NICODEMUS

Homily for Week 4 in Lent, Saturday: John 7:40-53.

          “A division occurred in the crowd because of him,” we heard in the gospel. Some said, “This is truly the Prophet.” Others, who were already believers, confessed openly: “This is the Christ.” At which still others scoffed, saying that was absurd. Everyone knew that the Messiah would be descended from David and come from David’s city, Bethlehem, only six miles from Jerusalem.

Jesus was known as the rabbi from Nazareth in Galilee, a little hick village up north – in the boondocks, we would say. The Jewish authorities held this snobbish view. They scoff superciliously: “Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd, which does not know the law, is accursed.”

To think of a modern equivalent we might imagine the mayor of a small town in our deep South, or in the Nevada desert, with a population of less than 500, appearing in Washington to offer a solution to one of our major problems – immigration, say, or health care. No one in the White House or in Congress would take him seriously.

When the authorities send the police to stop all this unrest and controversy by arresting Jesus, they come back empty handed. Asked why they have not accomplished their mission, the cops defend themselves by saying: “Never before has anyone spoken like this man.”

One member of the ruling class, Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin, the governing body of Israel, protests against his colleagues’ contemptuous dismissal of Jesus. Readers of John’s gospel have met him before, when he came to Jesus by night, so that his visit would remain secret. Jesus told him he must be “born again.” Nicodemus didn’t understand that. But he clearly remained fascinated by this unusual rabbi from Nazareth.  Now he protests: “Does our law condemn a man before it first hears him?”

Nicodemus has been called “a tentative disciple”: drawn to Jesus, but unable to make the total commitment that Jesus asks. There are many like him. We pray in this Mass that we may move beyond tentative discipleship and give ourselves totally to the Lord, who surrendered himself totally for us, even unto the shedding of his life’s blood.    

"HIS HOUR HAD NOT YET COME."

Homily for Week 4 of Lent, Friday: Wisdom 2:1a, 12-22; John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30.

          “They tried to arrest him, but no one laid a hand upon him because his hour had not come.” This closing sentence from today’s gospel reading repeats Jesus’ words to his mother, when she told him that there was no more wine at the wedding feast in Galilee: “My hour has not yet come.” (John 2:4). When it did come, Jesus laid down his life voluntarily. He remained in charge. The shortest of our Eucharistic prayers, the one we use most often on weekdays, reminds us of this: “At the time he was betrayed, and entered willingly into his Passion.”

          Why did Jesus’ enemies kill him? For two reasons. First, because he healed on the Sabbath day. Second, because he made himself equal with God. When he spoke, in the Sermon on the Mount, about God’s law, he did not speak (like other rabbis) as an interpreter of the law. He spoke as the law-giver. ‘You have heard that it was said of old . . . But I say unto you …’ Like God, he forgave sins. And he acted as only God can act: in his miracles of healing, the stilling of the storm on the lake, the feeding of a vast crowd in the wilderness. Those were the things that enraged his critics.

          The Church gives us today, in our first reading, the thoughts which motivated Jesus’ enemies: “His life is not like that of others … He judges us debased; he holds himself from our paths as from things impure … He boasts that God is his Father.”

As we move, on our Lenten pilgrimage, closer to Easter, we should be reflecting on all this, recalling that Jesus laid down his life for us not because he had to, but of his own free will. Why? Jesus answered this question himself when he said: “Greater love has no one than this, that a man should lay down his life for a friend.” 

Sit, or kneel, in these late Lenten days, beneath the cross of Jesus Christ, your brother, your lover, your best friend; but also your Savior, your redeemer, your Lord. Contemplate the One who hangs there -- for you.

Do that, and you will make a great discovery: all the great lessons of life are learned at the foot of the cross.

NO CROSS, NO CROWN

Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year B. Heb. 5:7-9; John 12:20-33.

AIM: To proclaim the power of the cross.

 

          “In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh,” we heard in our second reading, “he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death.” The words refer to Jesus’ anguished prayer in the garden of Gethsemane the night before he died. John’s gospel, from which today’s gospel reading is taken, contains no record of this prayer. Instead John records Jesus’ prayer at the Last Supper in the upper room. We heard part of it a few moments ago: “I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  But it was for this that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”

          Jesus’ humanity was not a mask. It was real. He really experienced what we experience. He suffered as we suffer. Before his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus was tired from a long journey on foot, and thirsty (cf. Jn 4:6). At the death of his dear friend Lazarus “Jesus wept” (Jn 11:35). Facing the agony of crucifixion, Jesus felt the intense anguish that anyone of us would feel in such a desperate situation. 

