Friday, December 28, 2018

"WHOEVER HATES HIS BROTHER IS IN DARKNESS."


Homily for December 29th, 2018: 1 John 2:3-11.

          “I am the light of the world,” Jesus says in John’s gospel (8:12). How dark the world would be without him. In baptism we were commissioned to be lenses and prisms of that light, shining from the face of Jesus Christ. In today’s first reading the apostle John tells us how we fulfill that commission. “Whoever loves his bother remains in the light . . . Whoever hates his brother is in darkness; he walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”

          To understand these words we need to know that the words “love” and “hate” here do not refer to feelings. They refer to our conduct. This becomes clear if we look at the words of Jesus himself in the parable of the sheep and the goats in chapter 25 of Matthew’s gospel. There Jesus says that when we come to stand before God in judgment, he won’t ask us how many prayers we’ve said, or how many Masses we have attended. He will ask instead how we have treated other people.

          To those on his right hand, designated as sheep in that story, the king (a stand-in for the Lord God) will say: “Come, you have my Father’s blessing! … For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, in prison and you come to me.” Astonished at these words, those on the king’s right hand ask when they had done all those things. To which the king responds: “As often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me.” 

Then, to those on his left hand, designated as goats in the story, the king says: “Out of my sight, you condemned, into that everlasting fire prepared for the devil and has angels!” To explain this harsh judgment the king tells those on his left that they have done none of those things. Conduct and not feelings is the standard by which both are judged.

          We pray then in this Mass that when the Lord sends his angel to call us home to Him, he will find us walking in the light --  by doing good to those we encounter along life’s way.

Thursday, December 27, 2018

THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS


Homily for December 28th, 2019: Matthew 2:13-18.

          Which of us does not remember the brutal killing of 20 young schoolchildren, first and second graders, in Newtown/CT six years ago? It happened the Friday before the third Sunday in Advent, which is called “Rejoice Sunday” because the readings are about joy and rejoicing. I was away from St. Louis, visiting friends in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington/DC, and staying in the rectory of a large parish. I had prepared a homily for Rejoice Sunday, on the theme of joy.  

          As soon as the terrible news came from Connecticut, I knew I could not preach about joy, when our hearts were breaking at the slaughter these innocent children. Away from home, and without access to the books I normally use for homily preparation, plus the mass of material already on my computer, I was unable to produce the full text which I would have prepared had I been at home. I reflected long and hard about what I could say which would help people grieving over this tragedy. And I prayed that the Holy Spirit would give me the words I needed.   

At 11 o’clock on that Sunday morning I stood before a congregation of at least 300 people to speak about grief and how God can bring good out of evil. My own voice was breaking as I did so. When I finished, I knew that God had answered my prayers for inspiration and guidance. The whole congregation erupted in applause. And I remember saying to myself: “It’s not about you, Jay, it is about the Lord.”

          Today’s gospel tells us about a tragedy every bit as terrible as that one six years ago. In a frantic attempt to kill the baby king whom the Wise Men from the East had told him about when they passed through Jerusalem two years before, the cruel Gentile tyrant Herod ordered the slaughter of all the boys in and near Bethlehem two years old and younger.

          We cannot observe the feast of the Holy Innocents in America today without thinking of the mass killing of unborn children, a quarter of all babies conceived, which goes on day after day and year after year, leaving their mothers, most of them acting under pressure from others, burdened for life with regrets, shame, and guilt – a burden no woman should have to bear. This modern slaughter of the innocents will end only when hearts and minds are changed and people become as ashamed of abortion as we now are about slavery. For that we pray at Mass today.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

"I MUST BE IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE."




December 30th, 2018: Holy Family, Year C.  1 John 3:1-2, 21-24; Luke 2:41-52.
AIM:  To present the story of the boy Jesus in the Temple, and his return to Nazareth, as a model for our lives.
 
