"DO NOT SWEAR AT ALL."

June 15^th, 2019: Matthew 5:33-37.

          The Ten Commandments do not deal directly with oaths and swearing except to say, “you shall not bear false witness,” and “you shall not take the name of the name of the Lord, your God, in vain.” Jesus goes farther in today’s gospel, when he says, still speaking not as an interpreter of God’s law, but as himself the law-giver: “I say to you, do not swear at all.”

He goes on, then, to give examples of what he has just forbidden. Do not swear, he says, by heaven, by the earth, by the holy city Jerusalem, or by your head. The thought behind this list is that all these things are made by God, so swearing by them is really a way of swearing by God without actually pronouncing his name. Such subterfuges are unworthy of those whose lives are centered on God.

“Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,” Jesus says, “and your ‘No’ mean No.’” The person of integrity has no need to reinforce his Yes or No with an oath. When a man and woman come into God’s house to marry, there are no oaths. The priest or deacon who is presiding at the marriage asks the man simply: “John, do you take this woman to be your wedded wife?” He asks the woman, “Mary do you take this man to be your wedded husband?” Each of them answers, “I do.” With those simple questions and answers, the marriage bond is established. It is mutual consent, given without reservation or compulsion, which makes the marriage.

Similarly with a man being ordained as priest or bishop. Again, there are no oaths. The Church requires only that the candidate answer affirmatively to a number of questions about the duties of the office he is assuming. Once these are given, the prayer for the descent of the Holy Spirit, and the laying on of hands by the ordaining bishop follow.

In a beautiful passage in his second Letter to the Corinthians Paul tells us that Jesus is himself Yes personified. Here’s what Paul writes: “The language in which we address you is not an ambiguous blend of Yes and No. The Son of God, Christ Jesus, proclaimed among you by us ... was never a blend of Yes and No. With him it was, and is, Yes. He is the Yes pronounced upon God’s promises, every one of them.” (2 Cor.1, 18ff: New English Bible) To which we joyfully say: “Thanks be to God!”

 

"YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY."

Homily for June 14^th, 2019: Matthew 5:27-32.

          “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’” Again, as yesterday, we hear Jesus using the passive (“it was said”) as a way to avoid speaking the name of God, which for Jews was forbidden. Scholars call this a “theological passive:” a way of saying, “God said,” without actually speaking God’s name. 

          The next sentence takes our breath away – or would, if we were hearing it for the first time. “But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in heart.” If the commandment really means that, which of us can claim to be wholly innocent? Priests often have to deal in the confessional, or in spiritual counseling, with people who are upset, even in anguish, over these words of Jesus. When the priest explains that lustful thoughts are only temptations, until we consent to them, deliberately invite them in, and dwell on them; and that a thousand temptations do not make a single sin, people with tender or scrupulous consciences ask: “But how do I know if I have consented to such thoughts?”

          The only honest answer to that question is: “We don’t know, and we can’t know. As long as we are trying to turn away from lustful thoughts, turning instead to God and others, we’re all right. The Lord doesn’t want us to torment ourselves with worry. He is not a strict policeman just waiting to catch us doing or thinking something bad. God is first, last, and always, a God of mercy.”

          A seminarian approaching ordination to the priesthood told the priest who had been nourishing the young man’s vocation all through seminary: “I have difficulties with celibacy.” The priest’s response: “Well, brother, join the club. If celibacy were easy, it wouldn’t be what it is meant to be: a sacrifice. So don’t be discouraged. Never, ever give up. And when you stumble or fall, as most of us do from time to time, go to confession.”

          Then the priest gave the young man some advice which is good not just for seminarians and priests, but for all of us:  “Remember what our wonderful Pope Francis never tires of telling us: ‘God never gets tired of forgiving us. It is we who grow tired of asking for forgiveness.’”

 

     

JESUS, THE LAW-GIVER

Homily for June 13^th, 2019. Matthew 5:20-26.

