been excited to see what Jesus will do next: what miracles he will work, what healings he will affect, what wonderful words he will speak.  They have been caught up in the excitement of the crowds who have been following Jesus, at times not understanding things any better than anybody else.  Until now.

    The Transfiguration is kind of a defining moment for Jesus and his closest disciples. They see Jesus and with him Elijah and Moses … symbols of the Law and the prophets.  This gives them a little light, a glimpse of the real Jesus, an insight into who he was that they didn’t have before.  And, honestly, it’s a pretty unsettling glimpse.  Things had just gotten started and were going well.  They weren’t ready to talk about how it was going to end.  Jesus had just started speaking to them about his passion and death, and they weren’t ready to hear it.  Peter famously stumbles over the idea of Jesus having to die, to which Jesus replies, “Get behind me, Satan.  You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

    And now here they are, on the mountain, and they get to see how things were going to be after Jesus’ death and resurrection, only they weren’t ready to see that just yet.  But just because they’re not ready for Jesus to die doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen, sooner rather than later.  The Gospel story is at a turning point now.  God is revealing to Jesus’ closest followers the exact nature of Jesus’ mission in the world.  He hasn’t come just to work miracles, say wonderful things, and make people feel good about themselves.  We still have that misconception today, if we’re honest about it.  No, he hasn’t come to go with the flow and not make waves: he has come to turn the world upside down and make of it the place that it was always supposed to be.

    And the way that would happen is by his passion and death … there is no getting around that.  As difficult as that may be for his closest friends to hear, they have to hear it and come to terms with it.  This experience of the Transfiguration was supposed to give them hope that Jesus’ passion and death wasn’t going to be the end, that God still had wonderful things in store for Jesus, for them, and for the world.

    So this is where that first reading comes in.  Abraham and Sarah, as you might remember, were childless until God intervened in their lives at a very old age.  Finally, they receive Isaac, a real gift from God, a sign that the promise that God made to Abraham – that he would be the father of many nations – would be fulfilled.  And now, God asks him, – no, tells him – “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah.  There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you.”  So now Abraham has to weigh his trust in God’s promises against the loss of his only beloved son.  And we heard how the story ended, God did not allow Abraham to harm Isaac, but instead provided a lamb for the sacrifice himself.

    There is a whole part of this story that was cut out in the reading we have today.  What we miss is the conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way, which, as you might imagine, is rather poignant.  At one point, Isaac asks, “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the holocaust?”  I can’t imagine how heartbroken Abraham was in that moment.  His answer might have been misdirection, or maybe it was faith: “Son, God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.”

    And Abraham was absolutely right – God himself will provide the lamb for the sacrifice – the perfect lamb, Jesus Christ.  This whole reading is a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death and our salvation.  He came to suffer and die for our sins, and that’s significance of today’s Gospel event.  The world never looked so bright as it did on that Transfiguration day on top of the mountain.  But that’s not the last glimpse of that kind of light.  That light was just a tiny sample of the glory of the Resurrection.  And the Resurrection was just a sample of the Glory of God’s heavenly kingdom, for which we all yearn with eager anticipation as we muddle through the pains and sorrows of this present life.

    This is a chance for us all to see in Christ what Peter, James and John did.  It’s a chance to see what Abraham did up on that mountain.  God did what he asked Abraham to do – he offered his only Son.  To take all our sins away.

  • Pastoral Care of the Sick: Anointing of the Sick During Mass

    Pastoral Care of the Sick: Anointing of the Sick During Mass

    Today’s readings: 1 Kings 19:1-8 | Psalm 34 | James 5:13-16 | Mark 2:1-12

    I first met Tom probably a few weeks after I started my first assignment as a priest at St. Raphael’s back in the summer of 2006.  He was a young man, probably around my age, and was suffering the effects of cancer.  His family had called because he wanted to see a priest and I had gone to anoint him at the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital.  They didn’t think he was going to make it through the day, but just at the moment I got there, he had woken up and was talking to the family, the first time he had done that in a couple of days.  I waited a while, then went in to talk to him, and after a while I did what we’re going to do today: I anointed him with oil in the name of the Lord, praying over him, just as St. James tells us we should do in today’s second reading.

    During the conversation with Tom and his family, I learned that one of Tom’s favorite verses of Scripture was Isaiah 53:5: “But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins, Upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.”  Throughout his illness, Tom, a man of great faith, had prayed the closing words of that verse – “By his stripes we were healed” – every day at 3:00, the Mercy Hour, the traditional time when we believe Jesus gave his life for us, enduring stripes and torture and the agony of the cross to heal our brokenness and give us access to the kingdom of God.  He asked everyone he knew to pray for him in that way, and I promised I would do so.

    I visited with Tom a couple of other times during his illness.  About a month after I first met him, Tom passed from this life to the next, right around 3:00 in the afternoon, just after praying those words that had sustained him during his illness.  In the homily at his funeral, I noted that there are all kinds of healing, and that I truly believed Tom had been healed in the greatest way that God can offer us, by bringing us to the Kingdom.  By His stripes, Tom had indeed been healed.  Tom was the first person I ever anointed and his was the first funeral I ever celebrated.  I’ll never forget what a faithful man he was, even during his most difficult days.

    We gather together today to celebrate the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick.  The Church has this sacrament because of those directions from St. James: the sick are to call on the priests of the Church, and they are to anoint the sick person with oil in the name of the Lord.  The prayer of faith, we are told, will heal the sick person, and the Lord will raise that one up.  And if the sick have committed any sins, they will be forgiven.

