Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: mercy

  • Thursday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Simon the Pharisee committed a grave error in hospitality, and a serious error in judgment. In those days, when a guest came to your home, you made sure to provide water for him or her to wash their feet, because the journey on foot was often long and hot and dirty, and it was pretty much always made on foot. But Simon had done no such thing for Jesus.

    Simon’s intentions were not hospitable; rather he intended to confront Jesus on some point of the Law so as to validate his opinion that Jesus was a charlatan. That was the purpose of his dinner invitation. Then, in comes the “sinful woman,” who breaks an alabaster jar full of extremely expensive ointment and anoints the feet of Jesus while she is in tears for love of Jesus and sorrow for her sin. But Simon simply judged the woman to be a sinner, someone to be shunned and ignored, and reckoned Jesus guilty of sin by association. Jesus isn’t having any of that, because Jesus is about forgiveness. He didn’t care about the woman’s past; he already knew it well, but was more concerned that, presently, she had need of mercy. Her act of love and hospitality, her posture of humility, her sorrow for her sin, all of these made it possible for Jesus to heal her.

    But the one who doesn’t think he is in need of healing, symbolized by Simon the Pharisee, can never be healed. And so that’s our examination of conscience today. Are we aware of our need for healing, or have we been thinking we are without sin, without brokenness, without openness to God’s mercy? If so, our moments of reflection today need to guide us to honest and open acceptance of God’s mercy, and a pouring out of the best that we have in thanksgiving. Like the repentant woman, we need to humble ourselves, and pour out sorrow for our sins, and love for Jesus who wants nothing more than to heal us.

    We are offered so much mercy and forgiveness for our many sins. Let us love much so that we might receive the great mercy our Lord wants to give us.

  • Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

    Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    “Do you want to be well?”

    That had to be a jarring question to the man at the waters of Bethesda. I wonder if he was thinking, “Of course I want to be well! Why do you think I’ve been lying here so long?” But it’s an important question for him to answer: Jesus can’t heal someone who has become entrenched in his or her own illness to the point that they just accept it. But he tells Jesus his plight, and accepts the command to rise and walk, and with that he is healed.

    In these Lenten days, the Elect among us – those preparing for the Easter Sacraments of initiation – are lying at the waters of Bethesda. Those waters are the waters of Baptism, which will be stirred up at the Easter Vigil. They will be taken down to the waters by their sponsors, and they will be baptized into the faith. What a glorious night that will be!

    In these Lenten days, we find ourselves lying at the waters of our own Bethesda, too (Bethesda means “House of Mercy). We find ourselves sick with sin, and needing the waters of Baptism to be stirred up in our own lives so that we can be made well, so that we can rise and walk. We are more than half way through Lent, and so it is time that we reflect on our sin and answer Jesus’ question, “Do you want to be well?” Because he stands ready to stir up the waters and command us to rise and walk. This is the time for a good Lenten confession if we haven’t made one yet. This Sunday we will have 15 priests to hear confessions. Those waters will be plenty stirred up.

    So, do you want to be well?

  • The Thirty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Thirty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “Well done, my good and faithful servant.  Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities.  Come, share your master’s joy.” I always like to joke that that’s how I ended up being the pastor of the biggest church in the state, so maybe it’s not such a good idea! But then, I love this parish and wouldn’t rather be anyplace else, so there’s a lot of truth to the joy of faithfulness.

    This Gospel passage is a very interesting reading that sometimes gets explained as a plea for us to use our time, talent, and treasure for the good of the kingdom.  And that’s a very nice message, except that it isn’t what the Church is going for on this, the second to last Sunday of the Church year.  We have to remember that, at the end of the Church year, the Church points us to the end of time, when Jesus will return and all will be put into proper order, and the Kingdom of God here on earth will forever be the Kingdom of God in heaven.  So what’s really going on with today’s Gospel reading?  Well, bookmark that for a bit, because it is truly the million dollar question of the day.

    I’ve often heard stories of those who grew up in the great depression.  Many years later, they still had deeply engrained in them the scrupulous care for everything they have that was etched into their very being during that horrible time in our history.  They spent a lifetime wasting nothing, even hoarding things.  They would eat leftovers well past their freshness dates.  It was just their response to having nothing, completely understandable.

    And that’s the lens through which I think we need to see this week’s Gospel parable.  Here Jesus presents the often-quoted story of a rich man entrusting his slaves with a great deal of wealth before he sets off on a long journey.  The word “talents” here does not mean what we mean when we use that word: here we are not talking about gifts or abilities, but rather money, and a large sum of money at that.  Scholars suggest that a talent was equal to something like one thousand days’ wages, or what a poor person could have lived on for fifteen or twenty years.  So think about it, even the servant who only received one talent actually received quite a bit – he received what the average person would earn in a little over three years!  That’s a lot of money for anyone.

