Today, Jesus gives us what might be considered to be his mission statement: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Or at least we might consider this to be his statement of what he wants from us, his people. And we, like the Pharisees, might be tempted to make all sorts of sacrifices. That might mean sacrificing our time to work long hours to attain our goals. Or maybe we sacrifice to give to the poor, or spend more time at Church, or whatever. None of those things is bad in and of themselves, in fact, depending on our intentions, they are probably good things. But if we don’t have mercy in the mix, if we don’t then also extend God’s love to our family, coworkers, or whoever God puts in our presence today, then we’ve blown it. It’s all for nothing. But, if we put mercy first, if we forgive as we have been forgiven and love as we have been loved, then we’ve gotten our mission statement right, too.
Category: Homilies
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St. Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor
St. Bonaventure is known for his theological writings with regard to holiness. He was chosen to be minister general of the Franciscan Order in 1257, and devoted himself to bringing the Order to a closer living of the principles of St. Francis. This was especially important to him, since he was cured of a serious illness as a child through the prayers of St. Francis himself. Bonaventure is known for his writings, which are very close to a kind of mysticism, even though he was a very active preacher and teacher, and not a strict contemplative as you might expect a mystic to be.
Bonaventure’s life and faith is a great witness to us, because it is our life’s vocation to make our working and our prayer one seamless garment. In today’s Gospel, Jesus wishes to reveal the Father to us, very often through the work of great saints like Bonaventure. May we have that childlike faith today that is open to the Father, through Jesus, and through the saints.
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Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha
Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 to a Christian Algonquin woman. Her parents died in a smallpox epidemic – which left Kateri herself disfigured and half blind – when she was just four years old. She went to live with her uncle who succeeded her own father as chief of the clan. Her uncle hated the missionaries who, because of the Mohawks’ treaty with France, were required to be present in the region. Kateri, however, was moved by their words. She refused to marry a Mohawk brave, and at age 19, was baptized on Easter Sunday.
Her baptism meant that she would be treated forever as a slave. Since she refused to work on Sundays, she was not given anything to eat on those days. She eventually took a 200 mile walking journey to the area of Montreal, and there grew in holiness under the direction of some Christian women in the area. At age 23, she took a vow of virginity.
Kateri’s life was one of extreme penance and fasting. This she took upon herself as a penance for the eventual conversion of her nation. Kateri said: “I am not my own; I have given myself to Jesus. He must be my only love. The state of helpless poverty that may befall me if I do not marry does not frighten me. All I need is a little food and a few pieces of clothing. With the work of my hands I shall always earn what is necessary and what is left over I’ll give to my relatives and to the poor. If I should become sick and unable to work, then I shall be like the Lord on the cross. He will have mercy on me and help me, I am sure.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus laments that the people could not respond in faith to the mighty deeds they had seen. Kateri didn’t get to see any kind of mighty deeds; she responded in faith to the Word of God. She was able to put all of her life behind her, so that she could embrace the cross of Christ. She took very seriously the kind of “white martyrdom” – bloodless sacrifice of one’s life for Christ – that Jesus calls us to today.
Our call to personal holiness might not be as radical as Kateri’s was. But we are called to embrace the cross and follow Christ wherever he leads us, and we may well be called upon to sacrifice whatever is comfortable in our lives to do it. If we focus on that, we can take comfort in the Psalmist’s words today, words that Kateri truly believed: “For the LORD hears the poor, and his own who are in bonds he spurns not.”
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Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time [B]
When I met with Father Jim before I came here to Saint Petronille a few weeks ago, the one concern I expressed was coming back to my home parish. I thought it might be weird, and I quoted the exact line in today’s Gospel: “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.” I asked him what he thought about that and he said he didn’t know; he’s never had to experience that himself. But, he also assured me that you’d all be on your best behavior! So we’ll just have to see how that goes.
But it is a valid concern, because, as I believe today’s Liturgy of the Word is saying, we are all of us called to be prophets. When we are baptized, we are anointed with the Sacred Chrism oil, the oil whose name has the same root word as the word “Christ.” In that anointing, we are called to be other christs to the world, we are anointed as Jesus was, priest, prophet and king. So the mission is laid out for us on our baptism day. As priests, we are called to sacrifice for the good of others. As prophets, we are called to speak the truth and witness to the will of God. As kings, we are called to reign eternally with Christ our King in the kingdom that knows no end.