How much do we know about Jesus= childhood and youth? Apart from the story we have just heard in the gospel, nothing. He drops completely from view from the age of twelve until his baptism by his cousin, John, when B according to Luke=s gospel B Jesus was Aabout thirty years old@ (Luke 3:23). Three things in today=s gospel deserve consideration: Jesus= words to his parents; his return to Nazareth; and his mother=s reaction.
1.       ADid you not know that I must be in my Father=s house?@ Jesus asks his annguished parents, worn out from a frantic three-day search for their twelve-year-old son. The question is Jesus= first recorded utterance in Luke=s gospel. He speaks the words in the building which, for all believing Jews of that day, including Jesus himself, was the earthly dwelling place of God. The Temple at Jerusalem was the most sacred shrine of the people God had chosen to be especially his own.
With Jesus= coming, however, God was creating a new dwelling place on earth: not a building of wood and stone, but the living flesh of the twelve-year-old boy who stood in that building and spoke of his need to be Ain my Father=s house.@  Later, at the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus would stand in the Temple again to prophesy its destruction and its raising up again Ain three days.@  (John 2:18) That prophecy was a scandal to Jesus= devout countrymen. Even his friends did not understand what Jesus was talking about until after his resurrection. Then, John tells us, they recalled the Master=s words and realized that he had been talking about Athe temple of his body@ (John 2:19-22).
Because Jesus is himself God=s temple, the dwelling place of God on earth, only one thing mattered for him: doing his Father=s will. How did Jesus come to recognize his unique status as God=s Son and earthly dwelling place? We do not know. Today=s gospel indicates, however, that he came to this recognition gradually. It says that he asked questions of the teachers in the Temple. Clearly he did not come into the world knowing all the answers. Like every other human child, Jesus had to learn. His humanity was no mere disguise. It was real. Like every one of us, Jesus learned things as he grew and developed. The wording of Jesus= question to his parents in our gospel indicates, however, that even at age twelve, he had at least an inkling that his relationship to God was unique. He does not speak, as he would later teach his followers to do in his model prayer, of AOur Father.@ He says instead, AI must be in my Father=s house.@ Here is what Pope Benedict says in his book on the infancy narratives about this exchange between mother and son:
Jesus’ reply to his mother’s question is astounding: How so? You were looking for me? Did you not know where a child must be? That he must be in his father’s house, literally ‘in the things of the Father,’ Jesus tells his parents: I am in the very place where I belong – with the Father, in his house. There are two principal elements to note in this reply. Mary had said: ‘Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.’ Jesus corrects her: I am with my father. My father is not Joseph, but another – God himself. It is to him that I belong, and here I am with him. Could Jesus’ divine sonship be presented any more clearly? (p. 123f)
2.       This flash of youthful insight (if that is what it was) is immediately followed, however, by what looks like an anticlimax. Instead of remaining in his Father=s house at Jerusalem, Jesus returns to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph, to resume the normal life of a Jewish boy of his day. The great moment passes. Jesus surprises us.  He would continue to surprise people throughout his earthly life. He remains the master of surprise today.
Even to his closest friends Jesus was always something of a mystery. The gospels speak repeatedly of their failure to understand him. Jesus= friends began really to comprehend who he was, and what his life meant, only after the greatest of all his surprises: the empty tomb of Easter morning.
3.       One of those surprised by Jesus, and unable to understand him, was his own mother. Today=s gospel tells us that she and Joseph Adid not understand@ their son=s words about having to be Ain my Father=s house.@ Starting with the message from the angel Gabriel, that she was to be the mother of God=s Son, Mary received many messages about him: from the shepherds, recounting what the angels had told them; from those mysterious Awise men from the East@; from the prophecies of Simeon and Anna about her infant Son in this same Jerusalem Temple; from her husband=s dream, warning of danger to their child and the need to flee to Egypt.
Despite all these messages, however, Mary would never fully understand her Son. Even for the woman who was closer to Jesus than anyone else on earth, Jesus remained shrouded in mystery. Like every human being before and since, Mary had to walk by faith, not by sight.
We must do the same. On this Sunday after Christmas, the last in 2018, the old year is almost gone. In a few hours we shall cross the threshold of a new year.  What will it bring? We cannot know. Conceivably the year of grace 2019 could bring us some great experience B deeper insight, perhaps, into life=s meaning, or into God=s special purpose for the one life he has given us B something comparable to the insight given to the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple about the meaning and purpose of his life. If so, the experience will pass: for us, as it did for Jesus.
Jesus= brief moment of bright vision in the Temple was followed by the years of hidden labor in the carpenter=s shop at Nazareth. And it was there, in accepting the burdens, duties, and frustrations of a very ordinary and outwardly uninteresting life, that Jesus Aadvanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man,@ as Luke tells us at the end of today=s gospel.
Do you want to advance, as Jesus did? Which of us does not? We advance in age whether we wish it or not. Advancing in wisdom and favor before God and others, however, is not automatic. To do that we must do what Jesus did. We must be willing to let go of life=s great experiences, no matter how beautiful they may be.  We must accept the challenges, the duties, and the burdens which each day brings us. Never look back. Christmas is past. Look forward. The late Archbishop Fulton Sheen used to say: AThere are no plains in the spiritual life; either we are going up, or we are going down.@ He was right. 
Advancing in wisdom and favor before God and others means, above all, taking to heart the words of St. John in our second reading: AGod=s commandment is this: we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he commanded us. Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them. And the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he gave us.@

"THE OTHER DISCIPLE SAW AND BELIEVED."


