Friday, September 6, 2013

"THE SON OF MAN IS LORD OF THE SABBATH"



Homily for Sept. 7th, 2013: Luke 6:1-5.
          “Remember to keep holy the sabbath day,” is the third of the Ten Commandments. We find them twice in the Old Testament: in the 20th chapter of Exodus, and in the 5th chapter of Deuteronomy. Both versions say that we keep the sabbath holy by refraining from work. Exodus says that the sabbath rest commemorates God resting on the seventh day after creating the world and everything in it in six days. Deuteronomy doesn’t mention God resting; but it spells out in greater detail what Exodus says more briefly: that the sabbath rest is for all, domestic animals as well as humans, masters and slaves alike: “for you were once slaves in Egypt.”
          By Jesus’ day there was an enormous collection of rabbinical interpretation of this commandment, distinguishing between forms of work that were lawful on the sabbath, and those which were unlawful. The controversy continues in Judaism today. Orthodox Jews walk to the synagogue because they consider it unlawful to drive a car on the sabbath. Reform Jews reject this rigorism.       
          In today’s gospel reading some rigorists criticize Jesus’ disciples for picking heads of grain on the sabbath, rubbing them in their hands, and eating them. Jesus appeals to a precedent in the Jewish Scriptures, when David took bread offered to God, and which only Jewish priests might eat, and both eating it himself and offering it to his companions. The precedent was weak: David had not violated the sabbath rest, though what he had done was illegal.  
          Crucial is the final sentence of our reading: “The Son of Man [a title for Jesus himself] is lord of the sabbath.” Jesus never abrogated any of God’s laws. But he made charity the highest law of all. That is why he healed on the sabbath, for instance. And that is why Pope Francis, celebrating the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in a prison on the first Holy Thursday after his election disregarded the liturgical law which says that only the feet of baptized men should be washed, in order to wash also the feet of some Muslim women. The highest law of all is charity.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

COUNTING THE COST

Homily for Sept. 8th 2013.23rd Sunday in Ordinary time, Year C. 
        Luke 14:25-33.
AIM: To examine the cost of discipleship, and to show that it can be paid only through complete trust in Jesus.