Today, I want to focus, as our readings suggest, on the whole idea of us being anointed as prophets to the world. This presents two important issues. First, whether we like it or not, we are called to be prophets. And second, whether we like it or not, there are prophets among us.
So first, we are called to be prophets. And we may in fact not be thrilled about being prophets. With good reason, I think, because a prophet’s job is not an easy one. Prophets are called to witness to the truth, and quite often, people just don’t want to hear about the truth. God says as much to Ezekiel in today’s first reading: “Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they to whom I am sending you.” You know, that’s not a scriptural quotation you’ll often see on a vocation poster! But it’s a warning we all need to hear, because we will always in our witnessing to the truth come up against those who don’t want to hear it. You might be witnessing to the truth by taking a stand against a business practice you aren’t comfortable with. You can bet that won’t be popular. You might be witnessing to the truth by refusing to allow your children to participate in sports when it conflicts with coming to church on Sunday, that won’t be popular either. Whenever we exercise our ministry as prophets, we are certain to run up against people who are hard of face and obstinate of heart, but our call is the same as Ezekiel’s: witness anyway.
And second, we need to recognize that there are prophets among us. And that’s hard too because prophets can be a real pain. None of us wants to be confronted when we’re straying from the right way. None of us wants to hear the truth about ourselves or others when we’ve been blocking it out. None of us wants to be called out of our comfort zone and have to extend ourselves to reach out in new ways or meet the needs of those we’d rather ignore. But prophets insist that we do all those things.
It’s harder still when we know those prophets. They might be our spouses, our parents, our children, our best friends, and because they love us they will witness the truth to us. But how ready are we to hear and respond to that truth when we are called to it? Wouldn’t we too want to dismiss the carpenter’s son – or daughter – the one whose parents or sisters or brothers live with us, the one we have watched grow up, the one who shares our life with us? Who are they to be witnessing to the truth anyway? That’s the kind of thing Jesus was dealing with in his home town.
It’s like the Procrustean bed from Greek mythology. The mythical figure Procrustes was a son of Poseidon and a bandit from Attica, with a stronghold in the hills outside Eleusis. There, he had an iron bed into which he invited every passerby to lie down. If the guest proved too tall, he would amputate the excess length; victims who were too short were stretched on the rack until they were long enough. Nobody ever fit the bed exactly because it was secretly adjustable: Procrustes would stretch or shrink it upon sizing his victims from afar. Procrustes continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, who “fitted” Procrustes to his own bed and cut off his head and feet. And so a Procrustean bed is any kind of arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is enforced. We might be a lot like Procrustes when we refuse to admit that people among us are prophetic, when we refuse to hear the truth from them.
And here is a very important truth, the truth that I think we are being asked to take away from today’s readings: the prophetic ministry continues among us. There are times when we will be called to hear the prophets, and times when we will be called to be the prophets. Neither task is an easy one: the truth is very often difficult to deal with, no matter what side of it we are on. But honoring the truth is the only way we are going to get to be with Jesus who himself is the way, the truth and the life. So it is the vocation of us Christian disciples to constantly seek the truth, proclaiming it when necessary, hearing and responding to it when called upon, but always to be open to it.
Ezekiel says at the beginning of today’s first reading, “As the LORD spoke to me, the spirit entered into me and set me on my feet.” We might be ready to skip over that detail but I think we need to dwell on it a bit because it’s important. The truth is a heavy thing, and very often can flatten us. It might seem to crush the prophet who has to bear it or even knock the wind out of the one who has to hear it. But it doesn’t go away. We are given the truth, and the strength of the Spirit who picks us up and puts us on our feet. So we prophets can depend on the strength of the Spirit to bear the news, and we hearers can depend on the grace of the Spirit to receive the news and heed its call. The prophetic word is difficult, but our God never leaves us to bear it alone.
In our second reading, it is Saint Paul who makes the call so plain to us. He was afflicted with that thorn in the flesh. Maybe the thorn was the call to witness to the truth as he so often was. It wouldn’t go away, but God did give him the grace to bear it. And the words he heard from God are the words we prophets and hearers of the prophets need to know today: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”
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St. Thomas the Apostle
I think that St. Thomas often gets a bad rap for his doubt. He merely expresses what we would probably be thinking if we were him, and for that matter what the other disciples would have been thinking if they didn’t get to see Jesus the first time. But in his doubt, Jesus invites him to blessing. Thomas is invited to touch the Lord so that he could believe and be one with him. That’s the same invitation we have every time we approach the Lord in the Eucharist. “Take and eat,” Jesus says, “Touch me and do not be unbelieving but believe.” May the invitation to touch our Eucharistic Lord be the occasion to dispel our own doubt and become more closely one with him.