Homily for Dec. 27th, 2018: 1 John 1:1-4; John 20:1a, 2-8.

          “The other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first.” Why? There are two possible answers to that question. Both are probably true. First, “the other disciple,” as he is called, was probably younger than Peter. That is what most Bible scholars believe. This is the man we celebrate today: St. John, author of our fourth gospel, written, Scripture scholars believe, between 90 and 100 A.D., well after Peter had been crucified in Rome.

In the gospel which bears his name he is identified throughout as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Known therefore as “the Beloved Disciple,” he alone of all the twelve apostles returned to stand beside the Lord’s cross, along with Jesus’ mother Mary and the other faithful women disciples, after the men “all deserted him and fled” at Jesus’ arrest the night before in the garden of Gethsemane (Mk. 14:50).

And it is this special love which gives us the second reason for John’s earlier arrival at the tomb. His love for the Lord was more intense than Peter’s. Once he heard that the tomb was empty, the Beloved Disciple had to get there, to see with his own eyes what had been reported. And it was precisely this special bond of love between him and the Lord which explains the closing verse of our gospel today: “Then the other disciple also went in … And he saw and believed.” John is the only one of the Lord’s apostles who came to belief in the resurrection on the basis of the empty tomb alone. The others assumed that the Lord’s body had been stolen. They came to belief only when they saw risen Lord – and then only after overcoming their initial skepticism.

The American biblical scholar Fr. Raymond Brown, who died in 1998 at age 70, writes that John “was the disciple who was bound closest to Jesus in love [and hence] the quickest to look for him and the first to believe in him.” The Beloved Disciple was also the first to recognize the risen Lord standing on the shore after a night of fruitless fishing on the lake, and to tell Peter, “It is the Lord” (Jn. 21:7).

“Faith is possible for the Beloved Disciple,” Fr. Brown writes, “because he has become very sensitive to Jesus through love. … Love for Jesus gives one insight into his presence.” On this feast of the Beloved Disciple what better gift could we ask of the Lord than an abundant measure of the love that he has for us?

MARY, WOMAN OF FAITH


January1st, 2019: Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. 
Num. 6: 22-27; Gal. 4:4-7, Luke 2:16-21

AIM:  To present Mary as the model of trusting faith in the new year.

 

          A new year! What will it bring? Some great success? Humiliating failure? Unexpected happiness, or sudden loss? Dramatic change, or just more of the same? Illness, suffering, or death? We cannot know what the new year will bring. The one certain thing about the future is its uncertainty. As we venture into the unknown, the Church gives us, on this New Year’s Day, a feast in honor of Mary, the Mother of God. Does this mean that Mary is as important as her Son, equal even with God? Of course not.

          Why does the Church dedicate this first day of the new year in a special way to Mary? Because Mary is, in a unique way, the woman of faith. While only on the threshold of her teens, Mary was asked by God to venture into an unknown future, filled with suffering, the purpose and end of which she could not possibly understand in advance. We think of the angel’s message to Mary, that she was to be the mother of God’s Son, as something wonderful. For May it meant not only joy, but suffering.

          The faith which enabled Mary to accept her role in this mystery was no once-for-all thing. Her faith, like ours, needed to be constantly renewed amid suffering and misunderstanding. Joseph wanted to break their engagement. In the Jerusalem temple Mary heard the aged Simeon prophesy her Son’s rejection and his mother’s suffering. When her twelve-year-old Son told Mary and Joseph, who for three days had thought him lost in Jerusalem and sought him frantically, that he had to be in his Father’s house, Luke tells us that “they did not understand” what he was telling them. (Lk 2:50)

          There would be much more that Mary did not understand and could not understand. In time her Son left home. Often thereafter he seemed to be fulfilling his own command about “hating” parents and other close relatives, and one’s “own life too” (Lk 14:26). At Cana, the site of his first miracle, Jesus appeared to treat his mother with perplexing disrespect. Even at the Last Supper Jesus made no place, it seems, for his mother. Only at Calvary was she permitted to stand beside her now dying Son, along with “the disciple whom Jesus loved” — deliberately left anonymous, so that he can represent the ideal follower of Jesus Christ in every age and place. 

