Friday, November 17, 2017

WILL THE SON OF GOD FIND FAITH?


Homily for November 18th, 2017: Luke 18:1-8.

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 cynical 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? 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. 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. He is putting it to us, right now:

   AWhen the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on the earth?”

 

Thursday, November 16, 2017

THE GOD OF THE UNEXPECTED.


Homily for November 17th, 2017: Luke 17:26-37.

             Jesus continues his teaching about the end time, which began with yesterday’s gospel reading. The end time refers to Jesus’ return in power and glory, a total contrast to his first coming as a helpless infant, in weakness and obscurity. In today’s gospel the emphasis is on the unexpectedness of the Lord’s return. On page after page of Holy Scripture we see God acting in ways that no one could have expected.

Jesus gives two examples familiar to his Jewish hearers. No one expected the flood which swallowed up all but those who embarked in the ark which Noah built at God’s command. No one save Lot foresaw the catastrophe which befell the wicked inhabitants of Sodom.

Here are two more examples of the unexpected. The younger son Joseph was hated by his older brothers, who sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt. There Joseph is thrown into prison on a trumped up capital charge – only to become the second most powerful man in the kingdom and the savior from death through famine not only of the Egyptians but of his whole family, including his resentful brothers.

          At age forty Moses has to flee Egypt after failing to save his people from slavery. Forty years later, with Moses’ life for all intents and purposes over, God summons him from a life of obscurity to do what he had miserably failed to do forty years before: liberate his entire people from bondage. These biblical stories, and many more like them, have given birth to our modern saying: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

          How do we prepare for the unexpected? Jesus’ answer is clear: by living with our eyes directed not upon ourselves and our own interests, but on the Lord God.  That is what Jesus means when he says: “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will save it.”

If we are trying to do that, then, when the Lord comes – whether to us individually through the angel of death, or for all of us through the Lord’s return in glory – his coming, though unexpected, will be a day not of terror, but of joy – the joy of seeing face-to-face the One who alone can satisfy the deepest longings and desires of our hearts; and who told us during his short time on earth: “All this I tell you that my joy may be yours and your joy may be complete.” (John 15:11)

 

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

"HE BURIED HIS MASTER'S MONEY."

Homily for Nov.19th, 2017: 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. 

Matthew 25:14-30.

AIM:  To help the hearers overcome fear, and develop deeper trust.
                                 