    So who is it, then, that is receiving such a magnanimous gift?  On first glance, seeing what it is they have been given, we might think these are senior advisers to the master, people who would have been in charge of his estate and his business transactions.  But that’s not what it says.  It says he called in his “servants” – so we are talking here about slaves, slaves – not business advisers.  And so these slaves are getting ten talents, five talents, and one talent – all of them are getting a considerable amount of money!

    And we know how this plays out.  Two of them take what they have and very successfully invest it and when the master returns, are able to hand over the original sum with one hundred per cent interest.  Very impressive!  But the slave who received just a “little” (even though it was certainly still a lot of money), out of fear buries it in the ground and gives it back to the master untouched, with nothing to show for it.  It’s much like a person having gone through something like the great depression placing money under a mattress rather than trust the banks, which they saw fail miserably in their lifetimes.

    Now, we’ve established that the gift they are receiving – even the slave who received little – is worth an incredible amount of money, especially to a slave who would never have the opportunity to see such wealth if not for the trust the master has placed in them.  So let’s be clear that this parable is not about us using our gifts properly; it’s about us, the slaves receiving something very great, some inestimable wealth.  What could that possibly be?  Well, of course, it’s God’s love, grace, and favor, which is undeservedly ours and given to us without merit.

    Just for background, this is yet another indictment of the Pharisees and religious establishment of the time.  They were the ones who, because Christ was not yet present in the world, received just one talent.  But it was still a huge sum of grace!  Yet, their practice was to protect it so scrupulously by attending to the minutiae of the 613 laws of the Torah, that they missed the opportunity to really invest God’s love in the world and grow the faith to full stature.

    But we can’t be like that.  We can’t have the faith taken away from us and be tossed out to wail and grind our teeth.  We have to take the faith we’ve been given, the grace we have received in baptism, and invest it mightily in the world, without fear, so that everyone will come to know the Lord and we would all go on to be put in charge of greater things, in the kingdom of heaven.  That is our vocation in the world, brothers and sisters in Christ.  We have to get that right.  We can’t cower in fear, or think our faith is too little, or we don’t know enough.  That was the cardinal sin for Matthew in his Gospel.  We have to be bold disciples and make sure that Christ is known everywhere we go, everywhere life takes us.  That is the only acceptable response to God’s love.

    Next week, we will celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King of the Universe, and then look forward to a new year as we begin the season of Advent.  And so it is important that we take today’s Gospel parable seriously.  We need to spend some time reflecting on how well we have invested God’s grace and love in the world around us.  Have we been good examples to our family and others?  Have we been people of integrity in our workplaces, schools and community?  Have we served those who are in need out of love for Christ?  Have we been zealous to grow in our spiritual lives?  Have we taken time to root sin out of our life, and to receive the grace of forgiveness in the Sacrament of Penance?  Have we been unafraid to witness to our faith in every situation?

    If we can’t answer all these questions affirmatively, we have some new-Church-year’s resolutions to make.  Because, and I can’t stress this strongly enough, brothers and sisters, the alternative is wailing and grinding of teeth.  And forever is a long time to be doing that!  No; God forbid.  Our desire is to hear those wonderful words from our Lord one day: “Well done, my good and faithful servant.  Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities.  Come, share your master’s joy.”

  • The Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Think back.  When you were growing up, in your faith formation, did you get the idea that somehow you had to behave yourself in order to win God’s love and grace?  I think that’s a common thing that people come to after a life of somewhat inadequate faith formation.  We got the idea that, if we wanted God to love us, then we had to behave in the right ways and follow all the rules.  And some of that comes from our human experience.  Many people often consume their lives with trying to win the approval of others, and so God is just an extension of that.  But we have it all backwards: God is not like that, and that’s what today’s Liturgy of the Word is trying to tell us.  The Scriptures show us a God who loves us first, and then calls on us to respond to God’s love by living the right way.  Our entire lives should be all about responding in love to the love God has for all of us.

    The first reading today recalls how God led the people Israel through the desert for forty years, bringing them safely to the land he promised on oath to their ancestors.  Traditionally this has been viewed literally, but there is also a tradition that sees the whole rescue of the Hebrew people from the tyranny of Egypt allegorically.  Many of the Church fathers see the rescue as our own rescue from the tyranny and slavery of sin, through the wilderness of the world, into the safe haven of God’s promise.  So whether we want to read this first reading literally today, or whether we want to see it as our delivery from sin, in either case, we see the Lord’s providence and kindness poured out on his people, delivering them from danger and bringing them safely into a land that had always been promised to them.

    For our second reading these coming weeks, we will be reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, arguably one of the masterpieces of his, or anyone else’s, theological writing.  Today’s reading is somewhat the crux of his presentation in Romans: God in his mercy chose to save us even though we were not worthy of it: we were still sinners.  We had been enemies of God through the power sin and death had over us, but God in his goodness chose to redeem us anyway.  Having been reconciled, he now chooses in his kindness to save us from the power of death and bring us in to the grace and peace of his kingdom for all eternity.  This is all done through the grace and kindness of our God, who chooses to save us even though we are not remotely worthy of it on our own.