AIf anyone comes after me,@ Jesus tells us in the gospel reading we have just heard, Awithout hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.@ Is that good news? Can Jesus really be serious?
In speaking about Ahating@ those dearest to us, Jesus was using a Semitic word familiar to his hearers, but not to us. Hating for Jesus meant simply detaching one=s self from someone or something. What he was really saying is that He must come first. That is how Jesus himself lived. Even at age twelve Jesus was putting his love for his heavenly Father ahead of love for Mary and Joseph by staying behind in Jerusalem after his earthly parents had left. ADid you not know that I must be in my Father=s house?@ (Lk 2:49) Jesus asked them when they chided him for staying behind. Luke tells us that Athey did not understand what he said to them.@ But Jesus understood, though he was still a boy. 
Love for the Lord does not exclude other loves. But it puts the in the right order. God is not jealous. How could the One who is love, and who in creating us in his image has given us the ability to love, be jealous of what he has made? Jesus asks everything of us because he has given us everything. As Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, AHe loved us and gave himself up for us@ (5:2).
Jesus spoke those words about hating those dearest to us, Luke tells us, to the Agreat crowds@ which were following him. Did they know how Jesus life would end? How could they? And if they had known, how many of them would have continued to follow him? Many, perhaps most, were following Jesus in a spirit of momentary enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is fine. But Jesus knew that it must have solid foundations. His words about total renunciation, and the two short parables which follow, were his attempt to supply those foundations.
AWhich of you wishing to construct a tower,@ Jesus begins, Adoes not first sit down and calculate the cost ...?@ The example was immediately intelligible to Jesus= hearers. It was the dream of every small farmer in Palestine in Jesus= day to have a proper tower on his property, rather than merely a shed. During harvest time he could sleep in the tower, keeping watch for trespassers and predatory animals, to insure himself against loss.
Valuable as such a tower might be, Jesus= hearers also knew that it would be folly to start building one without first calculating whether the available resources were sufficient to complete the job. If they were not, the farmer would have nothing to show for his hard work but some useless foundations. And his friends would laugh at him for his imprudence.
The second parable begins differently: not Awhich of you ...@, but Awhat king ...@ That too was easy to understand, even though none of Jesus= hearers were kings with an army at their disposal. Common to both parables is the sentence about sitting down first and counting the cost. The first step in any important undertaking, Jesus was saying, is not action, but reflection. Too often we act first and reflect later (if we reflect at all). The crowds who followed Jesus with so much enthusiasm had not reflected. When, finally, they did reflect, some of them would shout: ACrucify him, crucify him.@  
The other sayings of Jesus which Luke places before and after these two parables B about hating father and mother, and about renouncing all our possessions B describe the cost of discipleship. Following Jesus is not something we can do in our spare time. It cannot be simply one interest among others. Jesus Christ must come first in our lives.
Some years ago the internationally known American pianist, Van Cliburn, was asked by a television interviewer about the sacrifices needed to succeed in his profession. AWhen you decide to give your life to music,@ Cliburn replied, Ayou must never look back. You must simply say: >If I am not in music, there is nothing.=@ That is breathtaking. But it is also inspiring. Is it any different, at bottom, from the demand which Jesus makes when he tells us that he must mean more to us than family and possessions?
If you want to be my disciple, Jesus says, count the cost. First reflect. Then act. So let=s reflect. If following Jesus Christ really means putting him first B ahead of money, possessions, success, ahead of those we love most B if Christian discipleship means that, which of us could say with confidence that we had the necessary amount of self-denial and staying power?
Does that mean that we should not follow Jesus Christ? Of course not. It does mean, however, that we should never try to follow Jesus Christ in dependence on our own resources alone. That would mean certain failure. If today=s gospel is good news, it is because of what it does not say: that there are resources for Christian discipleship available to us which are adequate. What we could never achieve on our own, we can achieve if we depend not on our own strength, but on the strength that comes from God alone.   
That is why Jesus tells us in several places to become Alike little children.@  Little children are naturally dependent on others. It never occurs to them that they can make it on their own. As children grow, we encourage them to become more and more independent, and to take risks. That is fine in the things of this world.
In spiritual things, however, and hence in our relationship with God, we must unlearn that spirit of independence which, in worldly affairs, is the difference between maturity and childhood. When it comes to following Jesus Christ, we dare not trust in our own resources. If we do, we are like the farmer building his tower without calculating the cost; or like the king setting our recklessly on a military campaign against impossible odds.
Jesus never asks us to fight against impossible odds. He does not want us to build with inadequate resources. That is why he gives us his resources. They are always adequate. If we trust in the power which God alone can give us, we are safe. We can build with confidence. We can fight confident of victory.
We are gathered here around these twin tables of word and sacrament to receive that power which can do for us, and in us, what we can never do for ourselves. This power is not something impersonal, a kind of spiritual electricity, as if we were here to get our batteries charged for another week. The power that is offered to us here is a person. 
His name is Jesus Christ. 


"MY FACE YOU CANNOT SEE."



Homily for Sept. 6th, 2013: Colossians 1:15-20.
          “Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God,” we heard in our first reading. The longing to see God is as old as the human heart. The Old Testament book Exodus says that God “used to speak to Moses, face to face, as one man speaks to another” (Ex. 33:11). In one of those conversations Moses said to God: “Do let me see your glory.” To which the Lord God responds: “I will let my beauty pass before you … But my face you cannot see, for no man sees me and still lives.” So God makes Moses stand in the hollow of a rock, telling him: “When my glory passes I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand, so that you may see my back; but my face you cannot see.”
          Things remained thus until the birth of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. In him we can see God, in human form. Our first reading calls Jesus “the image of the invisible God.” The opening of the Letter to the Hebrews says the same. There we read that God’s Son, Jesus, is “the refulgence” [which means the shining forth] or “reflection of the Father’s glory, the exact representation of the Father’s being.” (Heb.1:3). 
          What do we see when we look at Jesus? We see someone who preferred simple, ordinary people. In his youth he worked with his hands, in the carpenter’s shop. Later he would speak of simple things: birds, flowers, the vine, the lost sheep, the woman searching for her lost coin, the thief breaking in at night. He told stories so simple that children can understand them; yet so profound that scholars still study them.
          In Jesus we see someone who never turned his back on anyone in need; who had a special welcome for those whom others rejected; whose acceptance of suffering was so complete that no one has ever dared to pity him; and who manifested a joy that he longs to share with us. That is the gospel. That is the good news. And the Letter to the Hebrews gives us the best news of all: “Jesus Christ is the same: yesterday, today, yes, and forever” (13:8).

