"COME AWAY AND REST."

Homily for February 7^th, 2015: Mark 6:30-34.

The Twelve return to Jesus after a time of arduous labor, to report Aall that they had done and taught.@ Jesus knows that after this strenuous activity they need to withdraw C time, we would say today, to recharge their spiritual batteries. So Jesus invites them to Acome away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a little.@ We all need such times of refreshment. The most important hour of my day is the half-hour I spend here in church, waiting in silence on the Lord, and the Mass which follows. Without that time with the Lord who called me to his service on my ordination day, almost 61 years ago, I=d just be spinning my wheels.   

          How can we find time in our busy lives for the rest and refreshment we all need? Here are a few suggestions. In every life, no matter how crowded, there are empty times C times when we must wait. We wait in the check-out line at the supermarket. We wait in traffic, at the post office, at the bank, dentist, or doctor. We walk to and from the cars at our places of work, or at shopping centers. Such empty periods in the day can be turned into Atimes for God.@ As you wait, as you walk to or from the car, lift up your heart and mind to God. Hold up to him those whom you love. Ask him to bless them in the way he knows they need to be blessed. Hold yourself before your heavenly Father with all your weakness and need, all the loose ends in your life, your brokenness, compromises, failures. Long prayers are not necessary. Simple, short prayers are best.

AJesus, help me.@ AMy Lord and my God.@ ALord Jesus, I love you.@  AGood Physician, make me whole.@ AMary, mother, bless your child@

Or simply the holy names, AJesus, Mary, Joseph@ C or the holy name of Jesus alone, repeated with every step, every breath, every heartbeat: all these are perfect prayers that go straight to the loving heart of our heavenly Father.

The more often you make time for the Lord in your life, the more you will discover that the words of today=s responsorial psalm are true C true for you:

 AThe Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.

In verdant pastures he gives me repose;

beside restful waters he leads me;

he refreshes my soul.@

DEATH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

Homily for February 6^th, 2015: Mark 6:14-29.

          Herod had thrown John the Baptist into prison, today’s gospel tells us, “on account of Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip.” Herod divorced his first wife, in order to marry the wife of his still living brother Philip, a woman named Herodias. No wonder that John denounced Herod. He had divorced his wife in order to marry his still married sister-in-law. This earned John the Baptist the hatred of two people, both equally unscrupulous: Herod and Herodias.

          Herodias sees her chance for revenge at a drunken party hosted by her second husband, Herod. Aroused by the dance of Herodias’ daughter – unnamed here, but celebrated in literature and in a well known opera as Salome – Herod promises the girl, under oath, that he will give her anything she asks for, up to half of his kingdom. Not knowing how to respond, the girl consults her mother, who tells her to ask for the head of John the Baptist, whom Herod has imprisoned to silence him.  

          Aghast at the girl’s request, but unwilling to violate his oath, made before so many witnesses, Herod orders John’s immediate execution, without judge, jury, or trial. It is hard to conceive of something more cruel and unjust than the squalid story our gospel reports.

          Is that all just long ago and far away? Don’t you believe it! The media report similar outrages all the time: Muslims threatened with death, or actually killed, for converting to Christianity; a Christian missionary sentenced to death for preaching Christ in an Islamic country, and saved only by a worldwide outcry; the teenage girl in Afghanistan who survived an assassination attempt by terrorists who oppose education for women. Fortunately she was nursed back to health in England, and lived to tell her story before a meeting of the United Nations in New York. And now we have just learned of the Jordanian pilot burned alive in a cage by religious fanatics.

          How could we better respond to the atrocity reported in today’s gospel than to pray in this Mass for the countless victims of similar injustice and terror in the world today?

 

THE HEALING POWER OF CHRIST CRUCIFIED

Homily for the 5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. Job 7:1-4, 6-7; Mark 1:29-39.

AIM: To help the hearers be open to the healing power of Christ, God’s personal

          Word to us. 

          Have you ever suffered from sleeplessness? If so, you will be able to sympathize with Job, complaining in our first reading: “Troubled nights have been allotted to me. If in bed, I ask, ‘When shall I arise?’ then the night drags on; I am filled with restlessness until the dawn.”

          The people we see thronging around Jesus in today’s gospel reading suffered from ailments far worse than insomnia. According to the ideas of that pre-scientific age, their ills were due to demons. “When it was evening, after sunset,” Mark writes, “they brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons. The whole town was gathered at the door.”

