Friday, September 7, 2018

THE BIRTH OF MARY


Homily for Sept. 8th, 2015: The birth of Mary: Rom. 8:28-30; Matt. 1:18-23.

What do today’s readings tell us about the birth of Mary, which we celebrate today? Nothing. Nor do the Scriptures tell us anything about how her earthly life ended. In defining Mary=s Assumption on All Saints Day 1950, Pope Pius XII said simply: AWhen the course of [Mary=s] earthly life had ended, she was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven.@ Whether this happened before or after physical death, the Pope did not say. The body the Pope referred to is Mary=s new resurrection body: the body with which Jesus rose from the dead B the heavenly and spiritual body which, as St. Paul says, each one of us will receive in heaven (cf.1 Cor. 15:35-53). There Mary continues to pray for us. As the Catechism says: AThe Church loves to pray in communion with the Virgin Mary ... and to entrust supplications and praises to her.@ (No. 2682).

The Scriptures do tell us one thing about Mary, however, which we often overlook. When, after a frantic three-day search, Mary and Joseph found their 12-year old son in the Jerusalem Temple, he answered their reproaches by asking: “Did you not know that I had to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). Already at age twelve, Jesus knew that God was his Father, not Joseph. And Luke tells us that “they did not grasp what he said to them” (2:50)

There would be much more that Mary did not grasp. How much did she grasp about the angel’s message that she was to be the mother of God’s Son? Well, she grasped at least this: that in a little village where gossip was rife, and everybody knew everybody else’s business, people would regard her as an unmarried mother. Yet despite this daunting prospect, and her still young age (Scripture scholars think she may have been no more than thirteen), Mary responded: “I am the maidservant of the Lord. Let it be done to me as you say” (Luke 1:38).

Three decades later, after Jesus left home, he seemed on more than one occasion to be fulfilling his command to his disciples about turning one=s back on parents and other relatives (cf. Lk 14:26). At the marriage at Cana Jesus seemed to speak coldly to his mother. She seems not to have been present at the Last Supper. Only at Calvary was Mary permitted to stand beside her now dying Son, along with Athe disciple whom Jesus loved@ (John 19:26); deliberately unnamed, many Scripture scholars believe, to represent the ideal follower of Jesus Christ in every time and place.

The last glimpse we have of Mary in Scripture shows her with the apostles and Jesus= other friends, praying for the descent of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:14). Thereafter Mary disappears. Her work of bringing Christ to the world was taken over by the Church. From her place in heaven this woman whose life began and ended in obscurity continues to answer the prayer which Catholics have prayed for two millennia: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.” 

Thursday, September 6, 2018

GOD'S SERVANTS AND STEWARDS


Homily for Sept. 7th, 2018: 1 Corinthians 4:1-5.
          “People should one regard us,” Paul writes in our first reading, “as servants of Christ and administrators of the mysteries of God.” Living as servants and administrators is fundamental in Holy Scripture. We find it already in the second creation tale in Genesis, chapter two. The man whom God places in Eden is not its owner. The garden belongs to God. God places Adam in the garden “to till it and care for it.”  He is God’s agent, his steward, to tend the garden on behalf of its creator and owner. As long as Adam obeys the creator’s laws, he enjoys the garden’s abundant fruits. When he breaks God’s law, he is expelled from Eden – a symbol of the ordered, beautiful world of God’s making. In terms simple enough for a child to understand, the Genesis creation tale proclaims what the modern ecology movement has rediscovered: that there is a sacred order in nature. When we respect nature’s laws, we prosper. When we violate the natural order, we pay a price. We are creation’s stewards, accountable to God, our creator.
          We are stewards of all God’s gifts: our time, our talents, and treasure – the money and other possessions we have. These are gifts entrusted to us by God, for a limited time. One day we shall have to give an account to God of how we have used his gifts. Crucial to the right use of these gifts is gratitude to their giver, the Lord God. 
          Hebrew religion taught the offering of firstfruits. The Jewish farmer and shepherd offered God the first fruits of field and flock, out of gratitude, in recognition that everything comes ultimately from God. Jesus, who learned this practice in childhood from his mother, from St. Joseph, and in the synagogue school at Nazareth, would be shocked to find many of his present-day followers offering God not the firstfruits but leavings: what is left over after they have provided themselves and their loved ones not only with necessities, and often with many luxuries besides.
          Show me someone who is deeply happy, and I’ll show you someone who puts God first -- in all areas of life: who gives the Lord God the first claim on his or her time, his or her talents (which means the skills and abilities we have developed by using the gifts God has given us). Such a person also puts God first financially, by giving Him not a tip but the first claim on his or her money and other possessions. There are such people here in our parish – and in every parish the world over. They are expressing their gratitude to God for all his bounty. And if a long life has taught me anything, it is this. Grateful people are happy people: no exceptions!