Today’s gospel continues our reading of the Sermon on the Mount, which started last Monday. Speaking about the moral law, based on the Ten Commandments, Jesus shows himself to be not an interpreter of the law, but himself the law-giver. Because perfect observance of all ten Commandments eludes us, interpreters prior to Jesus made exceptions to avoid an overly rigid, literal interpretation. Jesus regards such traditional interpretation not as false, but as inadequate.

He starts with the Commandment, “You shall not kill.” Note how he proceeds: “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors.” The one who had said that was, of course, God. As a pious Jew, Jesus was unwilling to speak the sacred name of God. So he uses the passive: not “God said,” but “it was said.” His Jewish hearers understood that what he really meant was: “God said.”

Jesus then shifts the ground from the act of killing to the emotion that precedes and causes it: anger. With the words, “But I say to you,” Jesus is speaking as only the giver of the law can speak. Modern psychology says that suppressed and unacknowledged emotions can cause neuroses and other mental illnesses. A modern understanding of Jesus’ teaching, therefore, is that we should acknowledge anger, but not act it out. Instead Jesus counsels us to seek reconciliation.

All Israel’s prophets had taught that there could be no true worship without justice. So Jesus gives a concrete example. “If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” Then he gives a kind of “worst case scenario,” describing the possibly disastrous consequences of failing to reconcile. This too has a modern parallel in the example of the wise lawyer who advises his client to “settle out of court.”   

Jesus will go on, in tomorrow’s gospel reading, to deal with the commandment prohibiting adultery. There he sets the bar so high that few indeed can clear it. He thus makes clear that no one has a claim, in strict justice, to salvation. We cannot stand before God  appealing to our good conduct record. Instead we pray, as we do at the start of every Mass, “Lord, have mercy.”

"FULFILLING THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS"

Homily for June 12^th, 2019: Matthew 5: 17-19.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets,” Jesus says. “I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” We sometimes hear that the Old Testament presents a God of law, the New Testament a God of love. That’s not true. While law is indeed central in the Old Testament, it presents God=s law as an expression of his love B a gift granted in a special measure to his chosen people. We read in Deuteronomy, for instance, about God telling his people to be careful to observe his commandments, “for thus you will give evidence of your wisdom and intelligence to the nations, who will hear of all these statutes and say, ‘This nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.’ … Or what great nation has statues and decrees that are as just as this whole law which I am settling before you this day.” (Deut. 4:6-8)

While the New Testament does emphasize God=s love, almost the whole of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, from which the gospel readings this week and next are taken, consists of examples and stories of how God’s law is lived out in daily life. And at the Last Supper he gives his apostles Aa new commandment: “Love one another@ (John 13:34). Both parts of the Bible proclaim the same God. If God=s self-disclosure is fuller in the New Testament, this is because in it God comes to us in person, through his Son. As we read in the opening verse of the letter to the Hebrews: AIn times past, God spoke in fragmentary and varied ways to our fathers through the prophets; in this, the final age, he has spoken to us through his Son ...@

Human laws command us to respect the rights of others. But I can respect your rights without having any human contact with you. Hence the enormous amount of loneliness in our society. Mother Teresa called loneliness Athe worst disease of modern times.@  There is only one cure for loneliness: love. We come here to receive God’s love: a free gift, not a reward for services rendered. The One who gives us this gift does so under one strict condition: that we share his love with others.

TRAVEL LIGHT

Homily for June 11^th, 2019: Matthew 10:7-1.

“Do not take gold or silver or copper for your belts; no sack for the journey, or a second tunic,  or sandals, or walking stick,” Jesus tells the Twelve as he sends them out to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick. He wants those whom he commissions as his messengers to travel light. They are to depend not on material resources, but on the Lord alone.

          Jesus’ words are especially relevant today. All over the world, the forces hostile to the Church are rising. In our own country the government is trying to impose on Catholic organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, requirements which we cannot, in conscience, accept. We are being asked, for instance, to pay for sterilization and abortion. In Ireland, unlike the United States a historically Catholic country, there is even an attempt to pass a law which would compel priests, in certain instances, to violate the seal of the confessional. TV entertainers air gross jokes about Catholic priests which they would not dare make about Muslim imams or Jewish rabbis. And the media show little interest in reporting studies which show that Christians are the Number One target of religious persecution in the world today.

