Friday, October 18, 2013

PERSEVERANCE IN PRAYER



PERSISTENCE IN PRAYER
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C.   Luke 18:1-11.
AIM: To encourage persistence in prayer. 
 
In 1961 the author, Joseph Heller, enriched the language with the title of a best-selling novel, later made into a film: Catch 22. The phrase designates a hopeless situation. An example would be a worker applying for a job who is told he cannot be hired until he joins the union. When he seeks membership in the union, however, they tell him he cannot join until he has a job. Like the widow in today=s gospel, he is stymied. Both are in a catch-22 situation. The woman=s hopeless situation is compounded by the judge=s cynicism. AHe respected neither God nor man,@ Jesus tells us. The judge, in other words, could not be moved either by considerations of duty or by threats to his reputation.
We need not think of the widow in the story as old. Women married in their early teens in Jesus= day. This widow may well have been young. Her repeated appearance in court indicates that she was also vigorous. Young or old, however, widows in Jesus= day were among society=s weakest members. It was a man=s world. Women were the property of men: of their fathers until marriage, thereafter the property of their husbands.  In a subsistence economy without any social safety net, a woman whose husband had died was vulnerable and destitute.
The widow in Jesus= story is the victim of a corrupt system. An Aopponent@ is withholding her sole means of support C the remainder of her dowry, perhaps, or her inheritance. If she is unable to vindicate her rights, she will starve.
Faithful to the age-old maxim that the squeaky wheel gets the most grease, she comes to court every day and makes a scene. At her first appearance the court officials doubtless explained to her that she could not be heard until she paid the usual fees. Since these went straight into the pockets of those demanding them, we would call them bribes. When the widow told them she was too poor to pay, they ignored her. Yet still she came. Those hearing Jesus tell the story recognize an impasse. Given the character of the judge, and the woman=s poverty, they expect no resolution. Some problems, they realize, are insoluble. 
Now comes a surprise. After days, perhaps many weeks, the widow suddenly achieves the breakthrough she has almost ceased hoping for. Without realizing it, she has found a chink in the seemingly impregnable armor of indifference with which the corrupt judge has covered himself. Consistent to the end, not out of any sense of justice but simply for his own convenience and to silence this public scold in his courtroom, he gives in, hears the woman=s case, and quickly grants her what she has so long sought in vain. 
Jesus= description of the judge=s thought processes would have caused mirth in the hearers. AThis widow is wearing me out,@ he reflects, and resolves to settle in her favor Aor she will end by doing me violence.@ This is the language of the boxing ring. The picture of one of society=s weakest members pummeling with her fists a man of virtually unlimited power, with others at his beck and call, is laughable. To recapture the story=s effect on its first hearers we might imagine a television skit in which an actor portraying the President of the United States ignores the verbal assaults of a homeless bag lady C until the woman hits him over the head with her bag, which turns out to be a water bomb that leaves the Chief Executive dripping wet.
The story=s impact comes from its reversal of expectations at the end. A judge who neither fears God nor cares for what others think of him comes to fear a poor widow. A petitioner without power, both as a woman and because she has neither husband nor money, turns out to be anything but powerless. Her power lies in her persistence.
Like all Jesus= parables, this one describes conditions in God=s kingdom: a state in which normal worldly expectations are reversed. Where God reigns, Jesus is saying, victims claim their rights, often in surprising ways. And in God=s kingdom victims obtain their rights. The weak and powerless are powerless no more. Wherever God reigns Mary=s words at the news that she was to the mother of God=s Son are fulfilled: the proud are confused in their inmost thoughts; the mighty are toppled from their thrones; the lowly are raised to high places; the hungry are fed, and the rich are sent empty away. (Cf. Luke 1:51ff)
For the story=s original hearers the use of a corrupt judge to illustrate God=s goodness was so shocking as to require an explanation. Jesus supplies this with his two rhetorical questions: AWill not God then do justice to his chosen who cry out to him day and night? Will he delay long over them, do you suppose?
At once Jesus answers these questions himself C and then puts a further question to the story=s hearers, ourselves included: AI tell you he will give them swift justice. But when the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on the earth?@
Most of Jesus= parables involve a similarity between the central figure and God. In this case the story turns on the dissimilarity between the corrupt judge and God. It is a Ahow much more@ story. If even so depraved a judge as this one grants the petitioner her request in the end, how much more will God grant the prayers of those who ask him for their needs. God, Jesus is saying, is not like the corrupt judge. It is not difficult to get his attention. God is always more ready to hear than we to pray. God is approachable.
What is the point of praying, however, if God knows our needs before we do, and better than we do? When we ask God for things in prayer, are we trying to change God=s mind? If that were the case, God would be like the corrupt judge.  And the point of the story, as we have seen, is that God is not like the corrupt judge. How does prayer work, then?
To that question there is no fully satisfying answer. Prayer, like everything to do with God, is a mystery: not in the sense that we can understand nothing about it, but that what we can understand is always less than the whole. One thing is certain. Prayer does not change God. Prayer changes us. It opens us up to the action of God in our lives, as the sun=s rays open the flowers to their life-giving warmth and the nourishing moisture of dew and rain.
Prayer also reminds us of our need for God. How easily we forget that need, especially when the sun shines on us and things go well. Then we start to think we can make it on our own: by our cleverness, by luck, by pulling strings, by hard work, even by being so good that God will have to reward us.
We need to be reminded again and again that we can never make it on our own. No matter how clever we are; no matter how much luck we have; no matter how many strings we pull; no matter how hard we work or how hard we try to be good. Even when we have all these things going for us (and which of us has?), we still need God. God is the missing ingredient in life: the one without whom life is meaningless, without whose help all our striving, conniving, planning, struggling, and praying still fall pitifully short of the goal.
AWill not God do justice to his chosen who call out to him day and night?@ Jesus asks at the story=s conclusion. The answer is obvious. Of course he will!  First, however, God wants us to Acry out to him day and night.@ He wants us to pray and to keep on praying, even when it appears useless C because God seems to answer only with silence. Perseverance in prayer strengthens our desire and deepens our faith, very much as sustained physical exercise strengthens the muscles, heart, and lungs. St. Augustine expresses this well: AGod wants our desire to be exercised in prayer, thus enabling us to grasp what he is preparing to give. ... We are small and limited vessels for the receiving of it. ... We shall have the greater capacity to receive [God=s gifts], the more trustfully we believe, the more firmly we hope, the more ardently we desire.@[1]
St. Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome from 590 to 604, says the same in a slightly different form: AHoly desires grow with delay: if they fade through delay they are no desires at all.@[2]
God always answers prayer, though not always at the time, and in the manner, that we want. More than half way through my ninth decade I am grateful to have lived long enough to be able to thank God for answering some of my prayers: ANot now@, and others ANever.@ Nor will God keep us waiting until we bid high enough for the things we need. All that is certain. One thing alone is uncertain. Do we truly believe in a God who hears and answers our prayers? Do really trust him? Or is our real trust elsewhere? In our own cleverness, in our good luck, in the strings we can pull, in our hard work, in the bribes we try to offer God in the form of prayers and sacrifices and good works? 
None of those things is certain, Jesus tells us.  There is certainty only in God. He alone can satisfy our deepest desires. Hence Jesus= final, insistent question: AWhen the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on the earth?