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

"PUT OUT INTO DEEP WATER."


Homily for Sept. 5th, 2018: 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: ABut 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: ADepart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.@ To which Jesus responds with words of reassurance: ADo not be afraid: from now on you will be catching men.@ In that moment, Peter=s life is changed. AThey brought their boats to shore,@ Luke tells us, Athey left everything and followed [Jesus].@ Peter never forgot it.

APut 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 APut out into deep water.@

Glimpsing this mighty God, our loving heavenly Father, with the eyes of faith, we too join B as in a moment we shall B in the angels= song:  AHoly, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!  All the earth is filled with his glory!@   

 

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

"BE OPENED!"



September 9th, 2018: 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. 
Is. 35:4-7a; Mark 7:31-37.
AIM:  To proclaim Jesus as the one who enables us to be open to God, and others.
 
Deafness, especially when it is total, is a heavier burden than blindness. There are blind people who become accomplished musicians or writers. The blind are also well represented in the learned professions. Few deaf people can match those achievements. Deafness isolates its victims from others more than blindness. The deaf see others talking and realize that they are excluded. 
The deaf man brought to Jesus by his friends in today=s gospel has apparently never heard human speech. He speaks indistinctly. The account we have just heard mentions a Aspeech impediment.@ Though Jesus sometimes healed with a mere word, he takes this man apart from the crowd. He had at least two reasons for doing so.
First, Jesus needed the man=s undivided attention. Second, Jesus experienced each of his healings as an intimate encounter with his heavenly Father: something too precious and too sacred, to be paraded before curious spectators. If Jesus= practice were followed by all who claim to heal in his name today, a number of Sunday television programs would have to go off the air.
So strong was Jesus= desire to avoid being known as a sensational miracle worker, that he often told those he healed to say nothing about it. Jesus knew that the one truly important miracle would be the empty tomb of Easter morning. Once, therefore, in this gospel according to Mark Jesus sets a limit to the silence he imposes: when he tells his three friends, Peter, James, and John, after they have witnessed his transfiguration, Anot to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead@ (Mk. 9:9). Then the greatest miracle of all, Jesus= resurrection, could be proclaimed B as long as the cross was proclaimed with it.  Calvary and the empty tomb must never be separated.
What is important about the miracle in today=s gospel, as about all Jesus= miracles of healing, is not so much the healing itself, as what it tells us about the healer. In the first reading we heard Isaiah prophesy that when God=s anointed servant, the Messiah, visits his people, Athe eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf cleared  ... the tongue of the mute will sing.@  
Jesus= healing of the deaf man fulfills this prophecy. In an act that speaks more eloquently than words Jesus is proclaiming that the one so long proclaimed by the prophets is here. In him, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary and Joseph, the very power of God is at work. God is visiting his people.
Even the details of the healing are significant. Jesus does not tell the man to be patient under his handicap, because in heaven his lot will be better. Nor does he urge the deaf man to Aoffer up@ his suffering. How often we hear both of those responses to sickness and suffering from those who claim to speak in Jesus= name.  We do not hear them, however, from Jesus himself.
Instead, Mark tells us, Jesus Alooked up to heaven and groaned.@ Why? The groan was Jesus= lament over this fresh example of how sin, which is the cause of suffering, has spoiled the beautiful and perfect world which God made. Jesus= heavenly Father and ours is not a God of sickness but of health. There is no reason to suppose that an individual who is suffering is being punished for his or her personal sin.  But Scripture clearly teaches that the existence of suffering is connected with human sin in general. In the Genesis story of the fall, for instance, God tells the woman, after she has turned away from him and sinned, AI will intensify the pangs of your childbearing.@ And to the man who joined her in sinning, God says that henceforth work will no longer be a joy for him, but a burden: ABy the sweat of your face shall you get the bread you eat.@ (Gen. 3:16-19) In his Letter to the Romans Paul takes this teaching a step farther, writing that human sin caused not only suffering but death: Athrough one man sin entered into the world, and with sin death@ (5:12). The deaf man=s inability to hear or speak reminds Jesus of how sin has spoiled his Father=s handiwork in creation. That is why Jesus groans. 
The heart of the story is Jesus= command to the deaf man: ABe opened!@  Deafness has closed him off from others. Jesus wants to set him free. Jesus is the man of total openness: openness to God; and openness to those who society in Jesus= day accepted only in subordinate roles or not at all B women, children, and social outcasts like prostitutes and the hated tax collectors. Jesus came, our fourth Eucharistic prayer tells us, to proclaim “the good news of salvation, to prisoners, freedom, and to the sorrowful of heart, joy.”
Jesus is saying to us right now, in this church, what he said to the deaf man: ABe opened!@ How closed in we are much of the time: closed to God, closed to others. We shut ourselves up in prisons of our own making, whose walls are self-fulfillment, and whose guiding principle is the hackneyed and deceitful slogan: ADo your own thing.@ Most of the conflicts, divisions, and wars in our world B between individuals, families, classes, groups, and nations B are the result of people not being open. In the cacophony of conflicting arguments and claims we hear only what we want to hear, and no more; just enough to confirm our prejudices; and then we stop listening altogether. 
Even between Christians there are barriers erected by our failure to be open to each other. To remedy this tragic situation, a living contradiction of Jesus= prayer the night before he died, that all might be one (Jn. 17, passim), the Second Vatican Council recommended the method of dialogue. Dialogue requires that we be open to what those who are separated from us B whom we may even consider enemies B are saying; that we listen before we speak.

