"ARISE, MY BELOVED, MY BEAUTIFUL ONE, AND COME!"

Homily for December 21^st, 2013: Song of Songs 2:8-14.  

       “Hark, my lover – here he comes springing across mountains, leaping across hills … My lover speaks, he says to me, ‘Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come!’”

       These words from our first reading come from a short book called The Song of Songs. It is a collection of love poems portraying, in the form of an allegory, the love between the soul and God. In the passage we have just heard the human lover calls out to God, the Beloved. Christians have always understood the Beloved to be a figure for Jesus – which is why the Church gives us this passage, just four days before Christmas. The one calling out, “Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come,” is Jesus. His love for us is passionate. He longs for us to be close to him always.

       One of the great interpreters of this book is the twelfth century French monk, St. Bernard. He begins his commentary on the Song of Songs with the book’s opening words, addressed by the soul to God: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The kiss, Bernard explains, is the Holy Spirit, who binds Father and Son together in love. The kiss may also be understood, however, as Jesus Christ, who with his kiss unites divinity and humanity. Since we are sinners, we cannot raise ourselves all at once to the Lord’s mouth. We must first fall at his feet, kissing his feet in repentance. Then, as the Lord’s stretches out to grasp and steady us as we rise, we kiss his hands. “And finally,” Bernard says, “when we shall have obtained these favors through many prayers and tears, we humbly dare to raise our mouth to his mouth .... not merely to gaze upon it but – I say this with fear and trembling – to receive his kiss. ... And whoever is joined to him in a holy kiss becomes, at his good pleasure, one spirit with him.”  

               We don’t read the Bible like that today. Some people still do, however. Let me tell you about one of them, a Jewish psychiatrist before he was baptized at age 27 and became a Trappist monk at St. Joseph’s Abbey in western Massachusetts, where he died in November 2006 at the age of 97. A true son of St. Bernard, Fr. Raphael Simon (his monastic name), left us these beautiful lines:

 “To fall in love with God is the greatest of all romances.

            To seek him, the greatest human adventure.

               To find him, the highest human achievement.”                           

"THE HOLY SPIRIT WILL COME UPON YOU"

Homily for December 20^th, 2013: Luke 1:26-36.  

          Mary “was greatly troubled” we have just heard in the gospel. Though Bible scholars think she was only twelve years old, not an usual age for girls to marry in Bible times, she sensed at once that the being who confronted her was no ordinary human being. To reassure her, the angel speaks words that Mary’s son will say often three decades later: “Do not be afraid.” It was these words which led Pope Francis to say, in a recent sermon about the sacrament of penance: “Confessing our sins is not going to a psychiatrist or to a torture chamber: It’s saying to the Lord, ‘Lord, I am a sinner,’ but saying it through the brother [a priest], because this says it concretely. ‘I am sinner because of this, that and the other thing.’”

          Mary’s mind is further troubled when she hears from the angel that she is to have a Son. “How can this be?” she asks. Though she has already agreed to marry Joseph, their marriage is still in the future. What then did she understand about the angel’s message?

          Well, she understood at least this: that in a little village where gossip was rife and everyone knew everyone else’s business, she was to be an unmarried mother. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” the angel tells her. The words recall what we read about the boy David being anointed by the prophet Samuel to be king over Israel, when David was probably no older than Mary. “From that day on,” the Bible says, “the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David” (1 Sam. 16:38).

          The power of God’s Spirit, “overshadowing her,” in the angel’s words, enables Mary without hesitation to say yes to the disturbing news that she has just heard. Without asking for any further clarification, she responds simply: “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” With those words Mary put herself without reserve at the disposal of God himself.

          We pray in this Mass that the overshadowing of God's Holy Spirit will enable us to say our yes to God, in good times, but also in bad, when the way ahead looks difficult, dark, lonely -- yes, even impossible. 

A VOICE FOR THE WORD

Homily for December 19^th, 2013: Judges 13:2-7, 24-25a; Luke 1:5-15.

          When the angel Gabriel visited the young Jewish teenager, Mary, to tell her that God wanted her to be the mother of his Son, Mary asked, quite naturally, how such a thing could be possible. To which the angel responded: “Nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).