          We rightly lament this tide of anti-Christian and anti-Catholic sentiment. But it has a positive side as well. Whenever in its two-thousand-year history, the Church has been favored by worldly powers, whether financially or in other ways, it has grown spiritually flabby and weak. The Church is always at her best in times of persecution. When persecution is raging it is difficult, mostly impossible, to see this. Things become clear only when we look back. So let’s look back.

In recent centuries the most violent attack on the Church came in the French Revolution, which started in 1789 and lasted more than a decade. Thousand of priests were murdered under the guillotine. Most of the French bishops fled the country. Those who remained had to accept restrictions on their ministry which they justified on the plea that there was to other way to continue offering the sacraments to God’s people. 

As the Church moved into the nineteenth century, however, there was an explosion of religious vocations in France, and the foundation of an unprecedented number of new religious orders, for both men and women.

          When we grow discouraged at the hostile forces confronting us, we need to remember: God can bring good out of evil – and he does, time after time!

TRINITY SUNDAY

June 17th, 2019:

“THE LOVE OF GOD HAS BEEN POURED OUT INTO OUR HEARTS”

Trinity Sunday C. Romans 5:1-5.

AIM: To explain the Trinity in terms of love.

          The Old Testament book of Job has a question which preachers the world over ask themselves on this Trinity Sunday, when they must speak about the One whom no words can properly describe, and whom the human mind can never fully grasp. “Can you fathom the mystery of God, can you fathom the perfection of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven ... it is deeper than [the nether world]; you can know nothing” (11:7f, NEB].

          Confronted with something beyond our understanding, it is a sound principle to start with what we do understand. For many people my age computers are a mystery. The first encounter with one produces confusion and discouragement.  After considerable frustration, we turn to something we think we may understand.  ‘When all else fails, read the directions.’  

          Where can we turn, however, to penetrate the infinitely greater mystery of God? What better starting place than the one we know best: our daily experience of our own human nature? Here is what Pope Saint John Paul II, wrote about the human experience in the first encyclical of his pontificate, way back in 1979: “We cannot live without love. We remain beings incomprehensible to ourselves, our lives are senseless, if love is not revealed to us, if we do not encounter love, if we do not experience it and make it our own, if we do not participate intimately in it.” (Redemptor hominis, 10)

          This insight, that life is unsupportable without love, is as old as the creation stories in Genesis. In the second one God says, after creating man: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will provide a partner for him” (Gen. 2:18). The creation of woman follows. God fashions her from the man’s rib – a way of showing that the two sexes were made to complement and complete each other. The first creation story in Genesis says that this complementarity of male and female reflects the nature of God himself. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness ...’ So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (1:26f).

          If we are made in God’s image; and if we are created male and female with the instinct to unite in love to create other human beings, then this suggests that there is something in God that corresponds to our human experience of love and the family. When we look at Jesus Christ, we see this confirmed.

          Though born into a human family, Jesus had no earthly father. He constantly referred to God as “my Father.” Jesus lived a life of intimate union with his heavenly Father. He prepared for his public ministry by a prolonged period of prayer and fasting. Though he was always available to people in need, Jesus spent whole nights in prayer. He said, “My Father and are one” (John 10:30). He spoke repeatedly of the mutual love between the Father and himself (John 3:35, 5:20, 10:17, 15:9). Jesus could even say, “I have life because of the Father” (John 6:57).  And he told his friends, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

          Pondering this evidence, Christians came to realize even before the last New Testament book had been written that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). To express this truth, theologians in time developed the doctrine of the Holy Trinity: that the God who is one is also in some mysterious way three. The Father loves the Son; and the Son loves the Father; each giving himself to the other in a continual torrent of love who is the Holy Spirit – “God’s passion for himself,” as the German Jesuit Alfred Delp wrote before giving his life for Christ on February 2^nd, 1945, in the closing weeks of Adolf Hitler’s evil tyranny.