    The Gospel reading, though, presents us with the greatest personification of God’s kindness.  Throughout chapter nine of Matthew’s Gospel, we see the crowds hanging on Jesus’ words and deeds.  In this chapter, Jesus heals a paralytic, he calls Matthew – a tax collector and a sinner – to follow him, he raises the daughter of a local government official from the dead, he heals two blind men, and expels a demon.  The crowds were understandably entranced by his words and deeds, and Jesus can see that they are entranced because they had so long gone without any kind of adequate pastoral care.  The religious officials who should have been bringing them the good news of God’s kindness had instead been about the business of extracting the minutiae of the Law and filling their own coffers.  They had left the people abandoned of God, like sheep without a shepherd, and Jesus’ heart ached for them.  So in his kindness, he sends out the Twelve to continue his work and to call more and more people to come to know that the kingdom was at hand, and repentance would give them a place in that kingdom.

    So these readings have been a great rehearsal of the kindness of God as the Scriptures present it.  God created us in love, redeemed us from the grasp of sin and death, and gives us a place in his heavenly kingdom – all of this without our being worthy of any of it.  And that’s nice, but the Scriptures would be remiss if they stopped there.  Instead, they go on to prescribe the proper response to God’s love and kindness, and each of today’s readings give us a way to do that.  These readings call us to keep the covenant, to boast of God and to freely give.

    In the first reading, God makes the first move in favor of establishing a covenant.  He didn’t have to – clearly.  He had made us in love, but we had turned away from him, and not just once.  Yet, he was the one who sent Moses to lead the people out of the slavery of Egypt so that they could inherit the land he promised on oath to their ancestors.  If God has reached out that far to us, we can do no less than keep the covenant.  We have to live the life of grace: keep the commandments, love God and neighbor, show God’s love in everything we do.  We have to reach out to the marginalized and needy, just as God reached out to us in our own need.  “If you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant,” God says to the Israelites and to us, “you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people.”

    In the second reading, Saint Paul echoes what the first reading says.  God has made the first move.  He reconciled us while we were still sinners.  He gave us the way to the kingdom.  We didn’t deserve it, but our sinfulness is no match for God’s mercy.  So if God has been so merciful, we need to boast about it.  And we’re not to boast about it as if it was something we earned or accomplished on our own; we are to “boast of God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”

    And finally, in the Gospel, Jesus gives us the key to our response to God’s love, mercy and kindness: “Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.”  The gifts of grace are never given to us just for ourselves.  They are given to us to share.  Now that we have been redeemed and blessed, we must turn and bless others, leading them to the redemption God longs to pour out on them.  We are to freely give of the rich store of grace that has been freely given to us.

    God does not manipulate us for his pleasure.  He does not demand that we behave perfectly in order to receive his kindness, grace, and love.  Instead, he is the one who washes our feet, who stretches out his arms on the Cross, who dies that we may live.  In the face of such great and perfect love, we can do no less than love in return.

  • Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent

    Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    Have you ever felt like you were certainly in the fire? Things in life may have gone from bad to worse. When we’re in those times of life, sometimes we know that the reason for it is that we have sinned. Now I’m not talking about when people in your life are sick or anything like that, God doesn’t punish sin by unleashing evil on us.  Maybe it’s more like when relationships have gone bad, or things have gone wrong at work, or there’s financial hardship. You know the feeling, things are just piling up and you have no idea how to get out, it’s getting hotter all the time and it seems there is no salvation. But deep at the heart of it, you feel the weight of your own sin. I can testify to being in that place myself in my life on occasion. To that, the young man Azariah speaks:

    For we are reduced, O Lord, beyond any other nation,
    brought low everywhere in the world this day
    because of our sins.
    But with contrite heart and humble spirit
    let us be received;
    As though it were burnt offerings of rams and bullocks,
    or thousands of fat lambs,
    So let our sacrifice be in your presence today
    as we follow you unreservedly;
    for those who trust in you cannot be put to shame.

    We have to be a forgiven and forgiving people. When life crashes in on us, we have to confess our sins, and cry out for God’s pardon and mercy. And when it is given us – and it will be given us – we must become a merciful people who extend forgiveness to every single person in our lives without hesitation. We have to be a people who throw mercy around freely, because that’s how it’s been given to each of us.

  • The Thirty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Thirty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Last Sunday and today, we have a kind of theme going on in our Liturgy of the Word.  Particularly in the Gospel readings, we have had the stories of two tax collectors.  Last week, the tax collector drew the scorn of the Pharisee, but went home justified because he humbled himself and asked for mercy.  He literally made himself low and was raised up.  Interestingly, in today’s story, Zacchaeus begins by raising himself up.  Being vertically challenged, he climbs a tree so that he can get a look at Jesus who was passing through Jericho.  As Jesus notices him, he is invited to come down so that Jesus can stay with him, which he does with joy.