          It seems terribly unfair, doesn’t it? The first two servants are praised for taking chances. The third is condemned for being prudent. There were no safe deposit boxes in Jesus’ day. Burying treasure in the ground was an accepted form of safekeeping. Jesus’ original hearers would have been shocked to find someone who had done his duty being condemned. Let’s look at the story more closely.
          The sums entrusted to each servant were huge. Our version speaks of “talents”: five, two, and one. Biblical commentators tell us that one talent was equivalent to the subsistence wage of an ordinary worker for fifteen years. The sums involved were clearly enormous. Jesus’ hearers recognized that at once, even if we do not.   
          This tells us something crucial about the story’s central character: the man going on a journey. He is not a bean counter. Generous in extending his trust, he is no less generous in reward. On his return from a long absence, he praises the first two servants for doubling the sums entrusted to them. The words he speaks twice over, “You were faithful in small matters,” are ironic: the sums entrusted to each, and now doubled, were not small. They were huge. The master backs up his praise of the first two servants by inviting each to “share your master’s joy,” words which clearly imply a handsome financial reward.
          The people hearing the story now expect that the third servant will also receive generous treatment. By returning to his master the smaller but still enormous sum entrusted to him he has faithfully discharged his responsibility as custodian. True, he has not increased the sum entrusted to him, like the first two servants. But he has also avoided the risk of loss which they incurred by what today would rank as speculation.     
          How shocking, therefore, for Jesus’ hearers to find this third servant not praised but rebuked as a “wicked, lazy servant.” In place of the reward which the first two servants received, this man, who has acted prudently according to the standards of the day, goes away empty-handed, banished into “outer darkness” to “wail and grind his teeth” in disappointed rage at his unjust treatment. The master, who up to this point in the story has seemed so generous, turns out to be no better than the greedy absentee landlords Jesus’ hearers knew so well, squeezing the inhabitants of the land for every penny they could get out of them. The third servant’s description of the master seems to be all too accurate: “I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter.” With someone so grasping and unreasonable, prudence was the only safe policy. “Out of fear,” the third servant explains, “I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Here it is back.”
          How can we make sense of the story? Is the central figure, the master, simply arbitrary: generous with the first two servants, cruel to the third? So it would seem. The master’s final action confirms this view. Taking the money which the third servant has faithfully preserved, he gives it to the first servant as an additional reward for the enormous risks he has taken in doubling the sum entrusted to him — an example of arbitrary injustice if there ever was one. 
          To make sense of the story we must ask about motives: not those of the master, but the motives of the three servants. The first two servants acted out of trust. A man who had entrusted them with so much, they reasoned, was clearly generous. He could be trusted. The third servant was motivated by fear. He says so
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himself: “Out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground.”  It is this fear which the parable condemns.  
          How often Jesus tells his followers, “Do not be afraid.” The master in Jesus’ parable rewards the first two servants not for the money they gained, but for their trust. He rebukes and banishes the third servant for lack of trust. The third servant did nothing bad. As we have seen, he fulfilled his responsibility. Like those at the king’s left hand in the parable of the sheep and goats, which follows at once in Matthew’s gospel, the third servant is rejected not for anything he did, but for what he failed to do. Fear paralyzed him into inactivity.
          The parable is about the one thing necessary: trust in the Lord who gives us his gifts not according to our deserving but according to his boundless generosity. 
Refusing to trust, the third servant concentrates on security above all, and loses all.  Jesus is challenging us to be bold. For most of us that is difficult. Boldness is not our long suit. Like the third servant, we prefer to play it safe. The boldness of his two colleagues came not from themselves, but from their trust in the master’s generosity. Burying our gift to keep it safe is like opting for a low-risk spiritual life, avoiding sin as far as possible but not loving much because of the risk involved: the risk of not loving wisely, the risk of having our love betrayed, or not returned, and so being hurt. 
          Do you want to be certain that your feelings will never be hurt, that your heart will never be wounded as you journey through life? Then be sure to guard your heart carefully. Never give it away, and certainly never wear your heart on your sleeve. If you do that, however, your heart will shrink. The capacity to love is not diminished through use. It grows. What mother ever ran out of love because she had too many children? From the beginning of time loving mothers have found that with the birth of each child their ability to love is increased.
          “Out of fear ... I buried your talent,” the third servant in the story tells his master. Jesus came to cast out fear. 
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.  Whoever believes in him avoids condemnation, but who whoever does not believe is already condemned for not believing in the name of God’s only Son. (John 3:17f)
          To escape condemnation we don’t need to establish a good conduct record in some heavenly golden book: a series of stars after our name representing our prayers, sacrifices, and good works. Thinking we must do that is “not believing in the name of God’s only Son.” His name is synonymous with mercy, generosity, and love. Escaping condemnation, being saved, means one thing only: trusting him. It is as simple as that. We don’t need to negotiate with God. We don’t need to con him into being lenient. We couldn’t do that even if we tried, for God is lenient already. He invites us to trust him. That is all. 
          Trusting him means risking all, our hearts first of all. It means loving: generously, recklessly, without limit and without conditions. Because that is the way God loves us. And doing that will mean suffering the wounds that love inevitably inflicts. Show me a person whose heart is battered and bruised, and I’ll show you someone who has loved: not always wisely, perhaps, but deeply, passionately, tenderly. I’ve suffered those hurts myself: more times than I could ever tell you.
          With this parable of the three servants entrusted with enormous gifts on behalf of an absent master Jesus is inviting us to imitate the first two servants: to recognize the generosity of the one who gives us our gifts; and to trust him as we use and share his gifts to us, confident that when the Master returns we shall hear his voice, speaking to us personally, and with great tenderness: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Come share your master’s joy!”

THE END TIME


Homily for November 16th, 2017: Luke 17:20-25.

          We are nearing the end of the year in the Church’s calendar. Two weeks from Sunday, the third of December, is the first Sunday in Advent, the beginning of a new Church year. As we approach the threshold of this new year, the Church gives us readings about what has traditionally been called “the end time,” when Jesus will come again: not as he first came in Bethlehem, in the weakness and obscurity of a baby, born in a little village on the edge of the then known world; but in an event so dramatic that all will know that history’s final hour has struck.  

          From Jesus’ day to this people have wanted to know when this will be. In Matthew’s gospel Jesus says that even he does not know this. “As for the exact day or hour, no one knows it, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but the Father only” (Mt. 24:36).

Hence, Jesus tells us in today’s gospel, when people claim to have a timetable, we should pay no attention to them: “There will be those who will say to you, ‘Look, there he is,’ or ‘Look here he is.’ Do not go off, do not run in pursuit.” Jesus’ return will be dramatic, but also unexpected. “For just as lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will he Son of Man be in his day.”

Then comes a shocker: “First he [the Son of Man] must suffer greatly and be rejected by this generation.”  Friends, this suffering and rejection continue today. Four years ago, Cardinal Dolan of New York, in his final address as outgoing President of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, spoke about the worldwide persecution of Christians today. The 20th century, he said, saw the death of half the total number of Christian martyrs since Jesus’ death and resurrection. And in the not yet 18 years of this century, more than a million Christians have already died because of their faith in Jesus Christ. Those martyrs are our brothers and sisters in the family of God, Dolan said. We must pray for them, as well as for those still living, in Iraq and Syria but also elsewhere, who are facing cruel persecution. Pope Francis has said the same many times. I invite you to do this in a special way in this Mass. 

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

ONLY ONE RETURNS TO GIVE THANKS.


Homily for November 15th, 2017: Luke 17:11-19.

