THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

Homily for December 28^th, 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 seven 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 leaped to their feet 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.

JAN. 1st: SOLEMNITY OF MARY

NOT SLAVES BUT SONS

January 1^st, 2020: Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21.

AIM: To help the hearers see that salvation is a free gift, not a reward.

 

Few words strike such a sensitive nerve today as the term “liberation.”  For the last half-century liberation from colonial rule has been the central concern of almost all Third World nations. In our country we have been through black liberation. We are still hearing about women’s liberation. And until recent years there was much talk about something called “liberation theology.”

Liberation is Paul’s theme in today’s second reading. The purpose of Jesus’ life, Paul writes, was “to deliver from the law those who wee subjected to it, so that we might receive our status as adopted sons.” (If Paul were writing today, he would add, “and daughters.”) Because of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, Paul says, “you are no longer a slave but a son!”

Christ has liberated us from what Paul called slavery to the law: the Ten Commandments plus the more than six hundred interpretations of them which the rabbis had developed in Paul’s day. Paul found this legal system enslaving because it seemed to lay down conditions which we must first fulfill before God would love him and bless us. And how could he -- or anyone -- ever be sure he had done enough? Speaking for himself, Paul said he knew he had not done enough: “The good I want to do I fail to do. But what I do is the wrong which is against my will” (Rom. 7:19). Which of us could not say the same?

The heart of the gospel, for Paul, is the good news that God’s love is not reserved for those who prove they deserve it by keeping all of God’s law. The idea that God only loves those who earn his love constituted “slavery” for Paul. Jesus had liberated us from this slavery, Paul taught, by making us his sisters and brothers, daughters and sons of his heavenly Father and ours. “You are no longer a slave but a son; and the fact that you are a son makes you an heir, God, by God’s design.” Sons and daughters do not have to earn their inheritance. It is theirs by right.

It is good to be reminded of this as we cross the threshold of a new year. The basis of our relationship with God is not what we do for him, but what God has already done for us -- not as a reward for services rendered, but simply out of love.  This reminder is especially important, because it cuts clean across the messages society constantly sends us.

Society today tells us that we get ahead by achievement. In school teachers classify their students as achievers or non-achievers; later as under-achievers and over-achievers. Society’s highest rewards -- wealth, power, and fame -- go to super-achievers. The important thing in life, we are constantly told, is to achieve as much as we possibly can.

For many this unceasing drive for achievement is a modern form of the “slavery” that Paul writes about in our second reading. God alone knows how much tension, and how many breakdowns in physical and mental health, are caused by people feeling pressured to ever higher levels of achievement.

How fitting, therefore, that the Church places before us, as we begin a new year, the figure of a woman who is known not for what she achieved, but for what she received. “Mary treasured all these things,” the gospel tells us, “and reflected on them in her heart.” None of the things she treasured and reflected on in her heart were things she had done for God. They were all things God had done for her:

--       The visit of the angel with his overwhelming news.

--       The beautiful words of her cousin, Elizabeth: “The moment your greeting sounded in my ears, the baby stirred in my womb for joy.” (Lk 1:44)

--       The visit of the shepherds recounting the angels’ message to them.

--       And later the arrival of those mysterious “wise men from the east” with their remarkable tale of following a star. (Mt 2:2)

How much of that was Mary’s achievement? None of it! It was all God’s gift, sheer gift. Mary stands at the gate of the New Year as the model of Christian discipleship, the one who was always totally open to God’s gifts, and to his action in her and through her.

Today’s feast gives us the best of all New Year’s resolutions: to live as Mary did. Don’t worry or fret about what you must do for God. Be open instead, as Mary was, to what God wants to do for you -- and through you for others. Then whatever you do for God will be a response to him: your attempt to thank our loving heavenly Father who loves us with the tenderness and passion of a mother, and whose gifts to us always exceed by far all we can ever deserve or even desire.

As you cross the threshold of this New Year, keep in your heart, as Mary did, all that God has done for you in your life up to this day: his unbelievable patience with you; his constant forgiveness of your sins; the preservation of your life amid so many dangers (some known to you, others known only to God).  Reflect on all these things, as Mary did.

If you do that -- even if you just try to do that -- then the year that is just a few hours old right now will be what deep in our hearts, we all hope and pray it will be: a truly happy New Year.

"THE OTHER DISCIPLE SAW, AND BELIEVED."

St John, the Evangelist: Dec. 27^th, 2019: 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 passionate 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?

"YOU WILL BE HATED BY ALL."

Homily for Dec. 26^th, 2019: Acts of the Apostles 6:8-10; 7:54-59; Mt. 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. You’re looking at one of them right now. 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 later admitted 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.”

FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY

“THE CHILD GREW ...”

Dec. 29th: Feast of the Holy Family. Luke 2:22-40.

AIM: To show that Jesus, like us, learned to love in childhood by being loved; and

to encourage the hearers to share their love with others.

 

What do we know of Jesus’ childhood and youth? Virtually nothing.  Matthew records the flight of the holy family into Egypt. Luke gives us the story of the infant Jesus’ presentation in the Jerusalem Temple, which we have just heard in the gospel. And he tells us also that at age twelve Jesus stayed behind in the Temple after Mary and Joseph had started home, thinking their son was in the group with them. Otherwise the record is blank. No wonder that the first three decades of Jesus’ life are called “the hidden years.”

The obscurity surrounding Jesus’ infancy and youth makes the concluding words of today’s gospel especially precious: “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” Jesus’ slow growth from infancy to manhood shows how completely he who was God’s Son entered into our human condition.