    I don’t think it’s coincidence that the Church puts these two striking Gospel stories among the closing weeks of the liturgical year.  Last week, one of our staff members reminded me that we were exactly two months from Christmas, which I didn’t in fact receive with joy.  It’s not that I don’t like Christmas, it’s just that the older I get, the faster time passes.  And this year has been a whirlwind.  But here we are, with just three Sundays left in the Liturgical Year.  Advent begins on Thanksgiving weekend this year, and that’s just a stone’s throw away.

    So in the closing Sundays of the year, I think it’s interesting that we have these two memorable stories about the conversion of tax collectors.  You’ve heard it preached before, no doubt, that tax collectors were considered to be among the most terrible sinners, a characterization that probably wasn’t all that far from the truth.  They were known to be extortionists, collecting far more tax than the empire required.  And so to have two stores of their conversions at the end of the year is, I think, quite deliberate.

    As we run out of time on the Liturgical year, the Church points to the fact that we really don’t know how much time we have.  Clearly, death can take us at any time, and Jesus himself prophesies that we do not know the day nor the hour when he will return in glory.  So conversion is urgent.  We can’t wait for a tomorrow that may never come, nor presume that God will always give us more time.  We have to come down from the tree, having seen the Lord, welcome him into the home of our heart, and repent of the sins we have committed in our weakness, or in our stubbornness, or in our hard heartedness. 

    [For 9:00am Mass, Rite of Acceptance into the Order of Catechumens:

    [We have here today, nine young people who have been like Zacchaeus.  Yes, some are vertically challenged – at least now! – but they too have seen the Lord.  And while they weren’t baptized when they were infants like so many of us, they have desired to come to the faith and embrace their cross and follow our Lord. ]

    You have to love this story of Zacchaeus, I think.  I think there are two main components of the story that really stand out for me as hallmarks of the spiritual life.

    The first is Zacchaeus’s openness.  First, he is so eager to see Jesus that he climbs up a tree to get a look at him.  We don’t have to go that far.  All we have to do is spend some time in the Eucharistic Chapel, or even just some quiet moments reflecting on Scripture.  All of those are ways to see Jesus, but like Zacchaeus, we have to overcome obstacles to get a look at him.  For Zacchaeus, that meant climbing up a tree to overcome his short stature.  But for you and me, that might mean clearing our schedule, making our time with Jesus a priority.  Zacchaeus’s openness also included inviting Jesus in, despite his sinfulness.  He was willing to make up for his sin and change everything once he found the Lord.  We might ask ourselves today what we need to change, and how willing we are to invite Jesus into our lives, despite our brokenness.

    The second thing that stands out for me is what Jesus says to those who chided him for going into a sinner’s house.  “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.”  What wonderful words those are for us to hear.  Because we know how lost we have been at times, and how far we have wandered from our Lord.  But the Lord seeks us out anyway, because we are too valuable for him to lose. And all we have to do is to be open to the Lord’s work in our lives, just like Zacchaeus was.  And we need to do it now, because repentance is urgent, mercy is urgent, salvation is urgent.  We know not how much time we have to return to our Lord, and there’s no time like the present.  What a joy it will be then to hear those same words Jesus said to our friend Zacchaeus: “Today salvation has come to this house.”

  • The Third Sunday of Easter

    The Third Sunday of Easter

    Today’s readings

    What Satan wants is a community of disciples so mired in their sins, that they do nothing to foster the Kingdom of God and live the Gospel. Bookmark that thought, because I’ll come back to it in a bit.

    I love today’s Gospel because it features one of my favorite characters, Saint Peter. Saint Peter has been inspirational to me because, despite being called to do great things for God, he does a lot of messing up and often has to pick himself up and start all over again. Today’s Gospel reading has him trying to figure things out. He’s very recently been through the arrest and execution of his Lord, only to find out that he is risen, and has appeared to various disciples, including Peter himself. I think today’s story has him trying to make sense of it all and figure out where to go from here. But he’s trying to figure it out in the midst of having fallen again, since he denied even knowing the Lord three times on the night of Holy Thursday.

    So, in an effort to figure things out, he goes back to what he knows best, which is to say he goes fishing. And he takes some of the others with him. And, as is very typical of Peter’s fishing expeditions recorded in the Gospels, he catches nothing even though he’s been hard at it all night long. It’s not until the Lord is with them again and redirects their efforts, that they eventually pull in an incredibly large catch of fish. Jesus then invites them to dine with him, using one of my favorite commands in all of Sacred Scripture, “Come, have breakfast.”

    Then we have this very interesting, and in some ways tense, conversation between Jesus and Peter. Jesus takes him off to the side after breakfast, and just as he redirected Peter’s efforts while they were fishing earlier, now he redirects Peter’s efforts in his life. There are a couple of points of background that we need to keep in mind. First, just as Peter three times denied his Lord on the night of Holy Thursday, so now Jesus gives him three opportunities to profess his love and get it right.