          Both of our readings today show God doing the impossible. In today’s first reading, the recipient of a gift impossible for anyone but God is identified simply as “the wife of Manoah.” The Bible nowhere gives her name. She is unable to conceive a child. Numerous contemporary articles and books by unfruitful wives testify eloquently to the grief experienced by women whose dreams of motherhood remain unfulfilled.  Manoah’s wife is visited by an angel who tells her that she will have a son who will free his people from their enemies.

          The woman in today’s gospel reading is named: Elizabeth, wife of the Jewish priest Zechariah. Both are far beyond childbearing age. This time the angel bringing the news that she will conceive and bear a son appears not to Elizabeth but to her husband. Zechariah is unable to believe that such a thing is possible. In consequence, the angel tells him, he will lose the power of speech until the promised boy is born. 

          In one of his sermons (293:1-3) St. Augustine uses a play on the two Latin words vox (voice) and verbum (word) to explain the reason for this. Zechariah’s son, John the Baptist, was called, Augustine says, to be a voice: vox – for the word, verbum: Jesus, God’s personal utterance and communication to us. While still in his mother’s womb, John was voice was silent. Only when John, the voice for the Word, was born, was his father’s power of speech restored.

In a different but similar way, we too are called to be voices for God’s Son, the Word: at least by the witness of our lives. St. Francis of Assisi has said it best: 
“Preach always. If necessary, use words.”

GOD WITH US

Fourth Sunday in Advent 4, Year A - Mt. 1:18-24.

AIM: To help the hearers recognize God=s presence in their lives today.

A Sunday school teacher told a class of young children the Christmas story of the shepherds and the Wise Men. At the end she asked them: AWho do you think was the first to know about the birth of Jesus?@

A girl=s hand shot up: AMary,@ she answered.    

Well, sure. How could anyone miss that? That=s just the kind of thing, however, that we adults often do miss. We=re looking for more complicated answers. Lacking the simplicity of young children, we associate God with things that are dramatic and spectacular, like the choir of angels appearing to the shepherds, and the star which guided the Wise Men to Bethlehem. It=s easy for us to miss God=s presence and action in something as ordinary as pregnancy and birth. 

That explains why so many of Jesus= own people failed to recognize him as their long awaited Messiah. The popular expectation was that the Messiah would come dramatically, and unexpectedly. Jesus= people had a saying: AThree things come wholly unexpected: the Messiah, a godsend, and a scorpion.@ No one expected God=s anointed servant to come as a normal nursing baby born to a young girl in a small village. People expected him to drop unexpected from the sky, full-grown in his royal regalia and power. What more fitting landing place for the Messiah than the Temple mount in the holy city of Jerusalem, venerated by  Jesus= people as the earthly dwelling place of God? This helps us understand why one way the devil tempted Jesus during his forty days= fast in the wilderness was by suggesting that he jump down from a pinnacle of the Temple.

How could people raised on such expectations reconcile them with this man Jesus who been born and raised in their midst? AWe know where this man is from,@ they say in John=s gospel. ABut when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.@ (Jn 7:27) Matthew reports a similar reaction to Jesus. When Jesus returned to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and taught in the synagogue there, the people asked: AIsn=t this the carpenter=s son? ... Where did he get all this? They found him altogether too much for them.@  (Mt 13:55f)   

It is easy to criticize Jesus= contemporaries for failing to recognize him. But are we really more clear sighted than they were? When God first came to us in human form he did so not dramatically on the clouds of heaven, but through the nine months= pregnancy of a simple country girl, and through thirty years of the normal human process of growth, infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. That tells us something C or at least it should. It tells us that God comes to us today as he did then: in ways we would never expect. More C God comes to us, and is with us, when we think he=s not there at all. 

In the days after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York twelve years ago, one of the television networks showed a group of people in New Jersey who had lost loved ones talking about that terrible day. AWhere was God?@ one man complained. AGod wasn=t there.@ Many people said the same. The complaint is understandable. But it is wrong. It assumes that God is there to protect us from pain and suffering, or at least from disaster and tragedy. Often God does protect us. But not always. Our Christian and Catholic faith promises us something different. It gives us the promise, and the assurance, not that God will always protect us, but that God is with us in pain and suffering, and especially amid disaster and tragedy.

