JESUS' HIDDEN YEARS.

Homily for December 30^th, 2017: Luke 2:36-40.

          The prophetess Anna, whom we have just heard about in the gospel, was very old. “She never left the Temple, “Luke tells us, “but worshipped day and night with fasting and prayer.” There are such people in the Church today: contemplative nuns, who do not leave the convent for charitable or other good works, like most Catholic Sisters. They lead hidden lives, praying for others.

          Anna has evidently been praying, as devout Jews had done for centuries, for the coming of God’s promised anointed servant, the Messiah. When Mary and Joseph brought their baby into the Temple to present him to the Lord, as the Jewish law required, both the priest Simeon and Anna recognized at once that this infant was the long awaited Messiah. How they most have rejoiced! Anna’s joy is evident in the fact that she cannot keep the news to herself. “She gave thanks to God,” Luke tells us, “and spoke about the child to all those who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.”

          Then comes what at first seems like an anti-climax. Mary and Joseph return to Nazareth with their child. Save for a glimpse of Jesus back in the Jerusalem Temple at age twelve, we know nothing about his boyhood, adolescence, or young manhood until, at age 30, he begins his public ministry with 40 days of fasting in the desert. These are called his so-called “hidden years.”

          Are they really so hidden, however? “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” people in Nazareth will ask later (Mt. 13:55). So we can assume that as a boy, Jesus must have worked in the carpenter’s shop. Is it conceivable that any shoddy work came out of that shop? that customers were kept waiting beyond the promised date? Luke tells us that in that shop, Jesus “grew in size and strength, filled with wisdom.” He did that by accepting the burdens, duties, and frustrations of a very ordinary and outwardly uninteresting life.

He calls us to do the same.

"WHOEVER HATES HIS BROTHER IS IN DARKNESS."

Homily for December 29^th, 2017: 1 John 2:3-11.

          “I am the light of the world,” Jesus says in John’s gospel (8:12). How dark the world would be without Him. In baptism we were commissioned to be lenses and prisms of that light, shining from the face of Jesus Christ. In today’s first reading the apostle John tells us how we fulfill that commission. “Whoever loves his bother remains in the light . . . Whoever hates his brother is in darkness; he walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”

          To understand these words we need to know that the words “love” and “hate” here do not refer to feelings. They refer to our conduct. This becomes clear if we look at the words of Jesus himself in the parable of the sheep and the goats in chapter 25 of Matthew’s gospel. There Jesus says that when we come to stand before God in judgment, he won’t ask us how many prayers we’ve said, or how many Masses we have attended. He will ask instead how we have treated other people.

          To those on his right hand, designated as sheep in the story, the king (a stand-in for the Lord God) will say: “Come, you have my Father’s blessing! … For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, in prison and you come to me.” Astonished at these words, those on the king’s right hand ask when they had done all those things. To which the king responds: “As often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me.” 

Then, to those on his left hand, designated as goats in the story, the king says: “Out of my sight, you condemned, into that everlasting fire prepared for the devil and has angels!” To explain this harsh judgment the king tells those on his left that they have done none of those things. Conduct and not feelings is the standard by which both are judged.

          We pray then in this Mass that when the Lord sends his angel to call us home to Him, he will find us walking in the light --  by doing good to those we encounter along life’s way.

THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

Homily for December 28^th, 2017: Matthew 2:13-18.

          Which of us does not remember the brutal killing of 20 young schoolchildren, first and second graders, in Newtown/CT six 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 erupted 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.

HOMILY FOR JANUARY 1st, 2018

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.  Num. 6: 22-27; Gal. 4:4-7, Luke 2:16-21

AIM:  To present Mary as the model of trusting faith in the new year.

 

          A new year! What will it bring? Some great success? Humiliating failure? Unexpected happiness, or sudden loss? Dramatic change, or just more of the same? Illness, suffering, or death? We cannot know what the new year will bring. The one certain thing about the future is its uncertainty. As we venture into the unknown, the Church gives us, on this New Year’s Day, a feast in honor of Mary, the Mother of God. Does this mean that Mary is as important as her Son, equal even with God? Of course not.

          Why does the Church dedicate this first day of the new year in a special way to Mary? Because Mary is, in a unique way, the woman of faith. While only on the threshold of her teens, Mary was asked by God to venture into an unknown future, filled with suffering, the purpose and end of which she could not possibly understand in advance. We think of the angel’s message to Mary, that she was to be the mother of God’s Son, as something wonderful. For May it meant not only joy, but suffering.