    Second, the Greek language has a few different words that we translate “love.” Two of them are in play in this conversation. The first is agapeo, which is the highest form of love. It’s a love that always wills the best for the other person, a love that is self-sacrificing and enduring. It’s the love that God has for us. The other kind of love that is used here is phileo, a bit lower form of love that is something like a strong affection for someone else. Where agapeo is an act of the will, phileo is more of a feeling. Many scholars don’t see this as an appreciable difference and say John in his Gospel just uses two different words to mean the same thing. But I think John is careful with language, and the two uses mean something, as we will see.

    So the conversation begins, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” That’s literally a loaded question, so let’s look at it. First of all, Jesus calls Peter “Simon, son of John.” But Jesus is the one who changed his name from Simon to Peter. So this seems to be a bit of a rebuke: Okay, Peter, if you’re just going to revert to your former self and pretend you haven’t known me the last three years, then I’ll just use your old name. I’m sure Peter didn’t miss the inference. Then at the end, “do you love me more than these?” Scholars have a lot of opinions on what “these” are: Do you love me more than you love these other guys? Do you love me more than these other guys love me? Do you love me more than this fishing equipment, the tools of your former life? It doesn’t matter what he meant by “these,” the effect is the same: Peter is called to a higher love, which is evidenced in the word Jesus uses for love, which is agapeo. Peter responds, acknowledging Jesus’ omniscience, “Lord you know that I love you.” But he uses phileo, perhaps acknowledging that he is not capable of the agapeo kind of love. And he’s probably right about that, since sin does diminish our capacity to love. He receives the response “Feed my lambs,” of which I’ll say more later.

    The conversation continues in the same manner, using the same forms of the word “love” in both the question and the response, and ending with the injunction, “Tend my sheep.” But the third question is interesting. Jesus asks the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” But this time Jesus uses the word phileo, as much as to say, “Okay, Peter, do you even have affection for me?” And Peter seems to get the inference, because he responds emotionally: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” And he’s right: Jesus does know. But Jesus needed Peter to know it too. Jesus, in his Divine Mercy, has healed Peter, forgiven his sins, and helped him to remember his mission, redirecting his efforts to “Feed my sheep.”

    Because if Jesus hadn’t done this, Satan would have won. He would have had that community of disciples so mired in their sins, that they do nothing to foster the Kingdom of God and live the Gospel. And then we wouldn’t be here today, would we?

    And let’s be clear about this. We, like Peter, all have a mission to accomplish. We all have some part of the Kingdom to build. We may not be the rock on which Jesus will build his Church, but we are indeed part of it. And we are all, sadly, affected by our sins. We have all denied our Lord in one way or another by what we have done and what we have failed to do. And so the Lord, in his Divine Mercy, says to us today: “Patrick, do you love me?” “Susan do you love me?” And we respond with whatever love we’re capable of. In that moment, Jesus redirects our life’s efforts too, so that we can do what we’re called to do. We, who have been purified by our Lenten penance, are now called to the life of the Resurrection, in which all God’s lambs are cared for, and all his sheep tended.

    So ponder this question this week: “Do you love me more than these?”  “These” can be anything that is part and parcel of your life day in and day out.  Do you love the Lord more than “these”?  Then hear our Lord say to you: “Tend my sheep.”  Those sheep are whoever in your life are the ones who make up your life’s vocation, those people God has given you to love and care for.  Tend them with renewed authenticity.  Tend them with the same love our Lord has for you.  Tend his sheep.

    Because Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!

    Alleluia!

  • Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of Our Lord

    Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of Our Lord

    Today’s readings

    I often tell the children in our school that if there’s just one thing they ought to know about God, one thing they ever learn about God, and that is that God loves them more than anything, that would be enough.  It’s the thing that I hope they remember me saying, because that’s the message I feel called to proclaim.  God’s love is the most important thing we have in this life, the most precious gift we will ever receive.

    It is true gift, because there’s nothing, not one thing, that we can do to earn it.  Filthy in sin as we are, we certainly don’t do it. And entitled as we can sometimes be, there is no way we can ever say that we have a right to it.  But we get it anyway.  God freely pours out his love on us sinners, not because we are good, but because he is.

    God loves us first and loves us best, and it’s a love that will totally consume us, totally transform us, if we let it.  It’s a love that can break our stony hearts and transform our sadness into real joy. It’s a love that can change us from people of darkness to real live people of light and joy.  It’s a love that obliterates the power of sin and death to control our eternity, and opens up to us the glory of heaven.

    And even if we live our lives passing from one thing to the next and barely noticing anything going on around us, we have to pause and appreciate God’s love on this most holy morning.  This is the morning that confounded Mary of Magdala; it’s the morning that got Peter and John out of their funk and sent them running.  It’s the morning that John finally starts to get what Jesus was getting at all this time.  He saw and believed.