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Wednesday of the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time
I always think it’s interesting that the demons know who Jesus is. The Pharisees and scribes and religious leaders had a real hard time figuring that out, but the demons know and are in fear of him. But the demons do have something in common with the townspeople: neither of them want anything to do with Jesus. We are obviously here because we want to be close to Jesus, but the challenge is what happens when we leave this nice church and go to our jobs, our homes, or wherever life takes us today. Will we see Jesus in each person that comes to us today, or will we have nothing to do with him?
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Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time
I want to feel bad for Lot’s wife in today’s first reading. Not only is she not even called by name in the entire reading, but she gets turned into a pillar of salt just for a backward glance. But, sad as it is, this is the whole point of the reading, and it’s not like they weren’t warned – the angel was very clear: “Flee for your life! Don’t look back or stop anywhere on the Plain. Get off to the hills at once, or you will be swept away.” So in some ways, she deserved what she got. But I think the reading is getting at something a little deeper here than a mere glance over one’s shoulder.
Indeed the real issue is, what did that looking back mean? Sodom and Gomorrah were being destroyed for their wanton evil. They may have once been wonderful cities, but they had become centers of every kind of evil and debased action. And this evil was so pervasive that no other corrective action other than total destruction of the cities would do. If yesterday had not been the solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, we would have heard the famous reading about Abraham and God bargaining to save those cities. At the end of it all, God agrees at Abraham’s urging not to destroy the place if just ten righteous people could be found there. Obviously the righteous numbered less than ten, amounting to just Lot, his wife, and his two daughters.
But, so pervasive was the evil of that place, that it infected even Lot’s wife, who didn’t just glance back to see if she dropped something. No, the backward glance was more likely sorrow for what she left behind; she was not untainted by the scandal of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The lesson is that when God leads us forward, we cannot debase ourselves to look back. The Psalmist has it right today, as always, when he says, “For your mercy is before my eyes, and I walk in your truth.” Your mercy is before my eyes, so I need to look forward, not back. Looking backward leads us to our old sinful ways; looking forward is what leads us to our God. So if God is giving us the chance to move forward, as he did for Lot and his wife and his daughters, then we can do no less than fix our eyes on the path ahead, cutting our ties with everything that is behind us.
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Saints Peter and Paul
In today’s Gospel, Peter and the others are asked, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Both Peter and Paul were committed to the truth about who Christ was. They had too much at stake. Having both messed up their estimation of who Jesus was earlier in their lives, they knew the danger of falling into the trap. So for them Jesus could never be just a brother, friend or role model – that was inadequate. And both of them proclaimed with all of their life straight through to their death that Jesus Christ is Lord. We too on this day must repent of the mediocrity we sometimes settle for in our relationship with Christ. He has to be Lord of our lives and we must proclaim him to be that Lord to our dying breath. We must never break faith with Saints Peter and Paul, who preserved that faith at considerable personal cost.
Perhaps Saints Peter and Paul can inspire our own apostolic zeal. Then, as we bear witness to the fact that Jesus is Lord of our lives and of all the earth, we can bring a banal world to relevance. Perhaps in our renewed apostolic zeal we can bring justice to the oppressed, right judgment to the wayward, love to the forgotten and the lonely, and faith to a world that has lost sight of anything worth believing in. To paraphrase Cardinal Francis George, the apostolic mission still has a Church, and it’s time for the Church to be released from its chains and burst forth to give witness in the Holy Spirit that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father
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Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time [B]
These readings today are just incredible. In one sense, they give us a reason for hope and a foundation for faith, but in another sense, they raise some pastoral questions that are difficult to answer. The very first words of today’s Liturgy of the Word reach out and grab us: “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.” And perhaps we already knew that. Perhaps we know that God does not intend our death or our suffering, but the really hard thing for us is that he permits it. Why is that? Why would God permit his beloved ones to suffer so much here on earth?When I was in seminary, I worked as a fire chaplain the last couple of years. We were called out one wintry night, just before Christmas break, to speak to some medics who had extracted a nine-year old child from a badly mangled car, only to have the child die on the way to the hospital. These medics were from a neighboring fire department, so we didn’t know them, and I didn’t have too much hope that the conversation would go well. But, to my surprise, these men did open up and expressed the frustration they felt.
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. They had struggled so much to find a reason for this sadness, but only faith could provide help in the situation.