          The faith which enabled Mary to accept her role in this mystery was no once-for-all thing. Her faith, like ours, needed to be constantly renewed amid suffering and misunderstanding. Joseph wanted to break their engagement. In the Jerusalem temple Mary heard the aged Simeon prophesy her Son’s rejection and his mother’s suffering. When her twelve-year-old Son told Mary and Joseph, who for three days had thought him lost in Jerusalem and sought him frantically, that he had to be in his Father’s house, Luke tells us that “they did not understand” what he was telling them. (Lk 2:50)

          There would be much more that Mary did not understand and could not understand. In time her Son left home. Often thereafter he seemed to be fulfilling his own command about “hating” parents and other close relatives, and one’s “own life too” (Lk 14:26). At Cana, the site of his first miracle, Jesus appeared to treat his mother with perplexing disrespect. Even at the Last Supper Jesus made no place, it seems, for his mother. Only at Calvary was she permitted to stand beside her now dying Son, along with “the disciple whom Jesus loved” — deliberately left anonymous, so that he can represent the ideal follower of Jesus Christ in every age and place. 

          There on Calvary Mary experienced the full truth of Simeon’s prophecy three decades before: that a sword would pierce her own soul. There she shared the anguish of her dying Son, as he cried: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Calvary was the final and greatest test of Mary’s faith, the place where she had to renew once again, as she had done so often before, the declaration of trusting faith with which she had begun: “Let it be done to me according to your word.” The final glimpse we have of Mary in the New Testament shows her to be still the woman of faith: joining with the friends of Jesus in prayer in the upper room at Jerusalem, before the outpouring of God’s Spirit at Pentecost, as Jesus had promised.  (Cf. Acts 1:24) The Church sets Mary before us today because she, like us, needed faith to journey into the unknown; because her faith can inspire in us the we faith we need for our journey into the unknown; and because Mary’s prayers support us on our pilgrim way. 

          Let me conclude with some words which evoke this trusting faith. They were written in England about a century ago. As you listen, you may wish to imagine them being spoken to you by Mary, the woman of faith, as you cross the threshold of a new year.

          “And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way.’”

[M. Louise Haskins; quoted by King George VI in his Christmas broadcast, 1939]

"THE OTHER DISCIPLE SAW AND BELIEVED."

St John, the Evangelist: Dec. 27^th, 2017: 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?

THE HOLY FAMILY

ATHE CHILD GREW ...@

Homily for Dec. 31st, 2017: 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 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 Athe hidden years.@

The obscurity surrounding Jesus= infancy and youth makes the concluding words of today=s gospel especially precious: AThe 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 Ahidden 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: AWhat 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?

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

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

AThe 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, has said: AThe 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: AO 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 the modern world=s great lovers, Mother Teresa, said about loving and being loved: AThe 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 C so that we can go forth from here to share that love with other people: His brothers and sisters, and ours too.

ST STEPHEN

The First Martyr 

         The Church celebrates today the first martyr, St. Stephen. The word “martyr” is taken from an almost identical word in Greek: martyros. It means simply “witness.” The Christian martyrs are those who have been witnesses to Jesus Christ through the shedding of their blood, even unto death. 

         Few of us, if any, will be called to be martyrs in this sense. All of us, however, were commissioned at baptism to be witnesses to Jesus Christ in daily life. Two of the four formulas of dismissal at the end of Mass remind us of this:  

         “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.”

         “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.” 

         What is this gospel, this Good News, that we are commissioned to proclaim -- sometimes by words, but always by the way we live our lives? It is very simple really. The Lord calls us to live as people who know that God is, that he is real; that he is a God of love, who looks for a response of love – for himself, and for our sisters and brothers; that God has made us for himself: to serve, love, and praise him here on earth, to be happy with him forever in heaven; that he is the God of the impossible, who can do for us what we can never do for ourselves: fit us for life with him, here and in eternity.

         That is the message, the Good News, to which we are called to bear witness in daily life. Does any of that come through in your life? If you were arrested tonight for being a Catholic Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? And if mere presence at Sunday Mass were not enough for conviction, would there be enough evidence then?  

         Never underestimate the power of personal witness. With great literary artistry Luke, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, from which our first reading today is taken, concludes his account of Stephen’s martyrdom with the sentence: “The witnesses meanwhile were piling their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul.” This was the man who, in baptism, would receive the Christian name of Paul. He was so zealous in defending his Jewish faith that he hunted down Christians to send them to prison for heresy.  

         There is a direct line from what Saul witnessed that day, as Stephen laid down his life for Jesus Christ, to the event outside the gate of Damascus which changed Saul’s life: the blinding light from heaven and the voice that said: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Stephen’s martyrdom prepared Saul to become the apostle Paul, the one whom God had chosen to enable his Church to break out of its original Jewish shell and become the worldwide Church of the Gentiles.  

         Your life too can make a difference. The Lord wants to use your faithful witness to him in daily life to influence others, in ways you may never know – until, one day, te Lord calls you home, and you meet him, face to face.