          Jesus was constantly surrounded by crowds like that. They flocked to him because they had heard of his miraculous healings. They regarded Jesus as a wonder-worker.

          Jesus was clearly unhappy with this role. We see that at two points in today’s gospel. First, when Simon Peter tries to persuade Jesus to resume his work of healing the next morning, Jesus refuses. He explains that his real task is not to heal, but to preach. “Let us go to the nearby villages that I may preach there also.  For this purpose have I come.”

          We find a second indication of Jesus’ unhappiness with the role of wonder-worker in Mark’s words: “He cured many who were sick with various diseases, and he drove out many demons, not permitting them to speak because they knew him.” In this gospel according to Mark the first person who is permitted to proclaim Jesus’ true identity publicly is the Roman military officer in charge at Calvary. He saw Jesus not as a wonder-worker, but as a common criminal suffering a death which, to us, is ghastly in its cruelty, but which, to this hardened soldier, was routine. Yet something in this criminal’s bearing moved that nameless Roman officer to say, following Jesus’ death: “Clearly this man was the Son of God!” (Mk 15:39)

          How do you regard Jesus Christ?  Do you see him as a wonder-worker?  Someone with supernatural powers who offers you a quick fix, who can get you out of a jam and rescue you when you are in over your head?

          We encounter Jesus Christ here in the Eucharist: in his word, and in the sacrament of his body and blood. He does not come to us, however, as a wonder-worker with a quick fix for all our problems. We encounter him as that Roman officer at Calvary encountered him: crucified in weakness.

          Yet we also encounter Jesus here as that officer did not. In the Eucharist he comes us as the risen Lord. At Easter he did not come back from death to his old life, like Jesus’ friend Lazarus. Jesus was raised from his tomb to a new life: one no longer subject to death. In the resurrection Jesus was raised to eternal life, beyond death. 

          This crucified-and-risen Lord comes to us here in the Eucharist not with a  quick fix, but with the healing power of God’s life-giving word. Indeed Jesus is God’s Word: his living, personal communication to us. The sixteenth century Spanish Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, says: “The Father spoke one Word, which is his Son, and this word he speaks always in eternal silence; and in silence it must be heard by the soul.” And the contemporary British Carmelite nun, Ruth Burrows, expands this saying by writing: “God gave all that God had to give in giving us Jesus. God kept nothing back from us, not even God’s only Son, and in this gift of Jesus is the gift of the divine Self.”

          There is healing power in this crucified and risen Lord who is God’s Word.  Jesus heals us by telling us that God loves us; by assuring us that God is always close to us, no matter how far we may stray from him. St. John of the Cross writes: “God dwells and is present substantially in every soul, even though it may be the greatest sinner in the world” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk II, chap. 5, 3). There is healing in Jesus’ assurance that God accepts us in love just as we are; that he does not wait for us to become the ideal people we would like to be, before giving us his love.

          Jesus who is God’s personal Word tells us that God loves us enough to exchange his divine power for human weakness. We see this at Bethlehem, where Jesus was weak and vulnerable as all babies are. And we see it at Calvary, where Jesus accepted the weakness and the seeming final defeat of crucifixion.

          In reality, Jesus is so much more than a mere wonder-worker. He invites us to open ourselves to the healing power of his word: the word he came to proclaim, the Word he himself is, in his own person. As we listen to him who is God’s Word, God’s personal message of life and hope, Jesus invites us to be filled with a sense of awe and wonder at the greatness of God’s undeserved love for us. He invites us to respond to that love with a love of our own – by making him the center of our lives. For until we do, we will remain always unsatisfied, always unfulfilled, always restless. Why? No one has said it better than St. Augustine. He was writing out of his own experience when he said: “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless, until they rest in you.”

"THEY PREACHED REPENTANCE."

Homily for February 5^th, 2015: Mark: 6:7-13.

AWhatever place does not welcome you or listen to you,” Jesus tells his apostles as he sends them out, “leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them.@ Rejection was sure to come because of the message Jesus gave them. AThey went off,@ the gospel says, Aand preached repentance.@ Repentance is never a popular message. In the Bible the word means more than regret for past actions which we see, by hindsight, were wrong. Repentance means a fundamental change of direction. It means turning around from self to God. Repentance means putting God at the center of life rather than somewhere out on the fringe.