Jesus heals ten lepers. In Jesus’ day leprosy was something like AIDS today. Because the disease was incurable, and thought to be contagious, the leper had to live apart, calling out AUnclean, Unclean!@ lest others approach and become infected. So in healing the ten, Jesus was restoring them from a living death to new life. Yet only one comes back to give thanks for his healing. He was a foreigner, despised by Jesus= people. If he goes to the Temple, the priest will probably tell him to get lost. He doesn=t belong to the right religion, or the right people. Related ethnically to the Jews, he doesn=t observe the full Jewish Law. Priests in Jesus= day were also quarantine officials. Only the Samaritan, who lives outside the law, follows the impulse of his heart, returns to Jesus, and gives thanks.  

What about ourselves? Are we grateful people? Do we take time each day to count our blessings, and give thanks to God for them? The Church helps us to be thankful people by placing thanksgiving at the heart of its public prayer. Eucharist, you know, means Athanksgiving.@ The Mass C every Mass C is a public act of thanksgiving to our heavenly Father for all the blessings he showers upon us. In a few minutes we shall hear once again the familiar story of what Jesus did for us at the Last Supper. AHe took bread and gave you thanks .... When supper was ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise.@

Giving thanks to God over something is the Jewish form of blessing. In giving thanks to his heavenly Father for the bread and wine, Jesus was blessing them. And in so doing he was also transforming them: changing their inner reality into his own body and blood. It is because of this miraculous though unseen change that we genuflect to Jesus present in the tabernacle when we come into church. We ring a bell at the consecration, reminding everyone in the church: Jesus is here, right now, in a special way, with a special intensity! The light burning near the tabernacle, day and night, says the same thing. 

Show me someone who is embittered, angry, filled with resentment and hate B and I=ll show you a person who has no time for thanksgiving. But show me a person who radiates peace and joy B and I=ll show you someone who daily and even hourly gives thanks to God for all his blessings. Which of these two persons would you like to be?

Monday, November 13, 2017

"WE ARE UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS."


Homily for November 14th, 2017: Luke 17:7-10.

          “When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’” The closing words of our gospel reading today tell us that we never have a claim on God. Even when we have done all that God commands – and which of us has? – we can never sit back and tell God: “I’m waiting for your reward, Lord.”

          That was what the Pharisee did in Jesus’ story of the two men who went up to the Temple in Jerusalem to pray. In his prayer the Pharisee tells God all the good things he has done. And he really had done them. He was a genuinely good and devout man. His good works went far beyond anything that was required.

          The tax collector, on the other hand, knew that he had few if any good deeds to appeal to. He could pray only for God’s mercy: “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Yet, Jesus says, it was the tax collector who went home justified – which means “put right with God” – rather than the devout Pharisee. His mistake lay in assuming that his good deeds gave him a claim on God. We never have a claim on God. God has a claim on us, and it is an absolute claim 

          Does that mean that there is no reward for faithful service? Of course not. Jesus speaks often of God’s rewards. To experience his reward, Jesus is saying, you must appeal, not to what you think you deserve; appeal instead to the Lord’s mercy. Learn to stand before Him saying the words of the hymn, “Rock of ages” (hardly known to Catholics, but a favorite of our Protestant brothers): “Nothing in my hand I bring / Simply to your cross I cling.”

 

Sunday, November 12, 2017

JESUS USES HYPERBOLE.


Homily for November 13th, 2017: Luke 17:1-6.

          Today’s gospel reading gives us an example of Jesus using hyperbole. How so, you ask? Webster’s dictionary says that hyperbole is “a statement exaggerated fancifully, as for effect.” The American humorist Mark Twain was using hyperbole when he said: “The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for 3 million dollars; and it is the mistake of my life that I did not do so.” In Mark Twain’s youth 3 million dollars was like 300 million today. The statement is absurd – but also very funny, which is of course the effect Mark Twain was aiming at.

          Helping people understand the power of faith is the effect Jesus was aiming at when he spoke the words in today’s gospel: “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” That is as absurd as Mark Twain claiming he could have bought Louis for 3 million dollars. No one would want to a plant mulberry tree in the sea. The salt water would kill it.   

          What Jesus is actually saying is that with faith we can accomplish the impossible. What is faith, anyway? Many Catholics would probably say: faith is the list of truths that we profess every Sunday in the creed. That is not wrong. But faith in that sense is properly called the faith.

          The primary meaning of faith is trust. Even in the Creed, we say “I believe in God.” To believe in someone is to trust that person. When we say we believe in God, we’re saying that we trust him enough to entrust our lives to him. Faith in that sense is not something that comes to us naturally. It is a gift. And the one who gives us this gift is God.

          Each time we come here we are praying that through his two tables of word and sacrament God will deepen and strengthen our trust in him. We are like the man in Mark’s gospel who comes to Jesus asking healing for his boy, who suffers terrible convulsions. Jesus asks the man if he truly believes that Jesus has power to heal. “I do believe,” the father replies. “Help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). With this gospel reading Jesus is inviting us to make that man’s prayer our own.