Friday, March 27, 2015

"IT IS EXPEDIENT THAT ONE MAN DIE FOR THE PEOPLE."


Homily for Week 5 in Lent, Saturday: John 11:45-56.

          “It is expedient that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.” These words of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas in today’s gospel reading are cynical. They were spoken at a meeting of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council, called together to discuss what should be done about the crowds who were becoming followers of Jesus following his raising of Lazarus from the dead. “What are we going to do?” members of the Sanhedrin ask. “This man is performing many signs. If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.”  

          Palestine was already controlled by the Roman government of occupation. But the authorities had an agreement with the Sanhedrin, allowing them to control internal affairs, as long as they kept order and saw to it that things remained quiet. Jesus’ miracles, culminating in the raising of Lazarus from his tomb, threatened to destroy this stability. If things got out of hand, the Romans would crack down hard; and the Sanhedrin’s limited authority would be swept away. Caiaphas was proposing a simple solution. Let’s show the Romans we can still control things. We’ll just remove Jesus, he says, and things will quiet down.

          Jesus was removed, as we know: by crucifixion. But although it was the hated Romans who executed him, working with the small ruling clique around the Sanhedrin, God remained in charge. As the great nineteenth century convert, Blessed John Henry Newman, wrote in a memorable phrase, “God knows what he is about.” Jesus’ death and resurrection brought salvation not only to his own people, but to all peoples. As the gospel writer says: “Jesus died … not only for [his own] nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.”

          Through baptism we are members of that people; no longer dispersed, but united in worship of the One who, by rising from death, has opened for us the gate to life everlasting, with Him.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

"THE FATHER IS IN ME AND I IN THE FATHER."



Homily for March 27th, 2015: John 10:31-42.
          “The Jews picked up rocks to stone Jesus,’ The gospel today starts where yesterday’s gospel ended: with Jesus’ critics throwing stones at him. As we saw yesterday, that was commanded in the book Leviticus as the punishment for blasphemy (24:16). 
          Whenever critics accuse him of blasphemy for making himself equal to God, Jesus responds by saying, I have not made myself anything. It is God our Father who has made me who I am. Today Jesus says, “the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”
          John’s gospel starts with that claim: “In the beginning was the Word; the Word was in God’s presence, and the Word was God. He was present to God in the beginning” (John 1:1). Words are used to communicate. Since we cannot see God, he sends us his Son, God clothed in human flesh, to show us what God is like. 
          When we listen to Jesus, we hear God speaking to us. When we look at Jesus, we see what God is like. What do we see when we look at Jesus? We see that he preferred simple, ordinary people. He came to the world in a provincial village where nothing interesting or important ever happened. Jesus moved not among wealthy or sophisticated people, or among scholars and intellectuals, but among ordinary people.
         Jesus was of the earth, earthy. In his youth he worked with his hands in the carpenter’s shop. His teaching was full of references to simple things: the birds of the air, the wind and the raging waves, the lilies of the field, the vine, the lost sheep, the woman searching for her one lost coin, leavening dough with yeast, the thief breaking in at night. 
          In preferring simple people and simple things, Jesus was showing us what God is like. He who is God’s word, God’s personal communication to us, is saying that God loves humble people. In his earthiness Jesus shows us God’s love for this world and everything in it.
Often we think of God and religion as concerned only with some higher, spiritual realm. No! God loves the earth and the things of earth. He must love them, because he made them. And God does not make anything that is not lovable. God made each of us, using our parents as his agents. And he loves us with a love that will never let us go.