Which is the story of today’s Gospel. Two people reach out in very different ways to end suffering and provide healing. One is a man, who approaches Jesus and falls at his feet, begging the teacher to heal his daughter. The other is a woman, who dares not make herself known, who sneaks up behind Jesus to touch his clothing. The situations were different, but what unites them is their faith. They have faith that reaching out to Jesus in their own way will bring them the healing they desire.
And there was a pretty serious leap of faith involved for the hemorrhaging woman. Touch was her enemy. She had suffered much at the hands of many doctors. Not only have their ministrations failed to heal her, but they have also left her penniless. And to touch anyone in her state of ritual impurity makes them ritually unclean too. So she is totally marginalized: she is a woman in a patriarchal society, afflicted by an enduring and debilitating illness, she has no money to take care of herself, and she is unable to be part of the community or participate in worship. Things could not have been worse. Finding the courage to reach out to Jesus, even in her impure state, she is healed by her faith.
Now that same faith was lacking in the people who were attending to Jairus’s daughter. They may have believed that Jesus could cure her illness, but now that she is dead, his assertion that she is merely “sleeping” meets with ridicule and scorn. So Jesus has to throw out the faithless ones so that they would no longer be an obstacle. The child cannot reach out to Jesus so he reaches out to her, taking her hand, and raising her up.
So it’s as simple as that. An act of faith on the part of the hemorrhaging woman and the synagogue official provide healing and restore life. But how realistically does that match our experience? I am guessing that those medics threw up a prayer or two in addition to all of the life-saving actions they performed on that nine-year old when he was in the ambulance with them, but the boy died. How many of us have prayed faithfully, constantly, only to be met by seemingly deaf ears? We don’t even have the same opportunity as Jairus and the hemorrhaging woman. We can’t reach out and touch Jesus in the flesh. So I can’t stand here and tell you that one simple act of faith is all it takes to make all 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.
I am struck by the Eucharistic imagery at the end of today’s Gospel. Jesus comes to the home of Jairus and finds his daughter asleep in death. He reaches out to her, touches her, and raises her up. Then he instructs those around her to give her something to eat. We gather for this Eucharistic banquet today and Jesus comes to us, finding us asleep in the death of our sins. Because we are dead in our sins, we can hardly reach out to touch our Lord, but he reaches out to us. He takes our hands, raises us up, and gives us something to eat.
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 stay with us, remaining unresolved at least to our satisfaction. 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, perhaps we can 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.
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Saturday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s first reading reminds me of times growing up when I’d laugh at inappropriate times, which was pretty often. Come to think of it, some things might not have changed that much, but I digress. But growing up, especially when there was tension, I’d often laugh, and I’d hate it when I got caught. “Who me? No, I didn’t laugh…” That kind of sounds like the conversation between the Lord and Sarah today. Yesterday, it was Abraham who laughed, and for the same reason. They simply could not believe that God’s generosity and blessing could overcome the limitations of their advanced age. But God had plans for Abraham and his family, and so age and even laughter could not prevent the beginnings of the covenant.
Contrast their incredulity and lack of faith with the faith of the centurion in today’s Gospel. Jesus didn’t even have to go to his house to cure his servant. The centurion’s faith was so great that even distance provided no obstacle to blessing. As I mentioned yesterday, we can’t be too hard on Abraham and Sarah. They didn’t yet have the experience of the Lord that we have, or even that the centurion had. That centurion had seen Jesus’ mighty deeds and probably had come to believe because of that.
This raises a rather uncomfortable pastoral question, I think. How many good, faithful people, have prayed their hearts out, totally trusting in God’s power to heal and save, and yet their loved one remains ill, or perhaps was not saved from death. That’s a hurt that a lot of people carry with them for a long time, it may even be that they have felt they had done something wrong or perhaps didn’t have quite enough faith. The answer of course, is that none of those are true. God’s answers to prayer can take a lot of different forms, and sometimes he doesn’t answer the way that we would have picked. That doesn’t mean that God is not merciful, just, or good, and it doesn’t mean that we are not faithful. It just means that whatever the blessing is, it’s different that we expected, and perhaps we can’t even see it just yet.
The responsorial psalm today is actually Mary’s Magnificat, her song of praise and faith. What a wonderful model this is for all of us who struggle with faith and who struggle with the way God answers prayer sometimes. Mary’s life was not without its struggles and pain, but still she was able to sing, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” That is the prayer for all of us who struggle but still have faith.
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