          If we want to know what God is like, therefore, a good starting point is our experience of love. St. John goes so far as to write: “The unloving know nothing of God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). We human beings were never intended, either by God’s design or by anything in our nature, to live in isolation or estrangement from one another.  God did not create us for hatred, for violence, for racism, for aloneness, or anonymity. He made us to develop and to enjoy deep and intense relationships of love with one another. Each of us was born into a family. Even those who do not marry and form a family of their own are still called to form communities of love, large and small, with our sisters and brothers.  When I was told sixteen years ago that, because of my age, I must retire, I asked at once to remain in the parish I had then served for almost 22 years. The people I served and loved had become my family.    

          During his life on earth Jesus modeled for us this life of love, family, and community. We see this in his intense union with his heavenly Father. And though unmarried, Jesus also had an earthly family: his disciples, women as well as men, and especially the inner circle of the twelve apostles. Their loving fellowship reached its climax at the Last Supper, when Jesus performed for them the menial task of washing the apostles’ feet, and told them that what he had done for them, they in turn must do for one another.

          In today’s second reading Paul tell us: “The love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” The ability to love God and others which Paul refers to there is not bestowed on us simply to give us a warm feeling inside. God’s love is poured out into our hearts so that the image of God may be perfected in us; so that by becoming more divine, we may also become more human. How sad when people refuse this divine gift of love, or fail to develop it. The Spanish philosopher-poet Miguel de Unamumo writes: “It is sad not to be loved. But it is much sadder not to be able to love.”  

          The French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin took this thought a step farther when he wrote: “Some day, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love; and then, for the second time, man will have discovered fire.” On this Trinity Sunday, the feast of God’s love – exchanged between Father and Son through the Holy Spirit, and poured out through this same Spirit into our hearts – let us pray for this divine fire, in the words of an ancient Catholic hymn.  

          O Holy Spirit, Lord of grace / Eternal source of love,

          Inflame, we pray, our inmost hearts / With fire from heaven above. 

          As thou dost join with holiest bonds / the Father and the Son,

          So fill thy saints with mutual love / and link [our] hearts in one. 

 

                     (O fons amoris, Spiritus, C. Coffin, 1676-1749; translated by J. Chandler)

"BEHOLD YOUR MOTHER"

Homily for June 10^th, 2019: John 19:25-27.

Decades ago it was common on Good Friday to preach seven sermons based on Jesus= seven last words from the cross. I preached those sermons myself, over half a century ago. The AThree Hours= Agony,@ as it was often called, started at noon and ended at three, traditionally the hour of Jesus= death, with the church bell tolling 33 times, once for each year of Jesus= earthly life. Interspersed between each sermon or meditation was a hymn and one or more prayers, allowing worshipers who could not remain for the full three hours opportunities to come and go. 

We have just heard the third of Jesus’ seven last words: AWoman, behold your son; son, behold your mother.@ The second half of this word from the cross is addressed to Athe disciple whom Jesus loved,@ as he is always called in the Fourth Gospel -- deliberately left anonymous, many commentators believe, so that he can stand for all those whom Jesus loves, ourselves included. It is because of this third word from the cross that we call Mary Aour blessed Mother.@

          We do not pray to Mary B or to any of the saints B in the same way we pray to God. We ask Mary and the other saints to pray for us. If it is right to ask our earthly friends to pray for us, how much more fitting to ask the prayers of our heavenly friends, especially of Mary, given to us by her dying son as our spiritual mother. The Catechism recommends such prayer in the following words: “Because of Mary’s singular cooperation with the action of the Holy Spirit, the Church loves to pray in communion with the Virgin Mary, to magnify with her the great things the Lord has done for her, and to entrust supplications and praises to her.” (No. 2682)

          As the Church bids us think today of Mary as Mother of the Church, we pray, once again, the familiar and well loved words: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.”