Wednesday, March 25, 2015

THE CENTRALITY OF THE CROSS


Passion/Palm Sunday B.  Mark 14:1-15:47.
AIM:  To help the hearers meditate on the cross. 
Bible scholars tell us that the passion narratives were the first part of the gospels to be written down. From the start the Christian community wanted to preserve faithfully every detail of the Lord=s suffering and death. Mark, whose account we have just heard, says nothing about Jesus= birth and infancy. But he devotes approximately a fifth of his gospel to Jesus= passion. For him, as for all the gospel writers, the cross was central.
Take the cross out of our religion, and you have ripped the heart out of it.  The late Archbishop Fulton Sheen illustrated this truth with a personal experience from the somewhat chaotic time after the second Vatican Council. Some of you may be offended by Sheen=s story. But the cross has offended people from the start. Paul called it Aa stumbling block to Jews, and an absurdity to Gentiles@ (1 Cor. 1:23). 
In his posthumously published memoir, Treasure in Clay, Sheen tells about receiving a phone call one day from a Jewish jeweler in New York whose shop he  had often visited. AWould you like to see a large number of silver crucifixes?@ the jeweler asked. When Sheen visited the shop, the jeweler showed him a little brown bag with dozens of silver crucifixes about four inches high. 
AWhere did you get them?@ Bishop Sheen asked.
AFrom Catholic Sisters,@ the jeweler answered. AThey brought them in to me and said they were not going to use them any more C wearing the crucifix separated them from the world. They wanted to know how much I would give them for the silver.@ The jeweler added: AI weighed them out thirty pieces of silver. What is wrong with your church?@ 
AJust that!@ Bishop Sheen replied. AThe contempt of Christ and his cross which makes it worldly.@
Fulton Sheen would not have been the man he was if he had not concluded the story by writing: AThose words became the channel of the Holy Spirit working in his soul. I explained to him the cost of redemption, the blood of Christ. He embraced the faith, and died in it.@ 
The Vietnamese bishop, Nguyen Van Thuan, who spent thirteen years in a Communist prison in Vietnam, before Pope John Paul II brought him to Rome, were he died as a cardinal in 2002, wrote during his time in prison: ALook at the cross and you will find the solution to all the problems that assail you.@ He was expressing what countless others have discovered: to learn the deepest meaning of our holy faith, we must take our stand beneath the cross and contemplate the One who hangs there. All the great lessons of life are learned at the foot of the cross.

 

'BEFORE ABRAHAM WAS, I AM."


Homily for Week 5 of Lent, Thursday: John 8:51-59.

          “Whoever keeps my word will never see death,” Jesus says. The response to this astonishing statement is fully understandable. ‘We always suspected you were crazy – now we know it.’ In the dialogue which follows Jesus’ critics press home the absurdity of what Jesus has just said. Abraham died. All the prophets have died. Who are you claiming to be?

          Jesus is about to tell them that he is without beginning or end. There was never a time when he was not. There will never come a time he will cease to be. Because he is not only human but also divine, he stands outside time. Since he knows, however, that this will seem to his hearers like boasting, he says: “If I glorify myself my glory is worth nothing; but it is my Father who glorifies me.”

          The exchange between Jesus and his critics culminates in the most astonishing statement of all, Jesus’ words: “Before Abraham was I AM.” What clearer statement could we have of Jesus’ claim to stand outside of time? As we saw two days ago, God had given the divine name I AM to Moses as the answer to his question about how to identify the One who was sending him back to Egypt to liberate his people. Tell them, God said, that I AM sent you.

          For Jesus’ hearers his appropriation of the sacred name of God was not merely astonishing. It was blasphemous. That is why the hearers take up rocks to throw at Jesus. They were doing what was commanded in Leviticus: “He who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him” (24:16). 

          The gospel’s final line seems like an anti-climax: “Jesus hid and went out of the temple area.” In reality, it is no anti-climax. It shows that Jesus is still in charge. His hour had not yet come. When it did, he would lay down his life not under compulsion, but willingly – for us.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

THE ANNUNCIATION


Homily for March 25th, 201: The Annunciation. Luke 1:26-38.

          “Do not be afraid,” the angel Gabriel says to Mary. Girls married very early in those days. Mary may have been only 14 or 15. To be visited by an angel was no ordinary experience. Mary did not know what was happening to her. Of course she was afraid – “greatly troubled,” Luke says. To reassure her, the angel calls Mary “full of grace.” Grace is God’s love, poured into our hearts through the power of God’s Holy Spirit. How wonderful for this young teenager to hear that she was filled with God’s love – the greatest and most powerful love there is.

          Only after speaking this reassurance does the angel tell Mary that even before her planned marriage to Joseph she is going to be pregnant. No wonder that she asks, “How can this be?” In response Mary hears the stunning news that the father of her child will not be Joseph. He will be conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit. Hence, the angel says, “the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”

Did Mary understand that? How could she? Only later, decades later, did all this start to make sense to her. At the time she understood only this: that in a little village, where gossip was rife, and everyone knew everybody’s own business, she was going to be an unmarried mother. Without hesitation, however, Mary responds in trusting faith: “I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”

More than thirty years later, the Son whom Mary bore would say, not once but often, what the angel had said to his mother, at the time he was conceived: “Be not afraid.” Jesus spoke those words to his disciples in a boat, when they saw him coming toward them on the water in the midst of a storm (Mt 14:27). He spoke the same words to Peter, James, and John on the mountain at his Transfiguration (Mt 17:7 and parallels). He repeated them to Jairus, the synagogue official who, after asking healing for his little daughter, was told that the girl had already died (Mark 6:50).