[1] Letter to Proba, 130; Office of Readings for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
[2]  Homily 25 on the Gospels; Office of Readings for St. Mary Magdalene.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

"GO, AND PROCLAIM THE GOSPEL OF THE LORD."



Homily for Oct. 17th, 2013: Luke 10:1-9
“The Lord Jesus appointed seventy-two disciples whom he sent ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit.” Was that just long ago and far away? Don’t you believe it! The Lord is still sending disciples to recruit new disciples by showing people the joy of a life centered on Jesus Christ.
One of them, a man now in his second year in seminary whose call to priesthood I have been nourishing, wrote recently about joining an Evangelization Club at his seminary. It started when some of the seminarians returned from visiting a state university, on fire from the incredible response they had received from college students who came to know Jesus Christ from conversations with the visiting seminarians.
“We are excited about the work done through the group,” my seminarian friend wrote, “and I've personally felt a certain aliveness in the Holy Spirit for proclaiming Christ.”
 “But of course,” I responded to him in an e-mail. “When we share our faith with others, we deepen our own faith. Teachers experience this all the time. They learn more than their students, because in order to communicate clearly the material they are teaching, they must first get a firm and clear grasp on it themselves.”
          “Go, and proclaim the gospel of the Lord,” we often hear at the end of Mass. But how? St. Francis of Assisi answers this question as follows: “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” Personal example is always more effective than mere words. If we center our lives on Jesus Christ; if we give thanks every day for all the blessings the Lord showers upon us – so many more than we deserve – people will notice that we’re people joy. They’ll want to know where this joy comes from. That gives us our opening: to tell them it comes from the One who loves us more than we can ever imagine; who is always close to us, even when he stray far from him.
His name, we’ll tell our questioners, is Jesus Christ.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

"WHAT OCCASION IS THERE FOR BOASTING?"