    He saw that his Lord was not there, that death could not hold him.  He saw that the grave was no longer the finality of existence.  He saw that Love – real Love – is in charge of our futures.  He saw that there is real hope available to us hopeless ones.

    “To him all the prophets bear witness,
    that everyone who believes in him
    will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.”

    That quote, from Saint Peter’s testimony in the Acts of the Apostles, today’s first reading, is the Easter faith to which we are all called.  We have to stop living like this is all there is. We have to stop loving our sins more than we love God.  We have to live like a people who have been loved into existence, and loved into redemption.

    That means we have to put aside our disastrous sense of entitlement. We have to learn to receive love so deep that it calls us to change.  And we have to love in the same way too, so that others will see that and believe.

    We’ll never find real love by burying ourselves in work or careers.  We’ll do nothing but damage our life if we seek to find it in substance abuse.  We’ll never find love by clinging to past hurts and resentments.  We are only going to find love in one place, or more precisely in one person, namely, Jesus Christ. We must let everything else – everything else – go.

    Today, Jesus Christ broke the prison-bars of death, and rose triumphant from the underworld.  What good would life have been to us, if Christ had not come as our Redeemer?  Because of this saving event, we can be assured that our own graves will never be our final resting places, that pain and sorrow and death will be temporary, and that we who believe and follow our risen Lord have hope of life that lasts forever.  Just as Christ’s own time on the cross and in the grave was brief, so our own pain, death, and burial will be as nothing compared to the ages of new life we have yet to receive.  We have hope in these days because Christ is our hope, and he has overcome the obstacles to our living.  

    The good news today is that we can find real love today and every day of our lives, by coming to this sacred place. It is here that we hear the Word proclaimed, here that we partake of the very Body and Blood of our Lord. An occasional experience of this mystery simply will not do – we cannot partake of it on Easter Sunday only.  No; we must nurture our faith by encountering our Risen Lord every day, certainly every Sunday, of our lives, by hearing that Word, and receiving his Body and Blood.  Anything less than that is seeking the living one among the dead.

    Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

  • The Fifth Sunday of Lent (Scrutiny III/Cycle A Readings)

    The Fifth Sunday of Lent (Scrutiny III/Cycle A Readings)

    Today’s readings

    “Lord, by now there will be a stench.”

    That’s one of my favorite lines in scripture.  It begs the question I want you to pray about this week, which is this: “What in your life really stinks?”  Because we have to have that stench washed away in order to really live.

    If you know my preaching, you’re not going to be at all surprised about this, but I have to tell you honestly, our Gospel reading isn’t about Lazarus.  Yes, he got raised from the dead, so good for him, but he isn’t the center of action in the story.  In fact, he’s dead for most of the reading, so he doesn’t play a major part.   Our Gospel today is about Jesus, who gives us baptism and grace, those helps that are the remedy for all that stinks in our life.

    So Jesus hears that his friend Lazarus is ill.  He knows that Lazarus will die, and he knows that he will raise Lazarus up, so very much like the rest of John’s Gospel, Jesus is in full control.  He delays going to see Lazarus because it will give him the opportunity that will increase faith in the other players in the story.  So when he arrives, Lazarus has been dead four days.  That’s an important detail because it tells us that Lazarus is really, really dead.  The Jews believed that the soul of a person hung around for about three days, but after that, well, he or she was gone forever.  So if Jesus had raised Lazarus on the second day, no big deal.  If on the third day, that would have been a foreshadowing of himself.  But on the fourth day, he raises up someone who is really, really dead: someone, you know, just like us.

    So just like the man who was born blind last week, we are born dead, in a way.  I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but stay with me.  We are born dead in our sins, and there is nothing we can do to raise ourselves up out of that sinfulness except for the grace of God.  So the movement in our Gospel today is from life that is so mired in sin that it stinks, to life that is so free of death that burial bands and tombs cannot contain it.

    During Lent, we have been journeying with our catechumens, who are now called the Elect, as they prepare to be baptized, confirmed, and receive first Holy Communion at the Easter Vigil.  Much like them, there are three groups of catechumens in today’s Gospel.  The first group of these scriptural catechumens is Mary and Martha, those friends of Jesus that are part of John’s Gospel a few times.  Here, the rubber meets the road in their faith.  Here, like so many of us, they have something tragic happen in their lives, and now they have to grapple with whether their faith helps them with that or not.  Mary is so troubled that she doesn’t even go out to meet the Lord until her sister tells her that little white lie that Jesus was asking for her.  Both she and Martha, when they first see Jesus, complain that he should have come sooner so that he could have saved Lazarus.  But Martha has a little faith.  She says very importantly that “Even now, I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”  That’s the beginning profession of faith.  She knows that Jesus has power over life and death.  So then they have a little catechetical dialogue about life and death and eternity, and at the end of it, Martha professes that Jesus is the Son of God who was coming into the world.  The sisters move from their grief, to faith in Jesus, even before he accomplishes the miracle.