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

"PUT OUT INTO DEEP WATER"



Homily for Sept. 5th, 2013: Luke 5:1-11.
After a discouraging night of toil on the lake, the net coming back empty time after time, until Peter and his companions were bone weary, Jesus tells Peter to try again in broad daylight. Peter knew that would be an exercise in futility: “Master, we have worked all night, and taken nothing.” But then, perhaps just to humor the Lord, Peter adds: "But at your command I will lower the nets." Peter's willingness to do the unthinkable enables him to experience the impossible. No sooner have they started to pull in the net, than they feel it heavy with fish.
Throwing himself at the feet of Jesus, with the fish flopping all around him in the boat, Peter can only blurt out: "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." To which Jesus responds with words of reassurance: "Do not be afraid: from now on you will be catching men." In that moment, Peter's life is changed. "When they brought their boats to the shore," Luke tells us, "they left everything and followed [Jesus]." Peter never forgot it.
"Put out into the deep water," the Lord says to Peter. He is saying the same to each one of us right now. Do not abandon the quest, though it seems fruitless. Leave the shallow waters near shore. Forsake what is familiar and secure for the challenge of the unknown deep. Dare, like Peter, to do the unthinkable. Then, like him, you too will experience the impossible. 
          As we travel life's way, with all its twistings and turnings, its many small achievements and frequent defeats, we who in baptism have become sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ should be sharpening our spiritual vision. For it is only with the eyes of faith that we can perceive the unseen, spiritual world all round us: beneath, behind, above this world of sense and time. Faith assures us that God is watching over us always, in good times and in bad; the same Lord who challenged Peter, devastated by failure at the one thing he thought he knew something about, to "Put out into deep water."
Glimpsing this mighty God, our loving heavenly Father, with the eyes of faith, we too join -- as in a moment we shall -- in the angels' song:  "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts! Heaven and earth are full of your glory!"   


Tuesday, September 3, 2013

"HE WENT TO A DESERTED PLACE"



Homily for Sept. 4th, 2013: Luke 4:38-44.
          In Jesus’ world illness of various kinds was due, people thought, to possession by demons. Today’s gospel portrays Jesus as one who has power over these supernatural forces of evil. He “rebukes” them.  
Jesus too comes from the supernatural world. As God’s Son, however, Jesus has power over the evil forces in that supernatural world. That is why Luke, the gospel writer, tells us that Jesus “rebukes” the supernatural forces of evil. He rebukes the life-threatening fever which has laid Peter’s mother-in-law low. And he rebukes the demons in the many people who are brought to him for healing. Luke’s language shows that he is describing what we today call “exorcisms.” Freed from demonic possession, these people are healed at once. There is no period of convalescence. Peter’s mother-in-law, we heard, “got up immediately and waited on them.” Her healing helps explain Peter’s willingness, reported in the next chapter of Luke’s gospel, immediately to leave his work as a fisherman in order to follow Jesus.
          The demons leave the other people whom Jesus heals, shouting, “You are the Son of God.” Unlike the many who witnessed Jesus’ healings and refused to believe in him, these evil inhabitants of the supernatural world recognize Jesus as a fellow inhabitant of that world – though unlike them a good one. Jesus rebukes them and does not allow them to speak, we heard, “because they knew he was the Christ”: the long awaited anointed servant and Son of God. Jesus did not want to acquire the reputation of a sensational wonder-worker. He was that, but he was so much more.
          Especially significant is the information that at daybreak, “Jesus went to a deserted place.” Why? He needed to be alone with his heavenly Father. If Jesus, whose inner resources were incomparably greater than ours, needed those times alone with the Lord, we are fools, and guilty fools, if we think we can make it in reliance on our own resources alone. That’s why we are here. To receive all the goodness, love, purity, and power of Jesus – our elder brother, our lover, and our best friend; but also our divine savior and redeemer. And when we have him, we have everything. 