          And so, with all the fervor of which he was capable, Jesus prays for deliverance from death. Immediately, however, he goes beyond this prayer to ask that he not be delivered from death, should acceptance of death be the means of glorifying his heavenly Father’s name. That petition is part of the “prayers with loud supplications and tears” referred to in our second reading. That reading goes on to say: “And he was heard because of his reverence.”            

          Was Jesus’ prayer heard? Isn’t the cross the proof that his prayer was not heard — or at least not granted? So it would seem. In reality, however, the cross is not the place of Jesus’ defeat, but of his ultimate triumph. Jesus confessed his faith in this triumph when he said in today’s gospel: “Now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” It was “the ruler of this world” — Satan, the personification of evil — who brought Jesus to the cross. In this passage, however, Jesus professes his faith that Satan’s triumph would be an illusion. The empty tomb of Easter shows that the victor in that cosmic conflict between good and evil was not “the ruler of this world”, but Jesus Christ.

          The price of that victory, however, was Jesus’ death. Why? Jesus answers this question with a lesson from nature. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” We are part of that fruit — a portion of that great harvest which Jesus sowed when, on Calvary, he cast the precious seed of his own life into the soil of that earth for love of which he had been born at Bethlehem some three decades before.  That we are Catholic Christians more than twenty centuries later in a land and continent undreamed of in Jesus’ day, is proof that Jesus spoke true when he said, at the conclusion of today’s gospel: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.” Jesus voluntarily laid down his life that we might live. And he summons us to live as he lived: “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be.”

          Where is Jesus Christ today? He is in every place of human need and suffering. He is in prison cells on death row. He is with the victims of poverty, oppression, and war. He is with all those who are suffering: in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza; in Somalia, Sudan, and the Congo. And he is also with those who sacrifice their own interests, safety, and lives to help others.

          Here is the story of one such sacrifice. In July 1941 the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe was a prisoner in the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, when a prisoner escaped. In reprisal the Nazi commandant ordered ten men from the missing prisoner’s barrack to be starved to death in an underground bunker. One of the men selected cried out: “My wife! My children!” Fr. Kolbe immediately asked to take the man’s place. In the starvation bunker he celebrated Mass daily, as long as he was able to do so, and gave Communion to his fellow prisoners. Sympathetic guards brought him unleavened bread and small quantities of wine. After three weeks without food or water, only Kolbe and three other prisoners were still alive. When he alone remained, he was killed by a lethal injection. The man whose life Fr. Kolbe had saved was present at Kolbe’s canonization as a martyr by Pope John Paul II forty-one years later, on October 10^th, 1982.

          Would any of us have the courage to make a sacrifice comparable to that made by the man whom we may now call St. Maximilian Kolbe? We cannot say. What we can say is that there is a direct line between the words of Jesus about the seed falling into the earth and dying, so that it can become fruitful, and the willingness of this Polish priest to sacrifice his life, so that a brother human being with responsibility for wife and children might live.

          “When I am lifted up from the earth,” Jesus says in the gospel – and he is speaking about being lifted up on the cross – “I will draw everyone to myself.” To learn the deepest meaning of our Christian faith we must take our stand beneath Jesus’ cross and contemplate in silent awe and reverent love the One who hangs there. All the great lessons of life are learned at the foot of the cross.

"JOSEPH DECIDED TO DIVORCE HER QUIETLY."

Homily for March 19th, 2015: 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 decides to go and visit Elizabeth. She couldn’t start right away. 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 in a dream 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 only 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 thoughts 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 friends servants for Mary and her Son Jesus.

                                                                                                  

"THE LORD HAS FORSAKEN ME."

Homily for March 18th, 2015: Is. 49:8-15; John 5:17-30.

AZion said, >The Lord has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me.=@ Those were the closing words of our first reading. Have you ever felt like that? You pray, and the Lord seems to answer with silence. In that first reading it is the whole of God=s people who ask whether God cares. In one of the most beautiful verses of Scripture, God answers their plaintive question. ACan a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even if she should forget, I will not forget you.@

Scripture portrays God as our father many times over. God=s loving care for us includes qualities usually regarded as masculine: strength, power, sternness in discipline, and generosity in reward. But God is more than a father. Here he speaks, through his prophet Isaiah, to tell us that, like a mother, his concern for us includes qualities we think of as feminine: gentleness, tenderness, and warm, protective love.