Homily for Oct. 17th, 2013: Romans 3:21-30.
          “All have sinned,” Paul writes in our first reading. This is a central truth of our Christian and Catholic faith: all have fallen short of God wants for us – and what we want in our best moments -- which is what Paul means by sin. To this statement there is just one exception: Mary, the mother of the Lord. She alone of the whole human race never fell short, never sinned. This explains why Pope Francis, when asked near the start of the lengthy interview which was published all over the world a few weeks ago, “Who is Jorge Borgoglio?” responded simply and without hesitation: “I am a sinner.”
          How then can we sinners enjoy fellowship with the all holy God -- in this world, and in the next? Many people would answer: by establishing a credit balance in some heavenly account book, through doing good deeds, making sacrifices, and through prayer. The problem with that view is that we can never do enough good deeds, make enough sacrifices, or say enough prayers to make up for our sins. This is what Paul means when he writes: “What occasion is there for boasting?” The question is rhetorical. It is Paul’s way of telling us: you can never do enough to get right with the all holy God. What Paul calls our “justification,” the technical term for getting right with God, is not the result anything that we do or ever can ever do. Justification is God’s free gift.
          We lay hold of this gift through faith. Or as Paul puts it: “A person is justified by faith apart from works of the law.” Does this mean that we can forget about good deeds, sacrifice, and prayer? Of course not. Those things are our response to God’s free gift of forgiveness and love – given to us not because we are good enough (for none of us is); but because God is so good that he wants to share his goodness and love with us.
          We pray, then, in this Mass with the man seeking healing from Jesus, who responded to the Lord’s question, “Do you believe?” with the words: “Lord I do believe: help my unbelief.” (Mark 9:24)

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

"I AM A SINNER" -- POPE FRANCIS



Homily for Oct. 16th, 2013: Luke 11: 42-46
“Woe to you Pharisees!” Jesus says in today’s gospel. Who are these people about whom we hear so much in the gospels, most of it negative? Their name means “the separated ones.” They looked down on their fellow Jews who paid little attention to all the details of the Jewish law.  
          There is an example of this superior attitude in John’s gospel. The Pharisees and chief priests ask the Temple guards in Jerusalem why they have not arrested Jesus. “No one ever spoke like that before,” the guards reply. “Do not tell us you have been taken in!” the Pharisees respond. “You don’t see any of the Sanhedrin believing in him, do you? Or the Pharisees?” Then comes the condescending sentence:” Only this lot, that knows nothing about the law – and they are lost anyway!” (John 7:45-49).
Jesus never condemns the Pharisees’ meticulous efforts to keep God’s’ law. What he criticizes is their legalistic spirit. “You [Pharisees] pay tithes of mint and of rue and of every garden herb, but you pay no attention to judgment and to love for God. These you should have done,” Jesus says, affirming the payment of tithes on even the tiniest things, “without overlooking the others”: judgment and the love of God.
Pope Francis spoke similarly in the lengthy interview which was published all over the world in late September. “The Church sometimes has locked itself up in small things,” he said. And he gave this example: We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. . . . The teaching of the church is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.” People immediately assumed that the Pope was changing Church teaching. Yet within days he told a group of gynecologists: “Every unborn child, condemned unjustly to being aborted, has the face of Jesus Christ, the face of the Lord.” You can’t get more specific than that.
What is the bottom line? The laws of God and the Church are important. Observing them is the key to happiness. Even more important, however, are help and mercy for those who fail in this – and that is all of us. Asked at the beginning of the interview, “Who is Jorge Bergolio” (the Pope’s original name), he responded: “I am a sinner. This is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. In saying those words, the Pope spoke for all of us, without exception.