Monday, September 2, 2013

ALL HE EVER WANTED




 

All he Ever Wanted

No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace

In his most affective and affecting epistle, St. Paul wrote to the Philippians: “I give thanks to my God for all my memories of you” (Phil 1:3). Paul’s eucharistic remembering came repeatedly to mind while reading the Rev. John Jay Hughes’s lovely and moving autobiography, No Ordinary Fool. Calling to mind and narrating the events of his life—the sorrow of his mother’s death when he was but six years old, the emotional and spiritual closeness to his Anglican priest father, his own ordination to the priesthood as an Episcopalian and subsequent reception into the full communion of the Catholic Church, his painful alienation from his beloved father, his fruitful scholarly and pastoral ministry—all this and more Hughes celebrates as a testimony to grace.

        As a precocious and sensitive child, the loss of his mother at so early an age had and continues to have an indelible impact. He says simply: “From this blow I have never recovered. I belong today to the walking wounded.”

        Yet, from this unfathomable sorrow there came a conviction of grace. Let me allow Hughes to recount the decisive occurrence in his own voice:

        I can no longer recall the exact day when I discovered God    
            in the darkness. I can fix it, however, before the age of 
        nine. One day I realized that the parting was not forever.
            With blinding certainty it came home to me that I would 
        see my mother again, when God called me home. From 
        that day to this the unseen spiritual world—the world
            of God, of the angels, of the saints, and of our beloved 
        dead -- has been real to me.... Decades later I realized 
        that this insight was the beginning of my priestly vocation. 

        Hughes spent six happy years as a priest in the Anglican Communion, mostly in parish ministry. Four aspects of that priestly service continue to characterize his approach to priestly ministry to this day. They have relevance not only for priests, but for all those seeking to respond generously to the Lord’s call. 

        First, early in his ministry he made a commitment to tithe whatever income he received. To his surprise he found the practice of tithing not a burden, but a source of blessing. He writes: “Since it is based on faith (trusting that our needs will be taken care of if we give away the first portion of our income), it deepens faith. It enables us to use money sacramentally, by making something material a vehicle of the spiritual—gratitude.”

        Second, Hughes soon became convinced of the need for a sustained prayer life as the soil of fruitful ministry and, indeed, of all growth in Christ. Moreover, this discipline must be practiced in season and out of season, whatever feelings of consolation or desolation accompany one’s prayer. As he writes wisely: “Neglect of this fundamental truth is the root cause of much of the Church’s present difficulties.”

        Third, from teenage years the practice of confession has been crucial to his spiritual life. Indeed, one of the sorrows he experienced in becoming Roman Catholic before the Second Vatican Council was that he did not hear pronounced the consoling words of absolution, which he had heard and rejoiced in as an Episcopalian. Instead, Catholics before the council were instructed to pray the Act of Contrition while the priest mumbled absolution in Latin. The irony, of course, is that the linguistic intelligibility of the sacrament has also witnessed a decline in its celebration—though there are welcome signs of a rediscovery of this great grace.

        Finally, a practice that Hughes learned from his Anglican mentors and which he has followed faithfully is never to preach on Sunday without a written text before him. The obvious advantage is that one thereby disciplines oneself to a clear beginning, middle and ending to structuring the interconnections among them. Those who have read Father Hughes’s published homilies know the care and the imagination they exhibit. He tells us that in homilies he shuns “moralism.” He explains that even when preaching the moral law, he presents it “not as the standard we must meet before God would love and bless us, but rather as the description of our grateful response to the blessings and love bestowed upon us by our loving heavenly Father as a free gift.”

        Father Hughes writes with passion and conviction, spicing his recollections with telling incidents and wry humor, often enough directing his wit at his own false steps and follies. But it is the author’s Jacob-like wrestling with the call to Catholicism that provides the distinctive drama of the narrative.

        In his early 20s he began to wonder whether the Anglican tradition had not in fact splintered itself from the Catholic Church, a questioning that his high-church father dismissed as “Roman fever.” Resolved for a time, the questions re-emerged forcefully after his ordination as an Episcopal priest. The stumbling block was his suspicion of exaggerated papal claims. But as he studied and consulted about them, he found them less an obstacle than he had feared.

        The decision, in 1960, to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church was motivated by no emotional appeal or aesthetic attraction to the preconciliar church, but solely by his persuasion of the truth of its claim. In his view this entailed no repudiation of his past nor of the abundant graces he had received. As he wrote his father at the time, “It was not so much that I had come to find Anglicanism wrong, as incomplete.” But all efforts at explanation were spurned; the elder Hughes barred his son from the family home; and, though correspondence continued between them, they never saw each other again.