What are some of the things of which we need to repent today? Here is a short list of sins mentioned often by Pope Francis, following his two predecessors, Benedict XVI and John Paul II.  One is consumerism. This is the false idea that we can buy happiness by amassing more and more possessions. A whole industry exists to promote this idea: advertising. Advertising which tells us where we can get things we need, at prices we can afford, is useful. But advertising designed to kindle desire for things we never knew we needed until we saw the ad is questionable at least. 

Something else which cries out for repentance is hedonism: the mindless philosophy that says, AIf it feels good, do it.@ Hedonism wrecks lives, relationships, and marriages, every day. 

We need to repent also of the hard-hearted selfishness which ignores the needs of the poor and oppressed in our midst; or which thinks that our obligation to them can be discharged by gifts to charity from our surplus goods, with no examination of unjust conditions in society that cause poverty and oppression. 

We need to repent too of an over-spiritualized religion which is concerned only with saying prayers and getting into heaven; and which ignores the challenge which Jesus gave us in his model prayer: AYour will be done on earth as it is in heaven.@ Those words challenge us to build colonies of heaven here on earth C by living not just for ourselves, but for God and for others. 

The repentance to which Jesus summons us is not somewhere else, tomorrow. It is here, and it is now. And repentance begins not with someone else. If it is begin at all, repentance must begin with ourselves.

"THEY TOOK OFFENSE AT HIM."

Homily for February 4^th, 2015: Mark 6:1-6.

There’s a 19^th century hymn, little known to Catholics, which goes like this:

          I think when I read that sweet story of old,

          When Jesus was here among men,

          How he called little children as lambs to the fold:

          I should like to have been with them then.

It’s a nice sentiment. But it hardly corresponds to the historical reality. Most of the people who encountered Jesus found him quite ordinary. “Is he not the carpenter?” they ask in today’s gospel reading. And Mark, the gospel writer adds: “They took offense at him.”  

That remains true today. People encounter Jesus today not in his human body but through his mystical body, the Church – through us, who in baptism were made eyes, ears, hands, feet, and voice for Jesus Christ. He has no other.     

The Catholic Church is human, as Jesus was human. Most of the time it is ordinary, as Jesus was ordinary. It can be remote, as Jesus was sometimes remote. It can be weak, as Jesus seemed weak to his contemporaries when he refused to use the divine power he manifested in his miracles to avoid crucifixion.

Hidden behind this ordinariness and remoteness and weakness, however, is all the power of God; all the compassion of his Son Jesus; and all the strength of his Holy Spirit, who came in fiery tongues on the first Pentecost to kindle a fire that is still burning; and to sweep people off their feet with a rushing mighty wind that is still blowing.

Most of Jesus’ contemporaries took offense at him. Or as another translation of our gospel reading has it, “They found him too much for them.”

What about you?   

"DO NOT BE AFRAID. JUST HAVE FAITH."

Homily for February 3^rd, 2015: Mark 5:21-43.

          Today’s gospel recounts two miracles: both of them healings. All the healings reported in the gospels are Jesus’ response to faith. Earlier in this chapter Mark has told us that when Jesus visited Nazareth, where he had grown up, “he could work no miracle,” because the people who had known him for years lacked faith. (Mk 5:6).   

          In today’s gospel the first person to manifest faith is a synagogue elder named Jairus whose daughter “is at the point of death.” He believes Jesus can heal her. The second person who approaches Jesus with faith is a woman who has suffered hemorrhages for twelve years. Jews had a special aversion to blood. Still today the Jewish dietary laws say that to be kosher, and hence fit for human consumption, meat must have all the blood drained from it before it before it comes to the table. This helps us understand that the situation of the woman with hemorrhages is desperate. She makes her request for healing not in words, but by coming up behind him and grabbing hold of his cloak. She is so confident in the power of Jesus that even this contact with his garment can bring her healing.

          Jesus turns around and asks, “Who has touched my clothes?”  His disciples say the question is unanswerable. Given the crowd pressing in on Jesus, it is impossible to say who touched him. The woman, however, confesses that she has touched Jesus. “Daughter, your faith has saved you,” Jesus tells the woman. “Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.”

          Messengers now arrive saying that that Jairus’ daughter has died. “Do not be afraid,” Jesus tells the father. Just have faith.” When Jesus arrives at Jairus' house, he finds a crowd already mourning the death of the man’s daughter. Hired flute players are playing a funeral dirge. “Go away,” Jesus tells them. “The girl is not dead but sleeping.” Not for the first time in the gospels, the people ridicule him, confident that he has lost touch with reality. When the crowd has dispersed, Jesus enters the house, takes the girl by the hand, and raises her to life.