    The second group of catechumens is the Apostles.  God bless them, they’re still trying to make sense of Jesus.  We can’t be too hard on them, because they’re a lot like many of us who are trying to be men and women of faith, but don’t really have all the facts right now.  “Let us also go to die with him,” Thomas says.  And they will, of course: they have to go through the cross before they see and understand Jesus fully.  We too will have to take up our own crosses before we can understand the salvation that Christ has won for us.

    The third group of catechumens is the Jews.  A bunch of them are weeping with Mary, and they go with her to see Jesus.  Along the way, they complain that if he could heal the man born blind like he did in last week’s Gospel, why couldn’t he have healed Lazarus?  But seeing the miracle, they come to believe, in the very last verse of this long reading. They are a lot like those of us who are skeptical for a long time, but see something wonderful materialize in the life of another and finally decide there’s something to this Jesus that’s worth believing in.

    Key to all of these catechumens is that, in order to move to belief, they had to have some kind of stench in their lives washed away.  For Martha and Mary, they had to get past the stench of their grief.  For the Apostles, they had to get over the stench of trying to figure things out and realize that Jesus was in charge.  For the Jews, they had to get past the stench of their skepticism and let him perform miracles among them.  For all of us, on the journey of faith, some kind of stench has to be washed away, in order to come to full faith in Jesus.  And that stench is, of course, sin.  The way it gets washed away is in baptism.

    So if you take away anything from today’s Liturgy, let it be this: this reading is really all about baptism, brothers and sisters in Christ.  Is it a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death and resurrection?  Well, okay, yes, maybe a little.  But it is more about baptism.  Because baptism is a kind of death.  As Saint Paul says in our second reading today, baptism is the kind of death that gives life to our mortal bodies.  It’s hard for us to imagine that kind of thing when the baptisms we’ve seen are just a mere pouring of water over a baby’s head.  But baptism in the early church was full submerging in water while the formula was pronounced, after which they came up out of the water gasping for air.  Believe me, they got the connection of baptism with death and resurrection!

    Baptism is what washes away the stench in our lives.  It does that with original sin, and if we live our baptism by participating in the sacraments, it does that with the sins of our daily life.  The sacrament of Penance is an extension, in a way, of the sacrament of Baptism, in which the sins of our lives are completely washed away, leaving us made new and alive in ways we couldn’t imagine.

    So today, Jesus sees us dead in the flesh, stinking of our sins.  But he calls us forth in baptism, rolling away the stone of sin that keeps us from relationship with him, releasing us from the burial-bands that bind us, and calling us to new life.

    So maybe in these closing days of Lent, we still have to respond to our Lord’s call to live. Maybe you haven’t yet been to confession before Easter.  So we have just a few times left to receive that grace before Holy Week and Easter.  We have what we lovingly call “Confession Palooza” today at 1:30 in the afternoon.  We will have twelve confessors available to hear confessions in English, Spanish, and Polish.  If you can come to that festival of mercy, I think you would find it beneficial.  If that doesn’t work, our last chances are this coming Friday at 6pm and Saturday at 2pm.  Please note that there are no available times for confessions during Holy Week, so please make plans to come this week.  We invite you to come and have the stone rolled away and to be untied from your burial cloths.  Wherever you find yourself at this point of Lent, I urge you, don’t let Easter pass with you all bound up and sealed in the grave.  Lent ends just before Evening Prayer on Holy Thursday.  That gives us around ten and a half days to take up our Lenten resolutions anew, or even make new ones, so that we can receive new life in Christ.  Don’t spend these days in the grave.  Come out, be untied, and be let go.

  • The Fifth Sunday of Lent (Cycle C Readings)

    The Fifth Sunday of Lent (Cycle C Readings)

    Today’s readings

    Back in the sixth century before the birth of Christ, the Israelites were in a bad way.  They had been separated from their God by sin: against God’s commands, they had betrayed their covenant with the Lord and made foreign alliances, which he had forbidden them to do.  He forbade this because he knew that as they made these alliances, they would give in to the temptation to worship the so-called gods of the people they with whom they allied themselves.  As punishment, God separated them from their homeland: the cream of the crop of their society was taken into exile in Babylon, and those left behind had no one to lead them and protect them.  Because they moved away from God, God seemed to move away from them.  But he hadn’t: I think it was really they who had exiled themselves from God.  In today’s first reading, God shows them that he still loves them and cares for them, and promises to make them a new people. I love the line: “See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?”  God would indeed bring them back and create their community anew.

    The Israelites were in exile, but exile can take so many forms.  And Saint Paul had a good sense of that.  For him, the exile was anything that was not Christ; a sentiment we should embrace.  Saint Paul knows that he has not yet taken possession of the glory that is promised him by Christ, and so he wants to leave behind the exile of the world and strains forward to all that lies ahead, the goal and prize of God’s calling in Christ.