Indeed, God=s tender concern for us, his children, exceeds that of the best father and mother combined. He knows our needs before we do, even as a good mother senses in advance the needs of her baby. Nature itself shows God=s loving care for everything he has created. Look at God=s handiwork in the flowers, his care for the birds. Can we suppose for one minute that we are of less value than these? If so, we have little idea of our true worth in the eyes of our heavenly Father.

In the gospel Jesus speaks of the intimate relationship between himself and his heavenly Father. “The Son cannot do anything on his own,” Jesus says, “but only what he sees the Father doing.” The union between Father and Son could not be more complete than that.

          Moreover, if we are trying to live as Jesus lived, united with his heavenly Father and ours, and trying to do good to others, we have eternal life here and now, Jesus tells us. “Whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life,” Jesus says. Note: not “will have,” pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die, but here and now. Such people, Jesus assures us, “will not come to condemnation, but [have] passed from death to life. “ That is the gospel. That is the good news.  

THE GOOD PHYSICIAN

Homily for 4^th Week of Lent, Tuesday: Ezek. 47:1-9, 12; John 5:1-16.

          “Do you want to be well?” Jesus asks the paralyzed man unable to get to the healing waters because of the crush of others ahead of him. Not all sick people do really want to get well. Their illness gains them sympathy which they lose, once they are healed and become ‘like everyone else.’ Moreover, Jesus (who as we see often in the gospels) can read minds and hearts, surely saw that this man was a simple soul indeed. After his healing he doesn’t even ask Jesus’ name, but lets the man who has changed his life slip away into the crowd unidentified. He discovers Jesus’ identity only later, when Jesus himself takes the initiative to look for the man he has healed. And then the man repays Jesus by identifying him to the authorities. A dull soul indeed.

The Church gives us, in the first reading, an account of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the stream of healing waters flowing from the Temple to be rebuilt following the return of God’s people from their exile in Babylon. The Temple was the earthly dwelling place of God. With the birth of Jesus, who is God’s divine Son, God transferred his earthly dwelling place to a new temple: the body Jesus himself. (See John 2:21). That is why, at Jesus’ death, the Temple veil, concealing the Holy of Holies, the place of God’s dwelling, was “torn in two” (Mark 15:38 and parallels). God had withdrawn his presence: a veil was no longer needed.

In this story we see that the healing previously flowing (in Ezekiel’s prophecy) from the Temple now comes from Jesus himself. Rather than helping the man reach the healing waters, Jesus heals him with a mere word. He continues to exercise his healing power. One of Jesus’ titles is “the Good Physician.” He heals us from the inherited guilt of original sin in the water of baptism. Through the word of a priest authorized to speak in Jesus’ name, he heals us in the sacrament of penance from the guilt of actual sin.

"THIS SECOND SIGN"

Homily for 4^th week in Lent, Monday: John 4:43-54

          The royal official who asks Jesus to come with him to heal the official’s son, who is near death, is a pagan. Jesus’ initial response to the man’s request seems harsh. “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” Why does Jesus respond in this way?  The most likely answer is that Jesus wants to teach the man to have faith, to trust. The official, it seems, would believe only if Jesus went with him to his house. He wanted to see Jesus healing. Most of us have this attitude. We are not aware that it shows lack of faith.

The official loves his dying son so much that he won’t give up. “Sir, come down before my son dies,” he pleads. Jesus still won’t budge. “You may go,” he tells the man, “your son will live.” And now comes a crucial sentence in this story. “The man believed what Jesus had said to him and left.” That shows faith. The man no longer insists on Jesus coming with him. Without any guarantee save Jesus’ word, the official believes. Before he reaches home, his servants come to him with the joyful news that the crisis is past. His son will live. When he asks when the boy began to recover, he learns that it was at the very hour when Jesus had assured him: “Your son will live.” How he must have rejoiced! And how Jesus must have rejoiced at the official’s faith. Later, a week after his resurrection, he would say to his apostle, Thomas, who refused to believe until he actually saw the risen Lord: “You [Thomas] became a believer because you saw me. Blessed are they who have not seen and believed” (John 20:29). This pagan official was one of that blessed company.

The story concludes with another significant sentence: “This was the second sign Jesus did when he came to Galilee from Judea.” Only in John’s gospel are Jesus’ miracles always called “signs.” The first of these signs was the changing of water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana. A sign points beyond itself to something else. The sign at Cana shows that when Jesus gives, he does not only abundantly, but super-abundantly. The quantity of water made wine would have kept the party going for a week! The sign in today’s gospel shows that Jesus’ love embraces all. He turns no one away. He asks for faith. And when we show even the smallest beginning of faith, he grants us healing, that our faith may grow and become complete.