Monday, October 14, 2013

ST. TERESA OF AVILA



Homily for Oct. 15th, 2013: St. Teresa of Avila
          We celebrate today one of the great women of the 16th century, Teresa of Avila in central Spain. Born in 1515 as her mother’s third child and first daughter, she was, in the words of a modern biographer, “a vain and vivacious girl, with a divine agenda.” When she was thirteen, her mother died while giving birth to her tenth child. Devastated, Teresa prayed that henceforth Mary might be her mother. Despite this early piety, Teresa says herself that she was a frivolous teenager, “wearing fancy things, and silly baubles.” This was likely why her father sent Teresa to a convent school at age 16.
          She got on well in the convent. But after 19 months she fell ill and went to a deeply pious uncle in the country to recuperate. Conversations with him convinced Teresa that the world would soon end and that if she did not change, she would go to hell. To avoid this, she decided to “bully herself” into becoming a nun. Lacking her father’s permission for this, she stole away at age 20, with the help of an older brother, to the Carmelite convent in Avila. She would remain there for the next quarter-century. It was a relaxed life, with nuns from wealthy families enjoying comfortable suites, pets, and even servants. “Everything about God gave me tremendous pleasure,” Teresa writes, “but the things of the world captivated me. I spent almost twenty years on this stormy sea, falling and rising, then falling again.”
          When she was not quite 40, she had a conversion experience. Her prayer deepened and she began to think of what more she could do for the Lord. Reform of orders for men and women was in the air, and in 1562 Teresa, with only 4 companions, but with the support of her 17 years younger friend and Confessor, St. John of the Cross, founded a new convent with a far more austere life than the one she had left. Teresa founded almost 20 other such convents in the 20 years which remained to her. Exhausted by the travels all over Spain which these foundations required, Teresa died in 1581. She left classic writings on prayer which fill 3 volumes in English translation. They formed the basis for Pope Paul VI’s declaration in 1970 of Teresa of Avila as a Doctor or official teacher of the Church, the first woman to be so honored.
          The modern English Carmelite, Ruth Burrows, writes: “Teresa’s will was identified with our Lord’s. So everything she was, her many gifts and her weaknesses too, were brought into the orbit of her love and dedication. Union with Christ does not mean becoming someone different, renouncing our gifts, changing our temperament; but putting everything we have into our love for God and opening everything we have to his transforming influence. Teresa reached the full potential of personhood: what she was meant to be she became. This is holiness.”
          How wonderful, if something like that could be said of us, when the Lord sends his angel to call us home. To that end, then, we pray:
St. Teresa of Avila, pray for us

Sunday, October 13, 2013

AN EVIL GENERATION SEEKS A SIGN



Homily for Oct. 14th, 2013: Luke 11:29-32.
          “This generation seeks a sign,” Jesus says. He is referring to the repeated demand of his contemporaries for a miracle so dramatic that it will force them to believe. We heard this demand in the gospel reading only last Friday. And as we noted then, belief cannot be forced any more than love can be forced. Jesus’ miracles confirm the faith of those who already believe. They do not force belief on those who hearts and minds are closed to him and his message.
          Jesus then mentions two such confirming signs: Jonah, and the so-called queen of the south, Sheba. Jonah’s sign was not his survival in the belly of the great fish. We saw when we were reading Jonah last week that this was one of the parts of Jonah’s story which showed that it was fiction – though, like much great fiction, notably Jesus’ parables and Shakespeare’s plays, the vehicle for important truth about God, humanity, and life. The sign of Jonah which Jesus refers to is the immediate repentance of the people of Nineveh – Gentiles without the gift of God’s law – in response to Jonah’s preaching. Jesus contrasts the response of the Ninevites with the failure of so many of his own people to respond to his message.
          The sign of Queen Sheba is different, though in one respect the same. Like Jonah, she came from afar, motivated however not by a divine command, but by the report that King Solomon possessed wisdom greater than that of all other rulers or sages. “There is something greater than Solomon here,” Jesus says. He is referring to himself. He not merely possesses wisdom: Jesus is wisdom personified. Similarly the statement that “there is something greater than Jonah here” means that Jesus’ message is more compelling than Jonah’s -- yet the people still do not respond. Jesus sums up by saying that the Ninevites and Queen Sheba showed a readiness to respond which his own people do not.
Are we responding? “I have come,” Jesus says in John’s gospel, “that they may have life, and have it to the full” (10:10). Are we embracing Jesus’ offer of life to the full? Or do we think of our faith as observing enough of the Church’s complicated rules and regulations to be able, on Judgment Day, to squeeze our way into heaven?
          Think about it!