          There on Calvary Mary experienced the full truth of Simeon’s prophecy three decades before: that a sword would pierce her own soul. There she shared the anguish of her dying Son, as he cried: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Calvary was the final and greatest test of Mary’s faith, the place where she had to renew once again, as she had done so often before, the declaration of trusting faith with which she had begun: “Let it be done to me according to your word.” The final glimpse we have of Mary in the New Testament shows her to be still the woman of faith: joining with the friends of Jesus in prayer in the upper room at Jerusalem, before the outpouring of God’s Spirit at Pentecost, as Jesus had promised.  (Cf. Acts 1:24) The Church sets Mary before us today because she, like us, needed faith to journey into the unknown; because her faith can inspire in us the we faith we need for our journey into the unknown; and because Mary’s prayers support us on our pilgrim way. 

          Let me conclude with some words which evoke this trusting faith. They were written in England about a century ago. As you listen, you may wish to imagine them being spoken to you by Mary, the woman of faith, as you cross the threshold of a new year.

          “And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way.’”

[M. Louise Haskins; quoted by King George VI in his Christmas broadcast, 1939]

Monday, December 24, 2018

'YOU WILL BE HATED BY ALL . . ."


Homily for Dec. 26th, 2018: Acts of the Apostles 6:8-10; 7:54-59; Matthew 10:17-22.

          A priest fifteen or perhaps more years ordained, told me recently that he was concerned about the overly rosy image of priesthood being offered to today’s seminarians. The recruitment material sent out by Vocation Directors is full of success stories. All the photos on the websites of today’s seminaries show young men laughing, smiling, and joking. None of this is false. Thousands of priests testify to the joy of serving God and his holy people as a priest. I’m happy to be one of them. The late Chicago priest-sociologist and novelist Fr. Andrew Greely said: “Priests who like being priests are among the happiest men in the world.” And he cited sociological surveys to back up this statement.

          The result of all this happy talk, my priest-friend told me, was that young priests who have a bad day, a bad week, or who encounter rejection or failure, start thinking that perhaps they have chosen the wrong vocation and should abandon priesthood. Jesus never promised his disciples that they would have only joy, success, and happiness. Both of today’s readings are about the price of discipleship. “You will be hated by all because of my name,” Jesus says at the end of today’s gospel. Only after these words warning about the cost of discipleship does he proclaim the good news: “But whoever endures to the end will be saved.”

          Christmas is a feast of joy, of course. But the day after Christmas year reminds us each year that this joy has a price. In a dispute with his enemies, the deacon Stephen, the Church’s first martyr, cries out: “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” Infuriated by the supposed blasphemy in those words, his enemies take Stephen outside the city and stone him to death. Omitted from our first reading are Stephen’s dying words: “Lord, do not lay this sin to their charge.” Jesus too suffered outside the city. Among his Last Words was the prayer: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Speaking a few years ago to a group of priests about the increasing secularization of our society, the late Cardinal George of Chicago said, in what he admitted later was an “overly dramatic fashion”: “I expect to die in bed; my successor will die in prison; and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” Mostly omitted by those who quote these words, is the good news which the cardinal spoke in conclusion: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.”

Sunday, December 23, 2018

"BLESSED BE THE LORD . . ."


Homily for December 24th, 2018: Luke 1:67-79.

          The Old Testament has a number of stories about women unable to conceive who become pregnant through God’s intervention. The one which most resembles the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah, the parents of John the Baptist, is the story of Sarah and Abraham. In both instances the parents are long past the age of childbearing. Three visitors come to Abraham and tell him that when they return next year, Sarah will have a son. From the tent nearby, where she is preparing a meal for the visitors (as required by the oriental law of hospitality for strangers) Sarah overhears the conversation and laughs at the absurdity of an old woman of her age giving birth. Whereupon God asks, “Why did Sarah laugh?” To which Sarah replies, “I didn’t laugh.” And the Lord responds, “Yes, you did.” (Genesis 18:1-15)

          In the case of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, an angel brings the message that his wife will have a son while Zechariah is alone, performing his priestly duty of offering incense in the Temple. The angel also says that the boy will be called John. Zechariah says he cannot believe the news. Because of this unbelief, he loses the power of speech  – and, as we learn later, his hearing as well. Thus he is unable to tell his wife about the angel’s announcement or the child’s name.

          This explains why, when they come to name Elizabeth’s baby, people are astonished to hear his mother say he will be called John; and her husband  -- still unable to speak, or to hear what his wife has just said – writes on a tablet the words Elizabeth has just spoken.

          Immediately Zechariah’s speech and hearing are restored. We might expect a conversation between him and Elizabeth about how they had agreed on the same name. Instead Zechariah immediately breaks out in the hymn of praise that we have just heard, called ever since the Benedictus, because that is the first word of the hymn in Latin.

          What does all this tell us? It says that in our relationship with God praise and thanksgiving come first. We come to Mass first of all to worship. We come, that is, not to get but to give. And all experience shows that those who give most generous also receive most abundantly.