          What better response could we make to the story of these two miracles than to repeat the anguished words of another father in Mark’s gospel seeking healing for his deaf mute son who seems to have what we would call epilepsy. Asked by Jesus whether he believes healing is possible, the man replies – and we repeat: “Lord, I do believe! Help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).

A FEAST WTH THREE NAMES

Homily for February 2nd: Luke 2:22-40.

          Today’s feast has three names: the Purification of Mary, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, and Candlemas. To understand the first two we must start with Jewish law about childbirth in Jesus’ day. This said that following the birth of a boy the mother was excluded from public worship for seven days. She was considered ritually impure. On the eighth day the boy was circumcised. This provision of the law is still observed by Jews today. Thereafter the mother remained at home for a further thirty-three days for her blood to be purified. That is why the first title for today’s feast is the Purification of Mary.

If this seems strange to us in 21^st century America, it is not strange at all in other parts of the world. Even today Chinese mothers stay at home for at least a month after giving birth. After forty days of rest and seclusion, the Jewish mother presented a purification sacrifice: a lamb for a burnt offering, and a young pigeon or turtle dove for a sin offering. Poor mothers needed to offer only two turtle doves or two young pigeons. As we heard in the gospel, that is what Mary and Joseph offered. They were poor.

Mary needed no purification. The child she bore would purify the world through his sacrificial death and resurrection. But as a devout Jew, Mary observed the law of her people nonetheless. Jewish law also said that a firstborn son belonged to the Lord. This was because, in the final plague inflicted by God on the Egyptians, he had killed all their firstborn children and animals. But he spared the firstborn among his own people, the Jews. Firstborn Jewish children belonged, therefore, to the Lord. The parents could “redeem” them (take them back) by paying five shekels to any Jewish priest they chose.

Instead of paying this redemption, Mary and Joseph take their infant son to the Jerusalem Temple, to present him to the Lord. This explains the second title for today’s feast: the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple. From that day on Jesus belonged completely to God. By age twelve he knew this. For when his parents found him in the Temple after a frantic three-day search, he asked them: “Did you not know that I had to be in my Father’s house?”

When Mary and Joseph entered the Temple with their infant son, 40 days after his birth, they found that the Lord had two surprises for them. How often he surprises us. The first surprise was the appearance of the old man Simeon. He was “righteous and devout,” Luke tells us, “awaiting the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.” God had promised Simeon that he would not die until he had seen “the Christ,” which means the Lord’s anointed servant, promised for so long by Israel’s prophets. When Simeon saw the child, he knew in his heart at once, that this was the one: the Lord’s anointed servant, the Messiah.

Taking the child in his arms, Simeon speaks the short hymn of praise to God that we heard in the gospel. It is called the Nunc dimittis, from its first two Latin words. From early times it has been chanted during the night prayer of the Church in both East and West. Praising God for fulfilling his promise, Simeon says he is now ready to go home to the Lord. The hymn also praises the child as Israel’s glory, and for the Gentiles a light – which helps explain why we bless candles on this feast and why it has a third name: Candlemas.

Simeon goes on to say that this child will be “a sign of contradiction.” Some will accept him, others will not. This contradiction continues today in  those who regard the whole notion of God as a limitation of human freedom, and his law a fence to hem us in. In reality, God’s laws, first given to the leader of God’s people, Moses, in the Ten Commandments, are not fences but sign posts pointing the way to human happiness and flourishing.

          Finally, Simeon warns Mary that the rejection of her Son by many will be a sword piercing her own heart. This prophecy would be fulfilled, according to the traditional dating, thirty-three years later on Calvary, where Mary stood beside her crucified Son, as he spoke his final words: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

The second surprise for Mary and Joseph is the appearance of the 84-year-old widow, Anna. Completely at home in the Temple, she has spent decades in fasting, adoration, and prayer – like contemplative nuns today. She now gives thanks for the child, Luke says, and speaks of him “to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.”

Having fulfilled all the provisions of God’s law, Mary and Joseph return with their child to their home in Nazareth, where (Luke tells us) “the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” It was there, in hiddenness and silence, in faithfulness to daily work and prayer, that Jesus became the man who could say to rough workingmen, “Come, follow me,” and have them obey him on the spot; and to utter words that he is still saying to us today: “I have come that [you] might have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).  

[The homily draws upon the presentation by Pope Benedict XVI in Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives pp.80-88.]