The Lord is saying those same words to us, right now: “Be not afraid.” Trust me. I am with you. I shall be with you – always. On this day when we celebrate Mary’s acceptance of the Lord’s call, we ask her to pray for us, that like her, we too may say our yes to God, in good times, but also in bad.

Monday, March 23, 2015

"I AM."


Homily for Week 5 of Lent, Tuesday: John 8:21-30.

          “Many came to believe in him,” we just heard. Others, however, did not. As he nears his arrest, trial, and crucifixion, Jesus speaks with increasing urgency. “If you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins.” That sentence makes sense only if we know the story of God calling Moses, already an old man, to return to Egypt and deliver his people from slavery to the Egyptians. Moses asks what he is to say to his people when they ask who has sent him. And God responds: ‘Tell them that I AM has sent you.’ So what Jesus is saying in the gospel we just heard is that only those who believe he is the divine Son of God will have their sins forgiven.

          The gospel readings for the last three Sundays have been giving reasons to believe in Jesus as God’s divine son. In the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration three weeks ago we saw the divine light of his divinity momentarily breaking through the veil of his humanity. Two weeks ago we heard about Jesus cleansing of the Temple and saying: “Destroy this Temple and I will raise it up” – words which the hearers assumed referred to the Temple building. In reality, Jesus was speaking abut the Temple of his body, and hence about the resurrection. Last Sunday we heard about Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead – something that only God could do.

          “Because he spoke this way,” today’s gospel tells us, “many came to believe in him.” In his book Jesus of Nazareth Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI writes that those who welcomed Jesus as he entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey on the first Palm Sunday “were not the same crowd that later demanded his crucifixion” (p.8). That crowd consisted, Pope Benedict writes, of “the Temple aristocracy,” a small ruling clique who felt their power threatened by Jesus’ teaching and claims – and not even all of them, as we see in the case of Nicodemus, a member of the ruling caste, but secretly Jesus’ disciple (cf. op.cit. 185f).

“Just as the Lord entered the Holy City that day on a donkey,” Pope Benedict writes, “so the Church [sees] him coming again and again in the humble form of bread and wine.” Greeting him, we are encountering the One who made us; the One who upholds us at every moment of our lives; who is always close to us, even when we stray far from him; who loves us more than we can ever imagine; who is waiting for us at the end of life’s road, to welcome us into the place he has gone ahead to prepare for us; where we shall experience not just joy but ecstasy – for we shall see God face to face.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

AN ADULTEROUS GIRL


Homily for Week 5 of Lent, Monday: John 8:1-11.
          The people who come to Jesus in today’s gospel, dragging with them a young girl caught in adultery, are whipped up and excited. They are out to put Jesus on the spot; and they think the have found the perfect means. The Jewish law in such a case was clear. A woman guilty of adultery must be stoned. They demand that Jesus take a stand.
          His first response is silence. Throughout Jesus remains calm and relaxed, in full command of the situation. Stooping down, he begins to write on the ground. Perhaps Jesus is embarrassed. Or maybe he is filled with indignant shame that religious leaders could act so heartlessly.
          And heartless the woman’s accusers were. The Scripture scholars say that she was probably a young teenager. Whatever her age, her accusers have no interest in her at all. Her accusers were really interested in one thing only: setting a trap for Jesus, “so that they could have some charge to bring against him,” as John tells us.
          When they insist that Jesus give some answer, he speaks the well known words: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Jesus’ challenge strikes home. When all the accusers have departed, leaving Jesus alone with the terrified girl, the condition he has set for her condemnation is fulfilled. Jesus is without sin. If anyone was entitled to condemn her, he was. He refuses to do so. Instead he offers her God’s mercy and the chance to begin again: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
          Jesus is not saying that sexual sins are unimportant. Against sin Jesus was uncompromising. With sinners he was compassionate. And with none was he more compassionate than with people guilty of the so-called sins of the flesh. The only people with whom Jesus is severe in the gospels are those guilty of spiritual sins: hard-heartedness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, pride.  
          Those were the sins of the girl’s accusers. To her Jesus extends God’s mercy. This alone could give her hope, challenging her to turn from a destructive life of sin to a constructive life for God and for others – which is the only way to fulfillment, happiness, and peace. Jesus offers us the same challenge today.