AWhere was God on September eleventh, 2001?@ people ask. God was there in the countless acts of heroism, large and small, which were so widely reported in the days and weeks after the attack, and which still remain reason for gratitude, admiration, and wonder.  

God comes to us in more ordinary ways too C not only when tragedy strikes. He comes to us, again and again, in the normal events of everyday life, in people we know and love C but also in those we dislike and find difficult, sometimes impossible. 

God came to me almost sixty ago through a child=s voice on the other side of the confessional screen saying: AI stamp my foot at my mother and say No.@ That hit me hard. That little one is so sorry for that small sin, I thought. My own sins are worse B and I=m not that sorry. I believe that the Lord sent that child into my confessional to teach me a lesson. I never knew that child’s name. He or she is probably a grandparent now. But I=ve never forgotten what that little one taught me.

The Lord came to me more recently, and spoke to me, in the words of a woman, a daily communicant, who said to me after many years of married life: AFather, when you walk up to the altar on your wedding day, you don=t see the Stations of the Cross.@ Preaching recently to a group of men preparing for ordination as permanent deacons, and to their wives, I quoted those words. As I did so I could see heads nodding all over the chapel.   

An African proverb says: AListen, and you will hear the footsteps of the ants.@ God=s coming to us is often as insignificant as the footsteps of ants. God is coming to each one of us, right now. He is knocking on the door of our hearts. He leaves it to us whether we open the door. How often we have refused to do so, trying to keep God at a distance because we fear the demands he will make on us. Yet God continues to come to us, and to knock. He never breaks in. He waits for us to open the door. As long as life on this earth lasts, God will never take No as our final answer.

Refusing to open the door means shutting out of our lives the One who alone can give our lives meaning; who offers us the strength to surmount suffering; the One who alone can give us fulfillment, happiness, and peace.  Keeping the door of our hearts shut to God means missing out on the greatest chance we shall ever be offered; failing to appear for our personal rendezvous with destiny.

Opening the door to God, letting him into our lives, means embarking on life=s greatest adventure. This is the most worthwhile thing we can do with our lives C at bottom the only thing worth doing. When we open the door to God, when we say our Yes to him, we place ourselves on the side of the simple Jewish girl whom we encounter in today=s gospel. When she opened the door to God and said her Yes to him, she was able to speak words that would be the height of arrogant conceit were it not for one thing: they were true:

AAll generations shall call me blessed.@ (Lk 1:48)

JOSEPH DECIDED TO DIVORCE HER QUIETLY

Homily for December 18^th, 2013: Matthew 1:18-25.

Luke’s gospel tells us that when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to tell her that God wanted her to be the mother of God’s son, Gabriel also told her that Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, though far beyond child-bearing age, was also, as they say in England, “in a family way” – six months pregnant, in fact. With typical generosity, Mary decided to go and visit Elizabeth. She couldn’t start right away. As I’ve told you so often, it was a man’s world. A woman, especially a young teenager like Mary, could not travel alone. She must have at least one chaperone.

Organizing that took time. Since the whole purpose of the visit was to help with the birth of Elizabeth’s son, Mary was away from home for some months. By the time she got back to Nazareth, she was visibly pregnant. A film I saw a few years ago – I think it was called The Birth of the Messiah – shows Mary’s encounter with Joseph after her months’ long absence. The look on his face is unforgettable.

          According to the law of that day, an unmarried woman who got pregnant could be stoned for bringing shame on her family. Though Mary had been unfaithful to him, Joseph still loved her and did not want to be responsible for her death. Rather than bringing public charges, Joseph decided simply to break off the engagement quietly.

Then something unexpected happens. An angel visits Joseph and tells him: the baby growing in Mary’s womb has no human father. He is God’s Son, the anointed Servant of the Lord, the Messiah, whose coming Israel’s prophets have predicted for centuries. Then Joseph wakes up and realizes it was only a dream.