    The Church has this sacrament also because of who Jesus was and because of what he came to do among us.  And that was to heal people.  Deeply.  Because what we ask for, what we are looking for, is something that can be kind of superficial.  We look for mere physical healing.  But God, in his mercy, knows what we really need; he knows what we would ask for, if we really knew how to ask for what would help us.  What Jesus wants to do is to heal us from the inside out.

    And so we see that in our Gospel reading this morning.  Everyone thought that they knew what the paralytic needed.  The crowd knew the man needed to be un-paralyzed.  They couldn’t have missed the tell-tale signs of the man, immobile on a stretcher, being lowered to down to Jesus from the roof.  The man’s friends probably thought they knew too: they had heard stories, most likely, about this miracle worker, and were anxious to bring their friend, long paralyzed, to the one person that could do something about it.  The scribes thought they knew:  they were watching very closely to see what Jesus would do in this pretty desperate situation: the man can’t even move, how could anyone save him, they thought.  And even the paralytic himself probably thought he knew what he needed: long-standing illness can bring about a kind of short-sightedness that blinds us to what is best for us.

    But the only one who knew – really knew – what this man needed was Jesus.  “Child, your sins are forgiven.”  We can just imagine all those brows furrowing up, can’t we?  What did he say?  His sins are forgiven?  So what about his paralysis?

    What they don’t know is that Jesus did address the man’s paralysis.  There are all sorts of things that paralyze us:  fear, certainly, but the most insidious cause of paralysis is sin.  Sin binds us in ways of which we are not usually fully aware:  sin cancels our freedom and makes us slaves to itself.  Sin is always a step in the wrong direction, but more than that, it often produces shame, which inhibits us from getting back on the right path.  Shame convinces us that we’re not worthy of grace or love so then we sin again, and the cycle continues.  Nothing keeps us from moving forward like sin does.  Nothing paralyzes us so insidiously as does sin.

    Now, please carefully understand that I am not saying that illness is a punishment for sin.  Jesus didn’t say that either.  In fact, so as to dispel the then-common idea that illness was some kind of punishment for something someone did wrong, and to prove that he had power over every kind of healing, Jesus says to the man, “Rise, pick up your mat and go home.”  And he does.  The paralytic had been healed in just the way Jesus knew he needed to be healed – from the inside out.  Clearing away what was binding him by sin, the man was open to receiving the grace of bodily healing as well.

    So today’s readings demonstrate all the tools for healing the Church offers us.  There is the forgiveness of sins, which we have celebrated earlier today in the Sacrament of Penance.  There is the Anointing of the Sick, according to the instructions of Saint James, which we will celebrate in a moment.  And the first reading points us to the most wonderful healing remedy there is: the Body and Blood of Christ.

    Elijah, who has every right at this point in the story to lay down and summon death, hears from God that that is not God’s will.  “Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you!”  Indeed, the path to healing and wholeness is very often a long and arduous journey.  We dare not make that journey without food to sustain us.  And nothing sustains us on that journey like the Body and Blood of Christ.  No matter where our journey takes us: be it to spiritual healing, physical healing, or even one day to eternal life, we need that food for the journey, which is the Eucharist, that splendid meal that reminds us that we are never alone no matter where life or its pains may take us.  Our ministers of care could certainly tell us many stories of just how important this food is to those who are sick.

    And so today, we bring all these tools to bear in the work of healing.  Wherever you are right now, it is our prayer – the Church’s prayer – that God would grant you the healing that you truly need.  That healing may be spiritual: reuniting you with God and others at the Altar of praise.  That healing may be physical if that is what God knows is best for you.

    We don’t know if you all will walk out of this holy place healed of all your diseases.  But we can promise that, if you are properly disposed to receive grace, you will be freed from your sins, healed from the inside out, and that your Lord will always walk with you in your suffering.  Just like for Tom, the healing will come at some time in some way, of the Lord’s choosing, for your good, and for the glory of God.  That’s why we are here today.  That’s why we celebrate these beautiful sacraments with you today.  We know that our Lord deeply desires to heal us.  And we know that Tom was absolutely right in his profession of faith in our Lord’s goodness: by his stripes we were healed.

  • Monday of the First Week of Lent

    Monday of the First Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy.

    People often balk at the mere suggestion of being called to personally holiness. Oftentimes, this is wrapped up in a misplaced and false humility, that kind of humility that says that since I’m good for nothing, there is no way I can even come close to being like God. Yet the fact of the matter is that we are made good by our Creator God who designed us to be like himself, perfect in holiness.

    And if that seems too lofty to attain, Moses and Jesus spell out the steps to getting there today. Clearly, personal holiness is not merely a matter of saying the right prayers, fasting at the right times, going to Church every Sunday and reading one’s Bible. Those things are key on the journey to holiness, but using them as a façade betrays a lack of real holiness. Because for both Moses and Jesus, personal holiness, being holy as God is holy, consists of engaging in justice so that hesed – right relationship and right order – can be restored in the world.

    All the commands we receive from Moses and Jesus today turn us outward in our pursuit of holiness. Our neighbor is to be treated justly, and that neighbor is every person in our path. Robbery, false words, grudges, withholding charity, rendering judgment without justice, not granting forgiveness and bearing grudges are all stumbling blocks to personal holiness. All of these keep us from being like God who is holy. And worse yet, all of these things keep us from God, period.

    The law of the Lord is perfect, as the Psalmist says, and the essence of that law consists of love and justice to every person. If we would strive for holiness this Lent, we need to look to the one God puts in our path, and restore right relationship with that person.