Can dialogue overcome all barriers? Sadly it cannot. Some conflicts are so grave that no human power seems great enough to break down the walls that separate us from one another. Nor can we penetrate by our own efforts alone the wall which our sins erect between us and the all-holy God. The gospel proclaims the good news that there is One who can break down those walls. His name is Jesus Christ.

Jesus, the man of total openness, has the right, if ever a man had it, to command: ABe opened!@ He won that right for all time on Calvary when, as we shall hear in a moment in the preface to our Eucharistic prayer, Ahe stretched out his hands as he endured his Passion, so as to break the bonds of death and manifest the resurrection.” (Weekday Preface VI) 

"HE SET OUT INTO OPEN COUNTRY"



          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’ healing 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 set out into open country.” 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 3, 2018

"THEY WERE AMAZED AND ASTONISHED."


Homily for Sept. 4th, 2018: Luke 4:31-37.

          “Jesus taught them on the sabbath,” we heard in the gospel, “and they were astonished at his teaching because he spoke with authority.” And a few verses later Luke, the gospel writer, tells us that following a dramatic healing, “they were all amazed and said to one another, ‘What is there about his word? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out.’”

          The people who hear Jesus realize that he speaks “with authority.” What does that mean? It means that he spoke differently from the other religious teachers they were accustomed to hearing. Those teachers interpreted God’s law. Jesus spoke not as an interpreter of God’s law, but as the law-giver. Read the last part of chapter 5 in Matthew’s gospel, for instance, and you will find Jesus citing one Commandment after another, and then saying: “But I say unto you.” After citing the Commandment which prohibits murder, for instance, Jesus says that it applies not only to killing another, but even to the emotion which leads to killing: anger. (Cf. Mt. 5:21-23)  Citing the Commandment, “You shall not commit adultery,” Jesus says that it applies even to lustful desires. (Mt. 5:27f.)

          The people who hear Jesus are also amazed that he has power to heal people with a mere word. The man whom Jesus heals in today’s gospel is possessed, Luke tells us, “with the spirit of an unclean demon.” In a pre-scientific age without blood tests, microscopes, or X-rays, that was the normal way to explain illness. The demon throws the man down and at Jesus’ word comes out of him, “without doing him any harm.”

          Jesus still speaks to us today: in Holy Scripture, in the teaching of his divinely commissioned Church, and in the still, small voice of conscience. His word still has power to convict people of sin, changing their lives, and setting them on the right path – to Him. When people pray to Him and listen to his words, there are still miraculous healings which no doctor can explain.

“Heaven and earth will pass away,” Jesus says, “my words will never pass away” (Mt. 24:35 NEB). How better could we respond than with the familiar prayer: “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.”

Sunday, September 2, 2018

"ALL SPOKE HIGHLY OF HIM."


Homily for Sept. 3rd, 2018: 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 town, 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. 

Not long after his election 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 guarantee us a first-class ticket to heaven.