God could have sent his Son into the world fully mature, in a way so dramatic as to compel everyone’s attention. Instead Jesus made his entrance, like every one of us: quietly, inconspicuously. Like us, Jesus passed through the weakness and vulnerability of infancy; through childhood, adolescence, and early manhood. At each stage Jesus possessed the perfection proper to that age. He was the perfect baby, the perfect boy, the perfect adolescent, the perfect young man.  There was, however, real growth: physical, mental, and also spiritual.

That growth took place in the context of a family: a family like any other, yet also unlike any other. Luke introduces them at the beginning of today’s gospel, yet they speak no word throughout. Their silence is another aspect of those “hidden years.”  

Were those years really so hidden, however? Even if we have no record of them, it is not difficult to reconstruct from our knowledge of Jesus’ public ministry something of what they must have been like. The early nineteenth century German novelist Jean Paul Richter writes: “What a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.” Many of Jesus’ familiar sayings surely reflect the atmosphere of simple trust in God, and undivided loyalty to him, which surrounded Jesus from his birth. It is fanciful to imagine Jesus first hearing in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth such sayings as these?

“Do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself.  Each day has troubles enough of its own.” (Mt 6:34)

“The one who endures to the end will be saved.” (Mt 24:13;10:22, Mk 13:13)

“The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” (Mt 19:30, 20:16, Mk 10:31, Lk 13:30)

Is it conceivable that any shoddy work came out of that carpenter’s shop? That its customers were kept waiting for things beyond the time they were promised?

The late Father Theodore Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame University and one of our country’s great priests, liked to say: “The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” Where did Jesus got his unsurpassed capacity to love even outcasts, lepers, beggars, and hardened criminals, if not from Joseph and Mary?  

A film I saw years ago on natural childbirth showed more clearly than many words the effect of a mother’s love even in the first moments after birth. As the baby is placed for the first time in the mother’s arms, she cries out spontaneously: “O you beautiful baby! I love you already.” That is how each one of us learned to love: not from formal instruction or from books, but simply by being loved. 

Parents don’t wait to love their children until the little ones have done something to deserve parental love. Indeed, before birth, and for months thereafter children are so burdensome, to their mothers especially, that there is every reason why they should not be loved. Parents love their children nonetheless. And if they are good parents, they don’t stop loving when their children disappoint them, changing from the little angels they admired in the crib into grown up sinners like Mom and Dad. It is this experience of unmerited and unconditional love that makes it possible for us, as we grow up, to love others in return. Jesus too learned to love in that way. He learned about God’s love from experiencing the human love of Mary and Joseph.     

Do you see now why the Church gives us, on this first Sunday after Christmas, a feast in honor of the Holy Family? By recalling the atmosphere of love that surrounded Jesus from birth, and molded him in that long process of human growth referred to in the closing words of today’s gospel, we are reminded that this is the way each of us grew to maturity. This is how we learned to love, if we have learned at all. This is how we learned how much, and how unconditionally, God loves us.

Here is what one of our modern world’s great lovers, Mother Teresa, said about loving and being loved: “The greatest suffering today is being lonely, being unwanted, being unloved; just having no one, having forgotten what it is like to have the human touch, human love; what it is to be wanted, what it is to be loved; what it is to have your own people. The greatest diseases are not leprosy, tuberculosis, or cancer. A much greater disease is to be unwanted, to be unloved.”

On this Feast of the Holy Family, God is asking each one of us, whom he has already made members of his family in baptism, and whom he loves totally and unconditionally, to be his agents in loving the unloved, the unwanted, the unlovable. Here at his holy table Jesus Christ, God’s Son, fills us brim full with his love — so that we can go forth from here to share that love with other people: His brothers and sisters, and ours too.

"BLESSED BE THE LORD."

Homily for December 24^th, 2019: 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 to the father while he is performing his priestly duty of offering incense in the Temple. His aged wife, Elizabeth, will have a son. The angel also says that the boy will be called John. Zechariah is unable to 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 even 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 generously also receive most abundantly.

"HE WILL BE CALLED JOHN."

Homily for December 23^rd, 2015: Luke 1:57-66.

          At the circumcision of John the Baptist, eight days after his birth, “they were going to call him Zechariah after his father,” Luke writes. Scholars tells us that in New Testament times a child’s naming was the right of the father. The naming of Mary’s Son was an exception: he had no human father. That was why the angel Gabriel told Mary in advance, “You will give him the name Jesus.”

          John’s father Zechariah had lost his power of speech when he failed to believe the angel’s message to him that his wife, though long past childbearing age, would have a son, “whom you shall name John” (Lk 1:13). He had thus been unable to tell Elizabeth that the angel had already disclosed the name of the son she would bear. We now learn that Zechariah is not only mute but deaf. So he cannot hear his wife saying: “He will be called John.”

          To get confirmation of the name, the bystanders must question the deaf father by writing him a note. Imagine the astonishment when he confirms the name already chosen by his wife by writing: “John is his name.”

          “Immediately his mouth was opened,” Luke tells us, “his tongue freed, and he spoke, blessing God.” Those final words are significant. With his speech restored, Zechariah speaks first of all to the Lord God, blessing and thanking him for the humanly impossible gift he and his wife have received. “Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel because he has visited and ransomed his people.” The Latin word for “blessed” is benedictus. So the canticle or hymn which Zechariah speaks is known by Catholics as the Benedictus. The Church incorporates Zechariah’s words into her daily public prayer, in the Office of Lauds or Morning Prayer.

Happy are we, if we do the same: by praising and thanking God for the blessings he has already bestowed on us, even before we start asking for fresh blessings.