        Hughes’ subsequent studies in Innsbruck (where he attended the lectures of Karl Rahner, S.J.) and in Münster (where he heard and greatly appreciated Joseph Ratzinger) were followed by his conditional ordination as a Catholic priest. His account of his many years of priestly ministry in the postconciliar church as teacher, theologian and pastor will elicit respect, gratitude and frequent moments of recognition as readers recall their own experiences and enter (as I did) into silent, yet spirited conversation with the author.
 
        One will find much to relish and to learn from in this marvelous testimony to grace. Eucharistic remembering provides the cantus firmus that inspires and sustains Hughes’s honest and joyful witness. His book evokes, in an almost sacramental way, what St. Paul saw to be the fruit of grace: “an overflow of thanksgiving to the glory of God.”

Rev. Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, teaches systematic theology at Boston College.
[Published in America magazine for Oct. 6th, 2008.]

SERVANT OF THE SERVANTS OF GOD



Homily for Sept. 3rd, 2013. St. Gregory the Great.
          St. Gregory the Great, the man whom we celebrate today, was born at Rome about 540 of a wealthy aristocratic family which had already given the Church two popes. It was a decaying and chaotic world. There was no Emperor at Rome. The man who bore that title now ruled Italy from Constantinople. Thanks to his intelligence and good connections, Gregory soon attained high office in civil government. But he was unsatisfied. A conversion experience led him to become a monk in his mid-30s.
          Gregory always looked back on this period of his life as the happiest. It lasted five years only. In 579 the Pope summoned Gregory from his monastery, and over his protests ordained him a deacon, thus making him one of the top administrative officials of the Roman Church. To Gregory’s further dismay, the Pope soon sent him as papal envoy to the Emperor’s court in Constantinople, where he would remain for the next seven years. Recalled to Rome in 586, Gregory resumed living with his fellow monks, while fully occupied with administrative duties at the papal court.
When the Pope died in 590, Gregory tried for months to avoid being chosen as Pope himself, but finally accepted the inevitable. He lived on for another 14 years, suffering often from ill health, but ceaselessly busy attending to the needs of the Church, and those of the city of Rome and the surrounding area as well. To raise the level of the Church’s bishops, he wrote his Pastoral Rule – a work too little heeded in the centuries to come.
Convinced from his years as a monk of the importance of waiting upon God in silence, he stressed the foundation of such contemplative prayer: the virtue of humility. When the Patriarch of Constantinople saluted him in a letter as “Universal Pope,” Gregory protested that this grandiose title detracted from the honor due his fellow bishops – an early example of what we call today “collegiality.” The best example of Gregory’s humility is the title he originated, and which is still used today in official papal documents: “Servant of the servants of God.” 
We invoke his prayers for his successor today: Pope Francis. 

Sunday, September 1, 2013

"ALL SPOKE HIGHLY OF HIM."



Homily for Sept. 2nd, 2013: Luke 4:16-30.
          “All spoke highly of him,” after Jesus reads in the synagogue from the prophet Isaiah and proclaims the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that God would send someone to comfort, heal, and liberate people. Only a few verses later, however, the same people who were “amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth” are ready to hurl Jesus headlong from the brow of the hill on which Jesus’ home tome, Nazareth, was built. What’s going on here? 
          The “year acceptable to the Lord” which Jesus says he was sent to proclaim is reminiscent of the jubilee years, celebrated by Jews in Jesus’ day every half-century. During a jubilee year the fields lay fallow, people returned to their homes, debts were forgiven, and slaves set free. Jubilee years also reminded people that God did not reserve his blessings for those he had called to be especially his own. God loves and blesses all people.
Jesus gives his Jewish hearers two examples of this universal love. During a prolonged famine, Jesus reminds them, God sent our great prophet Elijah not to a member of our own people, but to a Gentile widow living outside Israel. And Elijah’s successor, Elisha, never cured any lepers among our own people, only the Gentile Naaman, from Syria. Those were the words that changed the people’s admiration for Jesus to resentful anger. 
Last May Pope Francis caused similar outrage in some quarters by saying, during his homily at a daily Mass: “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘But Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! Christ died for all, even for atheists.”
          He was repeating, in more colloquial language, the teaching of the Second Council: “Those also can attain salvation who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do his will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience” (LG 16).
          Being a member of God’s holy Catholic Church is a great privilege and a blessing. But it does not give us a first-class ticket to heaven.