Or was it really a dream, Joseph wonders? Suppose it’s true? With great courage, and almost super-human faith, Joseph decides to go ahead with his longed planned marriage. For the rest of his life, whenever Joseph had doubts or second thouhts about the life he had chosen, all he had to go on was the memory of a dream when he was only a teenager.

          Friends, we too have staked our lives on a dream: that God exists; that he is a God of love and of justice; that he has called us, as he called Joseph, to be special servants for Mary and her Son Jesus.

                                                                                                  

JESUS' GENEALOGY

Homily for December 17^th 2013: Matthew 1:1-17.

          To come to Mass eight days before Christmas each year and to hear this long list of mostly strange sounding names – a challenge to any priest or deacon reading them – is discouraging, to say the least. And when we get to the end and find that Jesus’ ancestry has been traced not to Mary but to Joseph, his legal but not his biological father, is jarring. What can we say about all this?

          The list contains both saints and grave sinners. They symbolize all of us, with our strengths and weaknesses, who need the saving power of God. Jesus came, humanly speaking, from some great and talented, but equally from the poor and insignificant. God, this list tells us, writes straight with crooked lines. He has certainly done that in my life. Which of you could not say the same about yours?

          Especially interesting are the women in the list. The first mentioned is Tamar, a Gentile outside God’s Chosen People, who seduced her father-in-law, Judah, so that she could have a child. The next woman is another Gentile outsider, a prostitute named Hagar, honored by the Jews despite her sinful way of life, because she hid and thus saved from execution the Jewish men sent out by Moses’ successor Joshua to spy out the future home of God’s people. Then there is Ruth, another outsider, though no sinner. Bathsheba, also a Gentile, is not even mentioned by name. She is identified simply as the one “who had been the wife of Uriah.” She was the one who committed adultery with David – whose advances she could hardly refused, given the absolute power of a king in those days. And at the end of her life she would scheme to make sure that one of her own offspring would inherit David’s throne.

          The late great American biblical scholar Raymond Brown writes: “The God who wrote the beginnings on crooked lines also writes the sequence with crooked lines, and some of these are own lives and witness.” Christianity is not just for the talented, the good, the humble and honest. No one is so bad, so insignificant, so devoid of talent that he or she is outside the circle of Jesus Christ. And that includes all of us here today.

BY WHAT AUTHORITY?

Homily for December 16^th, 2013. Matthew 21:23-27.

          In Jesus’ day, and still in rabbinical schools today, it was common to settle disputed matters by asking one another questions. That is what is going on in the gospel reading we have just heard. “By what authority are you doing these things,” the religious authorities at Jerusalem ask Jesus. They want to know who had given Jesus the authority to cleanse the Temple, as Jesus has just done. Jesus responds with a counter-question: “Who gave John the Baptist the authority to baptize?”

          His critics recognize at once that whatever they answer, they will be in trouble. If they say that John preached and baptized by God’s authority, Jesus will ask them why they did not believe John. If the critics say that John the Baptist’s authority came only from himself, they will incriminate themselves with the people, who regarded John as a prophet sent by God. The critics take the safe way out by saying simply: “We do not know.” To which Jesus responds: “Neither shall I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

          What does this tell us? It tells us that we cannot demand from God explanations which make sense to us of things we do not understand -- injustice and suffering for instance. The Old Testament book of Job is about a man who made this demand of God. Job is an upright and good man who suffers a series of major calamities. Why, he asks God – but receives no answer: until finally God appears and asks a series of questions which Job is unable to answer. Where were you, Job, when I made, the sea, the land, the stars of heaven; the birds, the beasts, and man himself? The point of these rhetorical questions is to make Job understand that there is no equality between man and God. The book ends with Job accepting that he, a mere man, cannot demand answers of God. “I have dealt with great things that I do not understand,” Job confesses. “I had heard of you by word of mouth. But now my eye has seen you. Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes.” (22:2-6).

          Jesus never promised that all would go well with us, or that we will understand when it does not. He promises one thing only: to be with us in good times and bad; and when we encounter suffering and injustice to give us not understanding, but the strength to go on.