    Which brings us back to the woman caught in adultery.  We certainly feel sorry for her, caught in the act, dragged in front of Jesus and publicly humiliated.  But the truth is, just like the Israelites in the sixth century before Christ, she had actually sinned.  And that sin threatened to put her into exile from the community; well, it even threatened her life.  The in-your-face reversal in the story, though, is that Jesus doesn’t consider her the only sinner – or even the greatest sinner – in the whole incident. We should probably wonder about the man with whom she was committing adultery; that sin does, after all, take two. And as serious a sin as adultery certainly is, Jesus makes it clear that there are plenty of serious sins out there, and they all exile us from God.  As he sits there, writing in the sand, they walk away one by one.  What was he writing?  Was it a kind of examination of conscience?  A kind of list of the sins of the Pharisees?  We don’t know.  But in Jesus’ words and actions, those Pharisees too were convicted of their sins, and went away – into exile – because of them.

    Sin does that to us. It makes exiles out of all of us. The more we sin, the further away from God we become.  And it doesn’t have to be that way.

    Jimmy and Suzy went to visit their grandparents for a week during the summer.  They had a great time, but one day Jimmy was bouncing a ball in the house, which he knew he shouldn’t be doing.  It didn’t take long for the ball to hit grandma’s favorite vase, knocking it off the table and breaking it.  He picked up the pieces and went out back and hid them in the woodshed. Looking around, the only person who was around was his sister Suzy.  She didn’t say anything, but later that day, when grandma asked her to help with the dishes, Suzy said “I think Jimmy wanted to help you,” giving him a rather knowing look. So he did.  The next day, grandpa asked Jimmy if he wanted to go out fishing. Suzy jumped right in: “He’d like to, but he promised grandma he would weed the garden.”  So Jimmy weeded the garden.  As he was doing that, he felt pretty guilty and decided to confess the whole thing to grandma.  When he told her what had happened, grandma said, “I know.  I was looking out the back window when you were hiding the pieces in the woodshed.  I was wondering how long you were going to let Suzy make a slave of you.”

    That’s how it is with sin: it makes a slave of us, and keeps us from doing what we really want to do. It puts us deep in exile, just as surely as the ancient Israelites.  And it doesn’t have to be that way.  You see, it’s easier than we think to end up in exile.  All we have to do is a good examination of conscience and then think about the way those sins have affected us.  Have they made us feel distant from God, family and friends?  Have they caused us to drift in our life and not feel God’s presence in times of hardship?

    Exile is heartbreaking. And to the exile of sin, God has three things to say today:

    First, “Go, and from now on, do not sin anymore.”  That sounds like something that’s easy to say but hard to do.  But the fact is, once we have accepted God’s grace and forgiveness, that grace will actually help us to be free from sin.  Of course, that’s impossible to do all on our own.  But God never commands us to do something that is impossible for us, or maybe better, he never commands us to do something that is impossible for him to do in us.  God’s grace is there if we but turn to him.

    Second, God says: “Forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead.”  Once sin is confessed and grace is accepted, the sin is forgotten.  God is not a resentful tyrant who keeps a list of our offenses and holds them against us forever.  If we confess our sins and accept the grace that is present through the saving sacrifice of Jesus, the sins are forgotten.  But it is up to us to accept that grace.  We truly have to confess so that we can forget what lies behind and be ready for the graces ahead.

    Third, God says: “See, I am doing something new.  Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”  We are the ones who get stuck in the past, always fearing to move forward because of past sins, hurts, and resentments.  We are called today to be open to the new thing God is doing in our lives.  The way to open up is to confess our sins and get rid of the past.

    For a long time in my young life, I didn’t go to confession.  I didn’t think I needed to.  I grew up in that whole time of the church when it was all about how you felt about yourself.  Garbage. I knew something was wrong when I was in my young adulthood and felt lost.  I took a chance and went to confession at a penance service, and the priest welcomed me back.  In that moment, I knew exactly the new thing God was doing in me, and it felt like a huge weight was lifted off of me.  In fact, I was released from the exile of all my past sins and hurts.

    I never forgot that, and whenever anyone comes to me in confession and says it’s been a long time since they went, I am quick to welcome them back.  Because that’s what God wants, and it’s a great privilege for me to be part of that.  He wants to lift that weight off of you, to end your exile.  All it takes is for you to see that new thing he is doing in you, and to strain forward to what lies ahead.

    So we have just a few times left to receive that grace before Holy Week and Easter.  We have what we lovingly call “Confession Palooza” today/tomorrow at 1:30 in the afternoon.  We will have twelve confessors available to hear confessions in English, Spanish, and Polish.  If you can come to that festival of mercy, I think you would find it beneficial.  If that doesn’t work, our last chances are this coming Friday at 6pm and Saturday at 2pm.  Please note that there are no available times for confessions during Holy Week, so please make plans to come this week.  Would that we would all take this opportunity to forget what lies behind, and strain forward to what lies ahead.  God is doing a new thing in all of us these Lenten days.  May we all be open to it.